Academic literature on the topic 'Historical witness testimonies'
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Journal articles on the topic "Historical witness testimonies"
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Pleskaczyńska, Maria. "From the Experience to Bearing Witness; From the Authority to Trust. Testimony, Historical Truth and Trust in Contemporary Collective Memory." Philosophical Discourses 1 (2019): 81–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.16926/pd.2019.01.05.
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The last decades are the time of significant interest in the problem of witnesses and their testimonies, both in interdisciplinary discourse and practical activities and institutions. An important philosophical category of testimony, is gaining growing practical importance. New forms of collection and distribution of testimonies, significant increase of their quantity and release to the public discussion and a group of witnesses new participants, creates some new problems requiring reflection. The growing problem of institutionalization may disrupt the natural availability of bearing witness. Connecting testimonies with the historical truth and factual knowledge may lead to devaluation of testimonies and bearing witness. Ethics admits witnesses specific authority based on the personal experience and validity of the moral evaluations; this authority may explain who can (should) to bear witness. Meanwhile, the category of trust seems to explain the witnesses selection much better. The risk of numerous manipulations of testimonies is an important problem that has a negative impact on the reception of the social reception of testimonies and the situation of witnesses. In order to adequately respond to the experiences and needs of witnesses, an atmosphere of social trust should be build.
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Pérez Baquero, Rafael. "Witnessing Catastrophe." Studia Phaenomenologica 21 (2021): 177–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/studphaen2021219.
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This paper explores the contemporary phenomenological and psychoanalytical analyses of testimonies regarding traumatic historical events, with special attention to how such testimonies pose new challenges for the historiography of historical events in which witnesses participated. By exploring discussions on the memory of the Holocaust as well as the Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression, this paper addresses the extent to which the tensions and temporalities underlying the process of bearing witness to and giving testimony about traumatic historical events might reshape how their history is being told, written, and remembered.
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Wlodarski, Amy Lynn. "The Testimonial Aesthetics of Different Trains." Journal of the American Musicological Society 63, no. 1 (2010): 99–141. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jams.2010.63.1.99.
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Often praised as an exceptional artistic response to the Holocaust, Steve Reich's Different Trains adopts a documentary approach to Holocaust representation in which Reich assembled short excerpts from three survivor testimonies and published transcriptions of their accounts in his libretto for the work. This article explores the consequences that arise when fragments from very emotional testimonies are recast as purportedly unmediated documentary. The authority attributed to this sort of historical narrative has come under scrutiny in the field of Holocaust studies, in which it is called “secondary witness”—an intellectual interpretation of survivor testimonies advanced without the author revealing his or her own subjective standpoint or scholarly agenda. I argue that Reich's use of the voices of the survivors, Paul, Rachel, and Rachella, constitutes a form of secondary witness. Analysis of the original sources reveals that as Reich worked with extracts from the testimonies, in some cases his composition took on the aesthetics of the original testimonies, yet in other cases, he altered meaning and tone and even misheard certain phrases, producing transcription errors that reframed key moments by substituting his account of the Holocaust for that of the primary witness. Such revelations prompt reevaluation of the moral and political success that has been claimed for Different Trains, since the compositional process could never have been as objective and self-effacing as Reich and his critics suggest.
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Morgan, Katalin Eszter. "How do traumatic Shoah-witness testimonies fit into German History Education?" Forum Pedagogiczne 8, no. 1 (April 6, 2018): 273–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.21697/fp.2018.1.18.
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This essay traces ways in which traumatic Shoah witness testimonies fit into German history curricula conceptually by highlighting the competencies with which pupils are meant to grasp the topic of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Such curricula are diverse and they keep the learning objectives and teaching methods pertaining to emotions, imagination and ethical dimensions - as relevant to the topic - abstractly vague. This poses certain challenges and opportunities for history teachers and pupils. One such opportunity is the incorporation of virtual video-graphed Shoah witness testimonies that by their nature are emotional as they narrate traumatic memories. The opportunity in such narrations lies in assigning the function of tertiary witnessing to pupils and this process is briefly described. The challenges of using such oral histories can be understood as those that clash with the non-discursively organised knowledge in pursuit of truth (verifiable facts) by means of what is traditionally considered historical evidence.
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Wein, Dorothee. "«Und man hat geträumt, man wird überleben, und man wird das alles erzählen.» Historisches Lernen mit der Online-Anwendung «Zeugen der Shoah» Titre Di." Didactica Historica 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.33055/didacticahistorica.2019.005.01.131.long.
