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Facing Injustice: Video Testimony in the College Classroom
Let’s begin with some numbers. At the Wannsee conference in January 1942, Nazi
officials drew up a list which is divided into two columns, one labeled “country,” the other
“number.” According to this list, at this point in time there were still 11 million Jews living in
more than two dozen European countries, with only one – Estonia – declared judenfrei. The
Final Solution slated the remaining millions for destruction. What is so alarming about this list,
beyond its utter immorality and megalomania, is the reduction of 11 million human beings to
mere numbers. Figures of this magnitude defy the imagination and obfuscate rather than
illuminate. To break “through the numbing mass of numbers,” in the words of genocide
scholars Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, we need first-person accounts, victim and
witness testimonies.1 Our perspective on the past changes decisively if we switch from a
collective of faceless figures to a single person with a name.
When we conceive of others in terms of mere numbers, categories, or essences, we rob
them of their face, name, and individuality. This is exceedingly hazardous, as David Patterson
points out: “Thinking of humanity in terms of essence,” he writes, “is a way of dividing
humanity in the camps of We and They, thus rendering others faceless and ourselves either
indifferent or murderous or both.” According to Patterson, this kind of thinking informs modern
as well as postmodern conceptions of identity through categorization, shackling individuals “in
terms of the straitjacket of race, gender, or culture.”2 First-person testimony returns the face to
1
Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, “Introduction,” in Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts,
fourth ed., ed. Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2013), 6.
2
David Patterson, Genocide in Jewish Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3.
2
a witness made faceless by exclusion and persecution and thus provides a way out of this
straitjacket. [example 1: Nanjing massacre survivor Deshou Chen]3
The face occupies an important place in the ethics of the French philosopher Emmanuel
Levinas.4 In Levinas’s view, the other’s face is neither an idea nor a mere concept, but entirely
“concrete and particular.”5 As he put it in an interview, “if you encounter the face, responsibility
arises in the strangeness of the other and in his misery. The face offers itself to your
compassion and to your obligation.”6 Simply put, what is at stake in an encounter that truly
deserves the name is facing rather than defacing. While facing does not automatically mean
understanding, the other’s inevitable alterity provides the basis for an empathy which, if rightly
understood, may culminate in genuine insight.7 Orietta Ombrosi sums it up eloquently: “To
fight against the tyranny of the visible and triumphant history which is always the history of the
conquerors, to fight against the tyranny of a philosophy of the universal and the impersonal
which is always oblivious to the singular, and to fight against the tyranny of a reason of the
3
All sample clips used in this presentation may be found at https://sfi.usc.edu/search_the_archive. A subset of the
testimonies held in the Visual Archive is available at iwitness.usc.edu.
4
I am currently at work on an essay that draws on Levinas and Blanchot to provide the philosophical
underpinnings of a responsible use of video testimony.
5
Michael L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 61. Morgan elaborates:
“The encounter with the face is not an act of seeing; it is not perceptual and judgmental. What confronts me is the
other person’s need, misery, destitution, and I do not see them, for I do not see yet at all. I sense and respond. I
sense the suffering and give or withhold – that is, I respond, and my sensing, my responding, and my recognizing –
acknowledging and accepting – the other are all one. … I am all this sensing, this responding, and this recognizing,
and that is all I am as a human being; it is the totality of my humanity.” Ibid. 75.
6
Jill Robbins, ed., Is it Righteous to Be? Interview with Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001), 48. For an ethics as “optics” see Leonard Grob, “Emmanuel Levinas and the Primacy of Ethics in PostHolocaust Philosophy,” in Ethics after the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. John K. Roth (St.
Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999), 9 f.
7
For a good explanation of the asymmetrical relation between facing and understanding see Hilary Putnam, Jewish
Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2008), 74-75. To be sure, Levinas did not have the indirect, variously mediated, and multiply
framed “pseudo-encounter” with a person on a screen in mind but the real and direct thing: two human beings
coming face to face in real time. I would argue that this insight, crucial though it undoubtedly is, does not prevent
us from applying his thought to video testimony.
