years and collected 51,700 testimonies (Jungblut 2005, 509).
Oral history as a research method has risen in popularity since the 1980s – especially in circles of lay historians (Wierling 2003). Many of the interview projects that are being carried out have World War II and the Holocaust as their object. While the first interviews were recorded on audio files, more and more interviews are being recorded on video – a consequence of the drop in the cost of the technology. What is more, although there had been groundbreaking uses of witnesses to history in TV documentaries before, for instance in the BBC documentary The World at War (1973) and in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), witnesses to history have also started to be ever more frequently used in history documentaries since the 1990s. It has now become customary to include short clips from video testimonies on all kinds of events in documentaries (Bösch 2008; Elm 2008; Fischer 2008; Keilbach 2008; Kansteiner 2012). In those documentaries, an aesthetics was developed that was later to be used in museums as well.
With the popularization of oral history and the frequent use of video testimonies in documentaries, video testimonies have gained in acceptance and popularity both as objects of research and within public history. The musealization of video testimonies has to be seen against this background of a gradual mediatization and popularization of witnesses to history. Video testimonies were introduced into museums only after they had become popular as means to transmit history in other media.
Turning video testimonies into museum objects
As the examples of the Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Foundation show, video testimonies were collected long before they were used as exhibition items. Video testimonies from those collections are now also shown in museums and exhibitions. Clips from the video testimonies of the Shoah Foundation are part of the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, for example. As well as drawing on already existing collections, many museums started to collect video testimonies before they decided to present them in their exhibitions. In the Neuengamme Memorial the first major interview project was carried out in the early 1990s. First, audio technology was used, but video recordings soon replaced it. Both have been included in the new permanent exhibition which opened its doors in 2005. In the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, where the first oral history interviews were carried out in the early 1990s as well, a large-scale video interview project was initiated in 1999. When the memorial decided to design a new permanent exhibition (which opened in 2007) the video testimonies were included in the plans for the new exhibition. Yad Vashem has carried out interviews since its beginnings in 1953. Today around 60 percent of the collected ten thousand testimonies are in video format.2 Some clips from those video testimonies have entered the permanent exhibition which was inaugurated in 2005.
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