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At the end of the «Era of the Witness», valuable sources remain for education with video testimonies, which, however, require a different didactic approach than a live encounter with a survivor. The online application «Witnesses of the Shoah» developed at Freie Universität Berlin includes not only interview films, but contextual materials and interactive tasks. It serves as an example to show how the pedagogical use of video interviews in (school) education can be designed, which aspects of testimony are likely to be discussed in this context, how adolescents relate to the survivors’ reports, and in what sense this fosters their historical consciousness.
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Wein, Dorothee. "«Und man hat geträumt, man wird überleben, und man wird das alles erzählen.» Historisches Lernen mit der Online-Anwendung «Zeugen der Shoah» Titre Di." Didactica Historica 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.33055/didacticahistorica.2019.005.01.131.long.
Full textAbstract:
At the end of the «Era of the Witness», valuable sources remain for education with video testimonies, which, however, require a different didactic approach than a live encounter with a survivor. The online application «Witnesses of the Shoah» developed at Freie Universität Berlin includes not only interview films, but contextual materials and interactive tasks. It serves as an example to show how the pedagogical use of video interviews in (school) education can be designed, which aspects of testimony are likely to be discussed in this context, how adolescents relate to the survivors’ reports, and in what sense this fosters their historical consciousness.
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Carter-White, Richard. "Auschwitz, Ethics, and Testimony: Exposure to the Disaster." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 4 (January 1, 2009): 682–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d11207.
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Witness testimonies provide a singular challenge to historians of Auschwitz. Survivor accounts offer a privileged perspective on the world of the camp, yet as recent conceptual work has shown the performative structure of these texts exceeds and eludes this representational duty. The challenge for historians is that, given their privileged, ‘insider’ status, any equivocality regarding the content of witness testimonies provides space for Holocaust denial. This paper offers a critical reading of one historical strategy for meeting this challenge: Exposing witness accounts to an uncompromising criteria of evidentiality and plausibility, designed to test their representational quality as a means of preempting negationist attempts to manipulate ‘faulty’ accounts. Drawing on Lyotard, I argue that, even as this strategy succeeds in refuting individual cases of denial, by refusing to enter into dialogue with the language game of testimony, and, more importantly, by invalidating any attempt to do so, this strategy actually reiterates the tactics of those deniers it is designed to oppose, thus undermining its own important work. Rather than rejecting this historical approach, I argue that it is compromised only by an historiographical insistence on imposing this ‘evidential’ language game as universal and representational; if we conversely recognise its performative, nonrepresentational status, it is more equipped to refute denial and without making of testimony a collateral damage.
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Bećirević, Edina. "The Issue of Genocidal Intent and Denial of Genocide." East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 24, no. 4 (August 10, 2010): 480–502. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0888325410377655.
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This article discusses the issue of special genocidal intent and, within it, the relevance of judicially established truths to the wider historical context. It suggests that genocide researchers should not rely only on verdicts—which either deny or confirm genocide— as historical truth but, rather, use the judicial process and trial evidence as signposts to direct their research. The author uses the case study of Serbian genocide against Bosnian Muslims from 1992 to 1995 to illustrate the failings of judicially established truths in determining wider historical truth. Wartime documentation, interviews with witnesses, and court transcripts are analyzed to illustrate how this wider truth is sometimes lost when focus on the importance of supporting documents is overshadowed by a final verdict. The case of Srebrenica is outlined to illustrate how documents used in trials, as well as witness testimonies, can contribute on their own to the understanding of historical truths. In this case, a selection of trial narratives and documents is used to examine not only if there was “special intent” among Serbian political leadership to exterminate Bosnian Muslims as early as 1992, but also to determine if international community representatives were aware of that intent and ignored it consciously.
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Maubach, Franka. "Świadek historii. Swobodne wspominanie a krytyka źródła historycznego – o ambiwalencji metody w zachodnioniemieckiej oral history około roku 1980." Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej 3 (October 30, 2013): 39–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.26774/wrhm.41.
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Only recently has the contemporary witness become the subject of academic study. The emerging scholarship views this figure as belonging to a specific historical period, namely the post-Holocaust era. Today, the narrations of the contemporary witness are commonly understood as constructs, as stories developed synchronously in the course of the interview. The article takes a closer look at the formative period of the German Oral History studies around 1980, a field deeply informed by post-dictatorial sensibilities. It locates the figure of the contemporary witness, the interviewer and the interview methods employed within the historical context in which they emerged. Moreover, if we consider other Oral History approaches developed elsewhere and compare the German approach to Fritz Schütze’s narrative interview method for the social sciences, it can be identified as a genuinely historical, diachronically operating approach.
