Much research has been done within the last twenty-five years in response to the growing availability of oral, written and videographed testimonies by Shoah survivors in archives worldwide. In fact, more than 150,000 accounts in total can be found in the Yale Fortunoff Archive, the USHMM archive, the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, Yad Vashem’s resources, and at the Oral History Division of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry’s, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, only to name a few. Of these accounts, a significant number is by survivors who have repeatedly and at different points in time told their stories. However, most research is still concentrated on singular accounts in one of the mentioned institutions. Moreover, a comparative take on the phenomenon of multiple testimonies by one and the same survivor in different media, at different places and within the frameworks of different institutions has only been adopted by a very few scholars.
The international conference “Bearing Witness More Than Once” will take place in Berlin of March 14th to 16th, 2016, and is designed to encourage a shift of the general focus of analyzing survivors’ testimonies to a comparative perspective. Its goal is to understand testimonial accounts not as static sources, but as a changing narrative being in continuous interaction with the institutional, medial and discursive contexts of its creation. Open to accounts in all medial forms (literary, audio, film and other), the fundamental interest is to learn more about the specific temporal, spatial, institutional, medial etc. factors that have shaped testimonies by comparing different testimonies by one and the same survivor. This way, both the history of the institutions organizing those testimonies and the changing circumstances of the individual witness telling his/her story come into view.
The conference will be structured into two major parts. One set of panels is supposed to deal with the transhistorical, transmedial and institutional aspects of bearing witness in a more general way. Contributions to these panels should give an in-depth overview of the historical, the medial and the institutional contexts of Shoah survivors’ bearing witness. The other panels are meant to concentrate on the multiple accounts by a small number of particular survivors. For this part the following four survivors and their various testimonies are recommended: (1) Yehuda Bacon, (2) Jack Bass (alias Jürgen Bassfreund), (3) Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and (4) Jolly Zeleny. This selection will represent a maximum of variety in media, time of creation and institutional contexts. The origins of their testimonies range from the David Boder Archive, Yad Vashem’s Oral History collection, the Fortunoff Video Archive, the Visual History Archive to the Berlin-based projects “Sprechen trotz Allem” and “Zwangsarbeit 1939-1945”, and others. Moreover, their testimonies make use of all media of interest (audio, video, textual and other) and have been created in all decades from the 1940s to the present. For this reason, individual case studies dealing with these four survivors’ accounts are especially welcomed. A detailed overview of their different testimonies is available through this link: http://www.zentrum-juedische-studien.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Selection-Testimonies.pdf
The aim of the conference is to lead to a focused discussion with as much common ground as possible. Its interdisciplinary scope calls for contributions from the fields of historical, sociological, media and cultural studies. The conference language will be English.
We encourage papers especially to take into consideration the four named witnesses and their multiple testimonies, but also welcome papers on different multiple testimonies. Topics for papers may include, but are not limited to
- the changes of testimonies over time,
- the changing historical contexts of testimonies,
- different medial representations and assigned reading techniques,
- different interviewing methods,
- an analysis of different institutions and their influence on the testimonies’ content, shape and style,
- methodological reflections on comparing testimonies in different media
- individual case studies
Confirmed keynote speakers are:
Annette Wieviorka (CNRS, Paris)
Jeffrey Shandler (Rutgers University, New Jersey)
Oren Baruch Stier (Florida International University).
A published volume of selected contributions is planned. Funds for lodging and travel expenses are available for a limited number of participants.
Please direct all questions as well as paper proposals of not more that 300 words and a short biographical note to michaelis@europa-uni.de or a.bothe@zentrum-juedische-studien.de before May 15th 2015.