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Response to Deirdre Butler, “Witness at the Blackboard: Reflections on the Phenomenon of Survivor Testimony in Canadian Schools” and Rosemary Horowitz, “Methodological Considerations for Using the Videotaped Testimony of Holocaust Survivors in the Classroom,” Teaching the Visual Image, Bearing Witness: Memory, Representation, and Pedagogy in the Post-Holocaust Age, Shenandoah U, Winchester VA, 13 Apr. 2010.

Some of my remarks today may have limited relevance to the papers given today, as I received an early draft of Rosemary’s paper and I hadn’t seen the documentary clip that was part of Deirdre’s paper in advance of the conference.  However, I will try my best to incorporate some of my recent responses to the papers on the fly.

The panel topic, Teaching the Visual Image, as well as the papers themselves, point to at least two broadly construed questions.  The first question engages a practical but urgent concern: what is the most effective way to use mediated representations to teach the Holocaust, in and outside of the classroom?  The practical concerns that emerge from this question appear deceptively simple.  What films and other mediated representations should Holocaust education use?  Which images are appropriate for which audiences?  If a film works well for one audience, will it work as well for another?  When is it appropriate to screen an entire film, and when should one use part of a longer work?  How does a teacher decide how much of that work gets used?  How does one decide where to begin and where to end a clip?

Today’s panel as well as some of the discussions that have taken place at this conference point to a less explicit secondary question, but one that seems at least as pressing as the first: what is the place of critical and cultural theory and analysis in addressing central themes of Holocaust history?  Both Rosemary Horowitz and Deidre Butler’s papers suggest that “teaching the visual image” involves more than just practical concerns, as both papers try to think outside and around how mediated survivor testimony gets produced, and the attendant complexity of roles and voice in this production.  As Rosemary mentions, it is important for teachers to understand this context, particularly in terms of production value and standardization of the documentation process.  At the same time, both papers, like some of the discussions taking place at this conference, could go even further in engaging with the critical and cultural approaches that they raise, especially in terms of the relevance of discussing these approaches, not just with teachers, but with students as well.

Both papers are particularly concerned with the ways in which mediated representations can serve an archival function in capturing and preserving survivor testimony after there are no more survivors left to invite into the classroom.  Rosemary Horowitz suggests that we consider a range of formal and contextual factors mediating how survivor testimony gets recorded, including lighting, camera angle, staging of the testimony, shot scale, and the like.  Meanwhile, the Living History project offers a unique possibility to move beyond questions of whether the survivor gives testimony or gives an interview.  Instead, the Project stages testimony not in the journalistic mode as an interview, but in a documentary mode.  Here, the camera positions testimony as a communicative act existing between the person giving testimony, and those who witness that testimony.  Like any good documentary, the Project has the potential to move beyond conventional modes of representation and broaden our understanding, in this particular case, of testimony.  Rather than exclusively use the medium to isolate testimony from a communal context, only to transmit that testimony to a future and anonymous potential mass audience, the Project stages testimony as a public act occurring within a particular context, a powerful ritual that gains meaning not only through recitation, but also through co-created and shared meaning among all of its participants.

The use of the term staging is not meant here in a pejorative or trivializing sense.  Rather, I seek to move out from behind the comfortable abstraction of media studies-friendly terms like the French mise-en-scene, and suggest to an audience of Holocaust scholars and historians that no testimony, no interview, indeed no image as primary document is ever recorded neutrally or naturally.  Rather, the camera is an apparatus that comes with its own set of biases and assumptions, even if those biases and assumptions serve to make the camera invisible, and subordinate the apparatus to the fictional or non-fictional representations that it records.  Thus, while the testimony of a survivor is not the same as an interview, the mode of representation in recording survivor testimony often accedes to journalistic codes of an interview, drawing upon standard practices and conventions of camera placement, lighting, and of course staging of the participant or participants in front of the camera for the purposes of being recorded.  We may find comfort in making our cameras invisible, but neither that comfort nor our cameras is ever neutral.  Nor as spectators should we ever get too comfortable with our relationship to this apparatus.

In terms of thinking about the camera specifically and the medium more generally, here is where critical and cultural theory can make a difference, both in terms of where the papers on this panel could go further, as well as how some discussions within Holocaust Studies could develop a deeper understanding of representational strategies.  The Living History Project uses many conventional documentary devices that rightly subordinate these devices to the testimony given to the students.  However, there also is room for approaches such as the ones outlined by Rosemary Horowitz that can make our students engage with what I would call a critical Holocaust media literacy and be aware of how these techniques get used.  Many of the discussions surrounding the use of survivor testimony in the classroom draw from a paradigm that sees the role of media in the classroom as serving a kind of archival function.  According to this view, the camera will serve to record testimony for posterity once all of the survivors are gone.  This approach emphasizes the use of film and media, not as a way to address representational strategies, but to animate and bring to life a predetermined set of important topics and categories relevant to Holocaust history and the rise of Nazism.