By letting the interviewees talk about their memories uninterrupted, they were encouraged to reflect on their lives as a whole. A the same time, pioneers of the field such as Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato developed ways to verify the narrations’ plausibility and thus to evaluate the reliability of the interview as istorical source. This combination of empathy and skepticism, of unconditional interest in a person’s full life-story and its critical verification became the hallmark of German Oral history Studies, not least because emerged in a post-dictatorial society. Rather than studying memories as mere constructions of the past, they developed a methodology aimed at enabling historians to get access to the actual past experiences which they believed are contained in the retrospective testimonies of individual human beings.
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Sanyal, Debarati. "A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism." Representations 79, no. 1 (2002): 1–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rep.2002.79.1.1.
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IT HAS BECOME SOMETHING of a commonplace in recent criticism to claim that the Holocaust inaugurates a ''crisis of representation.'' To read, understand, and transmit a historical trauma of this magnitude is to confront the boundaries of the thinkable and the sayable. This essay critically examines the emergence of a theoretical current that presents the Holocaust primarily as a trauma that - as trauma - opens up unlocatable and unrepresentable forms of knowledge. It argues that the overwhelming focus on trauma as an optic for viewing the Nazi genocide leads to a dangerous conflation of the differences between victims, executioners, witnesses (primary and secondary); between literal and metaphorical survival and culpability; and between historical event and metaphorical, transhistorical condition. For a generation that did not live through the Holocaust but encountered it as secondary witnesses, as readers and viewers of films and documentaries, a sense of metaphorical survival and second-hand guilt seems to be an inescapable condition of Holocaust reception. Theoretical approaches to representations and testimonies of the Holocaust, especially in the wake of deconstruction, increasingly rely on models of contamination, complicity, and trauma. Such models complicate not only the difference between victims and executioners within the camps, but also the differences between witnesses, bystanders, and successive generations of secondary witnesses. Primo Levi's description of a ''gray zone'' in the concentration camp (in The Drowned and the Saved) has played a crucial role in this recent focus on the traumatized culpability of the secondary witness. The ''gray zone'' describes situations that blurred and even dismantled the opposition between victims and executioners (as in the case of the Special Squads, or Sonderkommando s, composed primarily of Jewish prisoners working in the crematorium). This essay argues that Levi's ''gray zone'' is now deployed as a figure in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, and Shoshana Felman. Identifying proximities in their views of trauma and testimony, the essay shows how Levi's ''gray zone'' is transformed into an overarching metaphorical framework for thinking not only about the Holocaust, but more broadly, about history, subjectivity,and ethics in the fields of psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and literary criticism. This hypostasis of the ''gray zone'' not only erases the historical specificity of the Nazi genocide, but also subsumes the irreducibly distinct positions of victim, executioner, witness, accomplice, and proxy-witness under a general condition of traumatic complicity. The essay concludes with a paired reading of Albert Camus's La chute and Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, suggesting that Camus's novel, while often read as an exemplary testimony to historical trauma, instead stages some of the ethical and political problems of reading history through the optic of trauma.
Books on the topic "Historical witness testimonies"
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Vivian, Bradford. Invention. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190611088.003.0002.
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Chapter 1 uses a historical, and notably unconventional, example of witnessing to demonstrate how bearing witness involves sometimes radical and purposeful rhetorical invention (or reinvention) of historical fact. In his Cotton States Exposition Address (1895), Booker T. Washington, a former slave, romanticized the pre–Civil War South with curious irony. This counterintuitive example indicates that witnesses bear witness in public only if social, political, or moral authorities permit their testimonies. In Washington’s case, the authorities in question presided over the economic and political institutions of the post-Reconstruction South. Witnesses are either broadly empowered or narrowly constrained in their ability to invent a version of the past that presiding officials and the public at large may welcome, according to existing standards of decorum or conventions of praise and blame. Witnessing, this chapter argues, is rhetorically inventive insofar as witnesses testify by appearing to present unmediated recollections of the past; yet such apparently unmediated accounts are effects of rhetorical invention constrained by the dictates of immediate sociopolitical hierarchies.
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Archambeau, Nicole. Souls under Siege. Cornell University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501753664.001.0001.