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totality of the Same which always consumes the singularity of the Other – this is the explicit and
implicit appeal in Levinas’s thinking.”8
Maurice Blanchot was a fellow thinker and close friend of Levinas, and it is no
coincidence that their philosophies complement each other. In the key text The Writing of the
Disaster Blanchot enjoins us to learn to think with pain.9 What does this mean? The way I
understand it, thinking with pain refers to a kind of secondary witnessing that seeks to align the
cognitive and emotional element of a testimony.10 The pain arises in the encounter with the
naked face of the suffering other, and it is its explicit recognition and acknowledgement that
makes thinking and to a certain extent sensing the disaster not only possible but imperative.11
To be clear: I do not endorse substituting testimony for traditional historical instruction;
rather, I see the use of testimony as an essential complement to the big picture. Video
testimony invites an engagement with prejudice and persecution that transcends the cognitive
realm. The result is “emphatic unsettlement,” a term coined by the intellectual historian
Dominic LaCapra.12 Emphatic unsettlement, coupled with the cognitive unease testimony ought
to elicit, avoids over-identification with the victim, a problematic response that may lead to
8
Orietta Ombrosi, The Twilight of Reason: Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and Levinas Tested by the Catastrophe,
trans. Victoria Aris (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 169.
9
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska
Press, 1986), 145. Emphasis in original.
10
Geoffrey Hartman, “Tele-Suffering and Testimony,” in Hartman, Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against
Inauthenticity (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 83.
11
Scholars are increasingly recognizing affect as a significant component of the learning process. Shari Saunders,
e.g., proposes a learning model that integrates thinking, acting, feeling, and physiology. Saunders, keynote lecture
given at the Teaching Diversity Conference, “Strategies for Creating Inclusive Classrooms and Communities,” Jan.
15, 2015, UC San Diego.
12
Dominic LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25.4 (Summer 1999), 699.
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“secondary traumatization” and thence to compassion fatigue.13 At its most elementary, facing
and “thinking with pain” are based on a viewing practice that stresses the importance of
sustained or what I call “deep” listening and that eschews a sound bite approach primarily
concerned with the retrieval of specific snippets of factual information.14
Video Testimonies in the College Classroom
Over the past several decades tens of thousands of survivor and witness testimonies
have been videotaped and stored in digital archives worldwide. The largest of these archives
today is the Visual History Archive or VHA of the Shoah Foundation Institute, housed at USC.
The brain child of filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the VHA contains around 53,000 testimonies by
survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, the Nanjing massacre, and the Rwandan genocide.15
At this writing, efforts are underway to interview survivors of the Cambodian genocide. UCSD is
one of only 51 institutions worldwide to offer access to the entire archive.
I first incorporated video testimony into my teaching at UCSD in 2009. 16 Though my
research is based on testimony by Holocaust witnesses, my insights apply to other collections in
the archive as well. Over the course of several years I experimented with various assignments
13
On “secondary traumatization” see Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub
(New York: Routledge, 1992), chapter 1.
14
For a detailed analysis of deep listening, augmented by extensive examples, see my article “Unheroic Survival,
Trauma Performance, and Video Testimony,” forthcoming in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.
15
For a good introduction to the VHA’s emergence and vision see Mark Goldberg, “An Interview with Michael
Berenbaum: The Holocaust and Education,” The Phi Beta Kappan, 79.4 (Dec. 1997), 317-19 and Henryk Broder,
“Indiana Jones in Auschwitz,” Der Spiegel 37 (1999), 246-64. On the rise of the stature of the witness see Annette
Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006).
16
For a fuller discussion of my experience with teaching with testimony see my article “Grim Expectations: Video
Testimony in the College Classroom,” forthcoming in The History Teacher.
