functions that they are given. I will show how personal memory has become part of the official transmission of history – and thereby been put on one footing with the first and second levels of transmission of history in museums as shown on the oil painting in the Royal Army Museum in Brussels: material remains and museum guides. Referring to Jan and Aleida Assmann’s theory of collective memory, I argue that the musealization of video testimonies is postmodern society’s attempt to turn communicative memory into cultural memory.
Video testimonies: Communicative memory as cultural memory
The Egyptologist Jan Assmann, in what has by now become a classic of memory studies, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (2011, first published in German in 1992), differentiates between two modes of collectively remembering the past: communicative memory and cultural memory. Communicative memory is “based exclusively on everyday communications” and “characterized by a high degree of non-specialization, reciprocity of roles, thematic instability, and disorganization” (J. Assmann and Czaplicka 1995, 126). Communicative memory concerns events in a recent past that some of the participants of the conversations can still remember. It lasts at the most 80 to 100 years, or three to four generations. Cultural memory on the other hand, “has its fixed points; its horizon does not change with the passing of time. These fixed points are fateful events of the past, whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)” (J. Assmann and Czaplicka 1995, 129). Cultural memory concerns events in a distant past that are reconstructed according to a contemporary context (J. Assmann and Czaplicka 1995, 130). Both modes of remembering the past are linked by a time of transition, a floating gap (J. Assmann 1992, 48).
The Anglicist Aleida Assmann has further developed Jan Assmann’s theory and divided cultural memory into storage memory and functional memory (2006, 54–58). Storage memory refers to those carriers of cultural memory that are stored in archives, magazines, libraries, and so on, but are not actively used at the present moment. Functional memory, on the other hand, concerns those carriers that are of direct relevance for a contemporary memorial culture. Aleida Assmann uses the art museum as an example to illustrate the difference between functional memory and storage memory, but any historically oriented museum would have done really. Generally, only a fraction of the objects in a museum’s storerooms, the museum’s storage memory, are actually exhibited in the galleries, the museum’s functional memory. Carriers of cultural memory that have once been part of storage memory can of course be rediscovered and become functional memory, while carriers of functional memory, after some time in the limelight, can end up in museum storerooms, archives, or libraries.
For Jan and Aleida Assmann, the transition between communicative memory and cultural memory is rather schematic. Although Jan Assmann accounts for a “floating gap,” this time of transition appears only at the end of the time of communicative memory and the beginning of its transformation into cultural memory. The theory does not account for the coexistence of cultural and communicative memory – or for the use of communicative memory as cultural memory. I argue that exactly the latter is happening right now: the musealization of video testimonies is an endeavor to turn communicative memory itself into cultural memory and to save it from oblivion.
The mediatization of the witness to history
In 2008 a conference in Jena analyzed “The Birth of the Witness after 1945” (“Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945”) (Sabrow and Frei 2012). Ten years earlier, the French historian Annette Wieviorka had already observed that we are living in the “era of the witness” (2006, first published in French in 1998). Wieviorka concentrated on the memory of the Holocaust while the conference took postwar memory in its entirety into consideration. Both, however, argued that a proliferation of personal testimonies in public representations of contemporary history can currently be observed. In German, a new word even appeared in the 1970s and 1980s that denotes people who have witnessed an event of historical importance: Zeitzeuge (Sabrow and Frei 2012, 14–15). The word is now used ubiquitously, but no English equivalent has yet been coined. I therefore propose the concept of “witness to history” as an analytical concept in English. I understand the “witness to history” in a more narrow sense than the German Zeitzeuge, which basically denotes anybody who has witnessed historical events. I use the concept of “witness to history” to denote a person who has witnessed the past and gives testimony to this past in a public sphere. With his or her testimony, the witness to history constructs a certain narrative of the past – a certain history – and at the same time testifies to this narrative. The medium for the transmission of this testimony that I will analyze here is video. The term “video testimony” was first used by the collaborators of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (hereafter Fortunoff Archive), a project that systematically records on video and collects interviews with Holocaust survivors.1 By using the term “video testimony” instead of “video interview,” I want to underline the fact that, in these videos, witnesses to history do not only report on the past but also testify to this past.
Studies on the figure of the witness to history observe that, over the last 40-odd years, witnesses to history have become ever more mediatized and ever more prominent in public representations of the past (Wieviorka [1998] 2006; Bösch 2008; Elm 2008; Fischer 2008; Keilbach 2008; De Jong 2011b, 250–256; 2012, 299–301; Sabrow and Frei 2012). Events that can here be named and that appear again and again in the literature are: the Eichmann trial in 1961, the foundation of the Fortunoff Archive in 1979, the (re)discovery of oral history as a research method in the 1980s, and the individualization of TV documentaries especially since the 1990s. It is this mediatization that provides the foundation for the musealization of video testimonies.
Only a few survivors had appeared as witnesses in the trials against the National Socialist elite that took place before the trial of Adolf Eichmann, notably during the Nuremberg trials, when documents were used as the main evidence (Wieviorka [1998] 2006, 67; Keilbach 2008, 144; Yablonka 2012, 177). The Eichmann trial now put the survivors center stage. The trial was in fact as much about giving a history lesson to Israel and the world as it was about convicting Eichmann. “We want the nations of the world to know ... and they should be ashamed,” declared Prime Minister David Ben Gurion at the time (quoted in Arendt 1994, 10). For this purpose, 110 witnesses were invited to give testimony. The role of those witnesses was less to attest to Eichmann’s guilt than to embody history. They were supposed to give “a phantom a dimension of reality,” as the attorney general Guideon Hausner declared (Wieviorka [1998] 2006, 70). What the witnesses said was therefore of lesser importance than the fact that they said it. The trial was a media event. Four cameras had been installed in the courtroom and the trial was broadcast on TV and radio. The plan to educate the world by affecting the audience of the trial worked. International TV stations soon started to request only pictures of the witnesses. Caught on camera, the witnesses’ bodies and their voice became part of their testimony – and were often considered of a higher value than their actual words. With the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust was given a voice and a face. It was not just the six million anymore. Ordinary men and women were accepted as witnesses to history and first steps toward their mediatization were undertaken.
Such an acceptance and mediatization gained further relevance when the Fortunoff Archive started its work in 1979. It started as a small-scale community project at Yale University when the television journalist Laurel F. Vlock and the child survivor and psychiatrist Dori Laub interviewed Holocaust survivors for a documentary produced for the opening of a Holocaust monument in New Haven. The project soon grew in size and importance, and affiliated projects were created all over the world. The Fortunoff Archive was the first large-scale project to systematically collect video testimonies with Holocaust survivors. To date 4400 videos have been amassed. Other projects have followed this example, the most well-known probably being the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (hereafter Shoah Foundation), founded by Steven Spielberg after the filming of Schindler’s List (1993). By 2003, when the collection period ended, the Shoah Foundation had exceeded its