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This book explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercenary warfare, and the violence of royal succession during the fourteenth century. Many people, the book finds, understood both plague and war as the symptoms of spiritual sicknesses caused by excessive sin, and they sought cures in confession. The book draws on a rich evidentiary base of sixty-eight narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the proceedings had lived through the outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as the violence inflicted by mercenaries unemployed during truces in the Hundred Years’ War. Consequently, their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of body and soul alike. Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. The book illustrates how medieval people approached sickness and uncertainty by using a variety of remedies, making clear that “healing” had multiple overlapping meanings in this historical moment.
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Morris, Larry E. A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190699093.001.0001.
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This book includes key documents, along with annotation, related to the origin of the Book of Mormon, from Joseph Smith’s first mention of the gold plates to the book’s publication in 1830. Smith claimed that on the night of September 21–22, 1823, an angel, later identified as Moroni, appeared to him and informed him of an ancient record, inscribed on gold plates, buried in the nearby Hill Cumorah. Smith finally obtained the plates in 1827, and, assisted by Martin Harris, began translating in 1828. After Harris lost the first 116 pages of the manuscript, however, translation essentially ceased until 1829, when Oliver Cowdery arrived on the scene. The Book of Mormon, considered scripture by believers, was finally published in Palmyra, New York, in 1830. Key topics discussed in both introductions and endnotes include the question of whether Smith’s story of the angel actually originated as a treasure-seeking yarn, whether the gold plates actually existed, and whether the testimonies of the three witnesses and eight witnesses count as historical evidence.
Book chapters on the topic "Historical witness testimonies"
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Pesce, Monica. "Alla cieca e il testimone di secondo grado." In Biblioteca di Studi di Filologia Moderna, 335–53. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/978-88-5518-338-3.26.
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The essay focuses on the modalities adopted by Magris in his novel, Alla cieca, to merge literature and civil engagement through a fine narrative construction. By populating his writing with precise documentary research and taking advantage of the possibilities of invention, the author succeeds in giving voice to minimum destinies of History and save their high moral lesson. This can also be seen through a comparative reading of the pages of the novel dealing with Tito’s gulag, Goli Otok, and Scotti’s book, which is a historical reconstruction provided by witnesses of the events suffered by Italians who lived there.
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Dutsch, Dorota M. "Introduction." In Pythagorean Women Philosophers, 1–16. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198859031.003.0001.
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The Introduction outlines the aims of the book. Since the seventeenth century scholars have asked whether the Pythagorean women philosophers mentioned in ancient texts were “real” historical individuals. The chapter briefly presents the material, then rehearses two recent answers to this question: 1) the proposal to embrace references to Pythagorean women at face value as direct testimonies to historical women and female experience; 2) the argument that all texts on record bear witness to male authors’ efforts to represent female thought. Drawing on Ricoeur’s dialectic of suspicion and belief, the chapter makes the case for a hermeneutic approach that moves from a critique of the circumstances of text production to belief and reconstruction of potential meanings and worlds. In this process, the text is treated as an autonomous entity, a notion drawn from the work of Bruno Latour. The Introduction insists on the complexity of the Pythagorean tradition and on the need to consider testimonies of Pythagorean women as instances of reception.
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Pollin-Galay, Hannah. "Introduction." In Ecologies of Witnessing, 1–13. Yale University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300226041.003.0001.
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The Introduction opens two interlocking debates: The first relates to the purpose and study of Holocaust testimony. Scholars have debated whether we should seek psychic, expressive truths from victim testimony or reconstructive, historical ones. Both of these approaches have overlooked the global, cultural translation aspects of recent testimony projects. The specific language, political, and geographic context of the witness (her ecology, or oikos) shapes the way she sees her own psyche as well as how she pieces together empirical information about the past. A comparative reading of recent testimonies, all narrating similar events, can bring the significance of language and place into view. Staging this comparison, investigating points of contrast between testimonies from three different ecologies, leads us time and again to question the effect of the Holocaust on Jewish culture—the second debate in which the book intervenes. Each contemporary ecology gives witnesses different tools for thinking about what makes the Holocaust a catastrophe—in the sense of an event that not only annihilated human life but also destroyed paradigms of knowledge, values, and identifications. The introduction also outlines why Lithuanian Jewry and its Yiddish cultural legacy make especially rich grounds for this explanation.
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Dutsch, Dorota M. "Conclusion." In Pythagorean Women Philosophers, 213–16. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198859031.003.0008.
