Video testimonies were, and are, collected to bridge collection gaps, to complement other sources with the voices and faces of the witnesses to history and for research purposes. In the case of video survivor testimonies, for example, the director of the Neuengamme Memorial, Detelf Garbe, observes that information on “the prisoner’s multi-layered ‘everyday life,’ the inner structures of the camp society, the conditions for survival and the perspectives of the different prisoner groups” could be extracted only from the memory of the survivors (1994, 35).3 With the advent of oral history and social history in the 1980s, such questions gained more and more research interest. Especially in the case of video testimonies from Holocaust survivors, collections were also motivated by a desire to give a voice back to the victims and by a sense of duty to preserve their testimonies for future audiences (De Jong 2011b, 248; 2012, 298). At least since the broadcast of Marvin J. Chomsky’s mini-series Holocaust in 1979, there has been a demand that the victims themselves be heard. Their voices and faces should be contrasted to the fictionalized representations of the Holocaust – but also to the archival pictures showing starved prisoners and heaps of corpses (see Young 1988, 163; Hartman 1996, 143).
Collecting can be considered the first step of the musealization of an object. Being collected, an object is taken out of its original context to enter the realm of signification. In the words of the Polish historian Krzysztof Pomian (1990), the object becomes a “semiophore”; its primary function becomes a semiotic one. The collected object represents an event, a time period, a style school, a person, and so on. What sounds fairly straightforward in the case of objects and artworks – a Greek vase comes to represent Greek antiquity, a painting by Umberto Boccioni represents Futurism, and so on – raises some ethical questions in the case of video testimonies. Video testimonies are representations of remembering individuals. Collecting video testimonies means – as macabre as this might sound – storing for the future aging bodies and voices that will inevitably die. Especially in the case of the Holocaust and World War II, where we are facing the disappearance of the last witnesses to history, video testimony appears as a medium that allows us to save communicative memory for future generations. As I will show in what follows, in video testimonies a conversation between a future audience and the witnesses to history is therefore staged. The methodologies that are used for the production of this medium, in turn, are supposed to show a pristine representation of the individual memory of the witness to history.
Turning communicative memory into cultural memory
For most video testimonies, the method of the so-called narrative interview or biographical interview is deployed. This interview method is meant to give the witness to history the greatest possible freedom to relate their story in their own way. The interviews generally start with the interviewer asking the interviewees to tell their life story. Only in a second stage do the interviewers ask direct questions. In general, the interviewer is supposed to refrain from interfering too much in the interviewee’s narrative (Jureit 1999; Wierling 2003, 110; Gring and Theilen 2007, 175). The social psychologist Harald Welzer has pointed out that the narrative interview is based on a model of the natural sciences according to which “a specific methodology can be used in order to ‘extract’ ‘data’ from the context of every day life that can be ‘interpreted’ for research purposes” (2000, 53). Through the “neutral” behavior of the interviewer, an untainted individual memory is supposed to be captured. Welzer observes that, rather than capturing memory, the situation of the interview creates this memory. He points out that “first, we cannot not communicate and ... secondly, we speak in such a way as we think that our interlocutor expects us to talk” (2000, 52). The interview is an asymmetrical conversation in which one of the parties mainly asks questions and the other one mainly answers those questions:
A biographical narrative is therefore rather determined by the normative requirements and the cultural criteria for a good story on the one hand and by the conditions of its performance on the other hand than by something like a really lived life. (Welzer 2000, 55)
Video testimonies, in other words, are representations of a highly structured conversation taking place at a certain point in time and at a certain place.
In their interviews for video testimonies, witnesses to history do in fact generally try to give a logical structure to their memory. In general, weeks, often months, of preparation in which the witnesses can reflect on what to say and how to say it precede the actual interview. There will have been phone calls and informal meetings between the interviewers and the witnesses before the actual recording takes place. The Shoah Foundation even used a preinterview questionnaire, thereby helping the witnesses to history to structure their testimony.
What is said in an oral history interview, and how it is said, are also dependent on the identity of the interviewer and the chemistry between the interviewer and the witness. Some things we will say only to a person of the same gender or of a similar age, to somebody who has experienced something similar, or – quite to the contrary – to a complete stranger. For all witnesses to history, the interview is moreover undoubtedly an important event. The invisible future audience is thereby always present. There are things that witnesses to history will not reveal in front of a camera. Maximilian Preisler, who has carried out interviews with Holocaust survivors, observes: “The imagined audience is present. And what will those future listeners think? For the sake of creating a meaningful narrative, the witnesses might feel under pressure to put coincidences and experiences into a non-existent rational framework” (1998, 197). Rather than extracting individual memory, the narrative interview thus constructs a particular memorial narrative. This narrative would sound different at any other moment in time, at any other location, and with any other interviewer.
An untainted individual memory, of course, does not even exist outside of the interview process, as Welzer is also eager to point out. Neurological studies have shown that, when we recall an event, millions of brain cells interact so that our memory is a “continuous reactivation of neuronal networks” (Thießen 2008, 610). Individual memory is at best a “representation of past impressions” cued by the present (Erll 2005, 82) – and we might actually never have lived through some of those impressions. Individual memory is influenced by the sociocultural context that we live in and by the cultural memory that is practiced at the time. In early interviews with Holocaust survivors, such as those carried out by the American psychologist David Boder, for example, “references to Jewish violence and revenge, as well as expressions of personal depravity” (Deblinger 2012, 121), were frequent. Such stories can hardly ever be found in testimonies today – they do not fit a contemporary memorial culture that focuses on victimhood and the figure of the survivor (see Jureit and Schneider 2010; Welzer 2011). In 1946 “it was not clear that any one part of a survivor’s wartime experience should be either highlighted or minimized”; the survivors therefore “openly shared stories that later became shameful or controversial” (Deblinger 2012, 121).
As the above quote from Maximilian Preisler shows, many interviewers are now aware of the limitations of the medium of video testimony to represent an untainted memory. Nevertheless, the precarious character of individual memory and the methodology used to produce the video testimonies are hardly ever made apparent in the video testimonies themselves. On the contrary, the aesthetics used for video testimonies highlight an “authentic” individual memory, while at the same time staging a conversation between the represented witness to history and the future viewers (De Jong 2013, 22–26). Several practitioners and scholars have considered video testimony to be the most adequate medium to represent the coming about of individual memory. “In video testimonies . there is nothing between us and the survivor; nor when the