While the archival function indeed is an important one, it does not exist to the exclusion of all other modes or functions of media, and how one might use film and media differently in different kinds of classrooms.  As someone who sees what he does as making the familiar strange, I’d like to conclude my response by suggesting some alternate directions for the use of media in studying and teaching the Holocaust.  First, as I’ve suggested throughout my response, Holocaust Studies must consider mediated representation, including narrative as well as non-fiction, as a different mode of representation with a distinct set of rules and conventions that can exist independent to face to face communication, not as an inferior or handmaiden to direct and unmediated testimony.  Second, Holocaust Studies must distinguish between the ways in which documentaries tell their own kinds of narrative stories, and the ways in which fictional narratives might serve as documentary evidence for studying Nazism and the Holocaust.  Third, Holocaust Studies needs to move beyond its focus on binary oppositions between fictional narratives and documentary film, and embrace a broader range of media using poetic, self-reflexive, and experimental modes of address.  Finally, Holocaust Studies could usefully move beyond isolated views of mediated representations as discrete texts, and more seriously engage with varying contexts that surround these representations, such as production history and audience reception.

With regard to some of these last points, we do not teach and study the images of the Holocaust that we want, but the images of the Holocaust that we have. On occasion, I have used the unfinished Nazi documentary “The Fuehrer Gives a City to the Jews” not only to point out the ease with which one can use documentary codes for deception, but also to highlight the complexity and contradictions of the film’s history and its own backstory.  One cannot easily dismiss the film as pure Nazi propaganda, given its production history and context.  Since the film was never completed, it was never publicly shown.  Thus, it is Nazi propaganda that never found an audience to propagandize.  Similarly, one cannot talk about this Nazi documentary of Theresienstadt without discussing Kurt Gerron, a German Jew and comedy superstar before the rise of the Nazis.  He agreed to direct the project in the hopes that he and those who worked on the film while already in Theresienstadt would be spared from being sent to Auschwitz.  Thus, the film’s fragments not only uncomfortably elide conventional notions of documentary and propaganda, but also elide what is a Nazi film and what is perhaps the only surviving evidence of a film directed, shot, and performed by Jews in a concentration camp.

Along similar lines, we study and teach films like The Diary of Anne Frank (20^th Century-Fox, 1959) not because they are faithful or authentic representations of Holocaust experience, but for a number of other reasons, perhaps one of them because popular films like Anne Frank document some aspect of how American culture could begin to understand Nazism and the Holocaust.  In this sense, one could view the 1959 film version as a documentary of sorts, obviously not about the Holocaust, but about how a girl’s coming of age story could in fact serve as a surrogate to the experience of the Holocaust for a distinctly American audience.  By considering the film’s production and reception contexts, one could usefully and productively point out the way in which the film appealed to universalized notions of suffering as it de-specified the Jewish dimensions of the Holocaust.  More importantly, though, if the film does not satisfy today’s standards regarding what constitutes a Holocaust film, a reception approach would acknowledge that actual audiences made sense of the film as a Holocaust film at the time of the release, right down to its quotation of a shot from Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1948; Times Film, 1949) in a dream sequence within the film.  Shot on location in Auschwitz and starring Holocaust survivors re-enacting their actual experience, the 1948 Polish film was the first Holocaust film that Americans saw after newsreels of Liberation.  A fictional narrative, the Last Stage already had complicated the boundaries between documentary and narrative, a feature discussed extensively in the popular press when released in the U.S.

I’d like to close by offering a reminder of Lawrence Langer’s useful intervention that Theodor Adorno surely did not mean to suggest to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric, but that to write poetry after Auschwitz in the same way that poetry was written before Auschwitz would be barbaric (Langer 2002).  While many have extrapolated this warning to mean almost any form of artistic representation, it seems particularly and equally applicable to how we discuss, analyze, and interpret mediated representations after Auschwitz as well.

Works Cited

Langer, Lawrence.  “Recent Studies on Memory and Representation.”  Review of Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies of the Holocaust by Lea Wernick Fridman; Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Realism by Michael Rothberg; Holocaust Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics by Berel Lang; Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust by Vivian M. Patraka; The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France by Caroline Wiedmer; At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16.1 (2002), 77-93.