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The Conclusion brings together the views on the gender of knowledge as found in Pythagorean texts. The texts repeatedly consider the possibility that philosophy is a female as well as male endeavor. Because female philosophizing is always contingent, it is crucial to approach these testimonies with a mixture of suspicion and belief. Pythagorean women philosophers exist not as textual representations of discrete historical figures, but as tangled entities, straddling history and fiction. From ancient fragments we may create modern narratives of exclusion or inclusion. However, the persistent presence of women in representations of Pythagorean history bears witness to the Greek writers’ conviction that women have the capacity to contribute to philosophical knowledge and have done so in the past.
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Hassner, Ron E. "Exploratory Torture." In Anatomy of Torture, 82–96. Cornell University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501762031.003.0005.
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This chapter explores the inquisitorial torture on the other side of the world, in Mexico City. It unfolds historical continuity: the trials in Mexico City occur between 1589–1601 and showcase many of the same patterns and outcomes as the parallel trials in Toledo. The chapter first argues that torture played a far more subtle role in eradicating Judaism from New Spain than was hitherto assumed. It looks at the account of the destruction of Mexico City's Jewish community, and how it diverges from the conventional history for two reasons. The chapter compiles a network of witness testimonies across dozens of trials from this period, organized chronologically, to assess what the Inquisition knew and did not know prior to the torture of Luis de Carvajal and his associates. It allows us to understand, from the court's perspective, why some testimonies were deemed reliable while others were deemed suspect. The chapter focuses on a crucial manuscript that has only recently become available to scholars: the trial of Manuel de Lucena, which constitutes the first effort to reanalyze the role of torture in these events using these previously inaccessible manuscripts.
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King, Kimi Lynn, and James Meernik. "Whither Thou Truth and Justice." In Legacies of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 225–48. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862956.003.0014.
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Chapter 13 examines micro-level components shaping the witness experience. It develops a model of procedural justice to examine witness perceptions about the search for historical truth and justice. Based on extensive survey data from witnesses who testified before the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the study evaluates in depth the impact of testifying. The chapter uses logistic regression to evaluate whether certain testimonial challenges such as trial delays, language translation difficulties, and other stressors associated with the process of testifying contribute to perceptions about about witnesses’ contributions to truth and justice. Notably, we find ethnic and gender differences among the witnesses regarding whether they believed they have contributed to truth and justice by having testified, and the findings reveal limited support for the proposition that if witnesses feel they have been treated fairly they are more likely to believe they have contributed to justice.
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"Filmed Testimonies, Archives, and Memoirs of the Mao Era." In Popular Memories of the Mao Era, edited by Judith Pernin and Sebastian Veg, 137–60. Hong Kong University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888390762.003.0007.
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Over the past 25 years, various Chinese independent documentary filmmakers have attempted to shed light on times and topics that are vaguely, inaccurately or insufficiently narrated in official history, such as the Cultural Revolution, or more recently the Great Leap famine. Typically, independent documentaries focus on ordinary people’s memories, and often feature witnesses who survived various political movements. Investigating sensitive historical topics as an independent filmmaker requires a distinctive documentary framework in order to present the author’s filmic and historical endeavor in a favorable light and convince the audience. In the Chinese context, the filmmakers’ unofficial status has various consequences on their stance, their work method, but also on the films’ aesthetics and reception. The present essay gives an overview of this body of films and analyses how unofficial memory is framed and expressed by focusing on three main aspects: the filming of oral testimonies, the use of archival documents, and the role of written memoirs. This study of several works reveals the diversity of responses found by independent filmmakers to articulate their findings and discourse on unofficial history.
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Fonseca, Carlos. "Forensic Fictions." In Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human, 37–55. University Press of Florida, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5744/florida/9781683401490.003.0002.
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Taking as its point of departure the contemporary crisis of testimonio and the recent works by Eyal Weizman, who has suggested in his book Mengele’s Skull that we have now entered an era where subjective testimony has been supplanted by object-oriented modes of witnessing, this chapter introduces the category of forensic fictions as a way of categorizing and thinking through recent Latin American literature, art, and film. Analyzing how the figure of the archive and its ruins is represented as well as presented throughout recent Latin American cultural production—in a series of works ranging from Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 all the way to the forensic sculptures of Teresa Margolles—the article explores the possibility of a mode of witnessing that goes beyond the humanist notion of the subjective voice of the witness. In dialogue with contemporary debates concerning post-memory, it proposes that the image of the ruinous archive as a metonym for thinking through the possibility historicity in a world devoid of the foundational myths which had until then functioned as the basis of historical meaning.