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 interview gets going between the survivor and his/her recollections,” writes Geoffrey Hartman (1996, 140) of the Fortunoff Insitute. James E. Young observes:
It is not merely a story or narrative being recorded in cinematographic and video testimony, but the literal making of it: the painful and deliberate choice of words, selection of details and memories, the effect of these details on the speaker, and then the effect of these details on the narrative itself. We watch as experiences enter speech: that point at which memory is transformed into language, often for the first time. (1988, 161)
For both Young and Hartman, the real testimony happens somewhere beyond the oral narrative. According to Young,
FIGURE 4.2 A still from the video testimony of Ulrike Poppe from 2010 in the Haus der Geschichte, Bonn.
© Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
In the testimonial image, we also perceive traces of a story the survivor is not telling; these traces are in his eyes, his movements, his expressions – all of which become part of the overall text of video testimony, suggesting much more than we are hearing or seeing. (1988, 162)
For Hartman, “the embodiment of the survivor, their gestures and bearing is part of the testimony” (1996, 144). Those extra-verbal expressions of testimony tend in fact to appear as more “real,” more “authentic,” than the oral narrative. Young (1988) acknowledges that the medium of video has an ordering effect on the testimony and that camera position and lighting have an impact on the representation of the object on film. He fails, however, to acknowledge the full impact of the aesthetics of video testimonies on both the representation of the witnesses to history’s individual memory and the viewers’ reception thereof.
Video testimonies have been dubbed rather derogatively as “talking heads”: the camera focus is generally on the face of the witnesses to history or their upper body. Occasionally the hands are also shown. In this way, the emphasis is placed on those parts of the body that are generally considered to represent the extra-verbal expressions of individual memory particularly well. The choice of background and lighting techniques further highlight those expressions. Early video testimonies were generally recorded in a private environment, often in the witnesses’ living room and sometimes at the location of the event that the witness testifies to. The camera angle and lightening were often rather arbitrary. Lately, however, an aesthetics that was developed for TV documentaries (see Bösch 2008; Keilbach 2008) has been adopted for most video testimonies, in particular those shown in museums. The witness’s face is illuminated in such a way that all of the emotional expressions are highlighted and a monochromatic, mostly black or gray, background is chosen (see Figure 4.2). Diana Gring and Karin Theilen, who carried out the video testimony project for the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, explain that the neutral background
is on the one hand beneficial for the editing process; on the other hand, the picture focuses in this way on the witness to history. Recipients can concentrate on the face, the facial expressions and the gestures of the interviewees; this allowed us to mimic a dialogic structure, a “virtual encounter.” (2007, 122)
Through the camera focus, the lighting, and the choice of background, a dialogue between the witnesses to history and the viewers is therefore mimicked.
The prerequisite for the construction of such a dialogue is that the interview process that is the origin of the video testimony has to be masked. The interviewer is generally left out of the camera frame. In the extracts that are shown in museums, his or her voice is only rarely heard. While, in normal TV interviews, the interviewee is generally looking at the interviewer, in video testimonies, especially in those shown in museums, the witnesses to history are often asked to look directly into the camera. In this way, the viewer will look the witness directly in the eye when watching the video. The producers of the video testimonies for the interviews in the Imperial War Museum observed that asking the witnesses to history to look into the camera instead of at the interviewer was one of the most difficult things about the interviews.4 In the Museo Diffuso, a small World War II museum in Turin which has based its exhibition almost exclusively on video testimonies, the sound of the video testimonies, which is transmitted over headphones, works only if visitors stand in front of the video testimonies and look straight at them.
The aesthetics of video testimonies thus construct a representation of individual memory that is supposed to bring viewers particularly close to the individual memory of the witness to history while at the same time engaging them in a virtual conversation. This effect is arrived at by decontextualizing the witnesses to history from the sociocultural context in which they live and their testimony from the situation that brought it about – the narrative interview. This decontextualization in turn allows the musealization of video testimonies and their use as carriers of cultural memory. Like an object when it enters a collection, the memory of witnesses to history is taken out of its original context. Their testimony, a supposed representation of individual memory, is presented as existing outside time and space. The collection of video testimonies also means turning them into storage memory; it is the attempt to turn communicative memory into cultural memory. This, in turn, means detaching the testimonies from the witnesses to the history that uttered them. Neither the interviewers nor the witnesses can fully control how future viewers will receive their testimonies and for what purposes they will be used. Recoded testimonies allow viewers to flick through them, skip parts, and fast-forward. They also allow curators to choose the most appropriate video testimonies for the exhibitions.
Exhibiting video
