the perception of the individual as an authoritative carrier of memory, which first became evident at the Eichmann trial. For the purpose of storage, communicative memory is standardized – it is put into the format of the narrative interview. The narrative interview is supposed to lead to a particularly pure narration of individual memory. The methodology of the narrative interview, combined with aesthetic choices highlighting the extra-verbal expressions of memory, leads to a representation of individual memory as existing outside time and space.
While collected video testimonies become storage memory, video testimonies are turned into functional memory once they are used in museums’ exhibitions. They are exhibited as testimonies to the past and to illustrate and authenticate, or comment on, other museum exhibits. Documents provide information on what happened. Objects and photographs show what it looked like. Video testimonies simultaneously inform visitors what happened, how it was lived through, what it felt like, and how it is remembered. This combination of different potential narratives makes video testimony a particularly potent didactic means. Video testimonies can be used to transmit historical knowledge, to instruct visitors on how to interpret this knowledge, to give them moral lessons, and to affect them. To come back to the painting described in the introduction: video testimonies have now become an additional or alternative means to material remains, documents, and museum text or museum guides of transmitting history. However, as the painting in Figure 4.1 shows, any transmission of history is embedded in a sociocultural context. Cultural memory is always the expression of a particular time and place. In the painting, the history of the Battle of Kursk is related by a Russian colonel to Allied soldiers only. The German Wehrmacht officer is allowed only to overhear this history lesson, not to take active part in it – let alone to have a say. The same is, of course, true of the use of video testimonies in museums. Only a fraction of the potential witnesses to history are interviewed at all, and the testimonies that those witnesses to history give are tainted by their sociocultural context and guided by the questions of the interviewer. Of all of the possible extracts from those video testimonies, only some meticulously selected stories enter a particular museum’s exhibition and are used as functional memory. Which ones are chosen depends on the particular museum and the period in which the exhibition has been designed.
Notes
1 1 Yale University Library, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, at http://www.library.yale.edu/testimonies/ (accessed August 4, 2014).
2 2 See the Yad Vashem Archive at http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/archive/about_archive_whats_in_archive.asp (accessed July 23, 2014).
3 3 All translations of source material are the author’s.
4 4 Author’s interview with James Barker, producer of the video testimonies for the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition, September 10, 2009.
5 5 Author’s interview with Detlef Garbe, Director, Neuengamme Memorial, December 12, 2009.
6 6 For a similar argument on video testimonies in TV documentaries, see Bösch (2008, 68), and also De Jong (2013, 37).
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