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and finally conceptualized an approach that depends on sustained engagement with entire
testimonies. Instead of focusing on the historical information contained in a particular
testimony, I came to see a life-story approach as most promising. This kind of approach puts the
individual witness, rather than the persecutors’ agenda, center-stage.17 Video testimony is a
hybrid medium, made up of different narrative elements such as memory, chronicle, and
reflection. Interviewees tend to switch between the past and present and relate their life story
and what it means to them through prosody, facial expressions, gestures, and silences. These
elements reveal new and deeper levels of meaning as this excerpt from the testimony of
Helena Jonas Rosenzweig demonstrates. [example 2: Holocaust survivor Helena Jonas
Rosenzweig]
According to a study based on VHA interview use in German secondary schools, an indepth engagement with video testimony fosters several different types of critical thinking skills
including source criticism and the ability to deconstruct a text.18 Beyond the cognitive realm,
video testimony also needs to be evaluated for its affective dimension. As my reading of dozens
of student essays has shown, an attentive engagement with video testimony encourages an
empathetic response born of witnessed suffering, whether explicit or implicit. Taken together,
the three main aspects of learning from video testimony – source criticism, deconstruction, and
empathy – enhance the student’s awareness of the nature of historical evidence and the ability
17
As Tony Kushner points out, “[f]or survivor oral testimony to be utilized to its full potential in Holocaust
representation would require the focus to be shifted from the Nazis to their victims—toward a life story
approach—and for the strands of history and memory to be woven together to show the full complexity of
survivor identity.” Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation,” Poetics Today 27.2
(Summer 2006), 6.
18
Michele Barricelli, Julaine Brauer, and Dorothee Wein, “Zeugen der Shoah: Historisches Lernen mit
lebensgeschichtlichen Videointerviews. Das Visual History Archive des Shoah Foundation Institute in der
schulischen Bildung,” Medaon 5 (2009), 14.
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to practice sustained self-reflection. Through the process of viewing, students are often able to
forge an emotional connection with “their” interviewee. This connection may have a lasting
impact on the way genocide is being remembered.
Because of its inherent hybridity, video testimony is a perfect medium to make students
think about the nature of evidence and to consider the important distinction between history
and memory. Though often lumped together or even confused outright, the two are not the
same, yet they constitute essential elements of video testimony. “In testimonies, history and
memory are linked,” writes Tyng-Guang C.; “the memory of the past becomes present when
remembered, and the past and the present are imposed onto each other. One is no longer
limited to the facts of the past event, but engages in the present with the way in which an
event was experienced, the underlying meaning of the occurrence, and individual subjective
reality.”19 As these observations show, attending to the all-important dichotomy between
history and memory promotes profound reflections on the malleability of human memory and
history.
Many students are aware of the unstable nature of human memory, especially the
memory of events long ago. Rebecca H., for example, remarks that “[m]emory can be a great
tool to recall past experiences, but it is often unreliable, inaccurate or just plain false. Memory
can change with experiences that have happened since the event. Especially when the topic is
something as traumatic as the holocaust, memory can be altered or tainted.”20 Though
memory’s susceptibility to alteration or downright falsification needs to be recognized, it
19
20
Tyng-Guang C., HIEU 144, fall 2011, UC San Diego.
Rebecca H., HIEU 144, fall 2011, UC San Diego.
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should not be exaggerated. In fact, the quest for an accurate recall of details may be less
significant than the authenticity of the original experience.
As creatures of memory and forgetting, we all draw on manifold sources to tell the story
of our life, and we constantly rework this story in accordance with new experiences and
insights. Perceptive students evince a pronounced sense of the dialectical nature of this
process. Memory is envisioned as a multifaceted interplay of experience and recall, ever fluid
and thus never complete. To be sure, written memoirs may be similarly analyzed in terms of
history and memory. Video testimony is generally less polished and “finished,” however, and
therefore especially well suited for this kind of critical dissection. A deconstructive approach to
video testimony fosters analytical and critical thinking by making students ponder the many
factors that affect the shape and reception of a particular testimony. In this respect, the
interviewer’s capacity to either guide or derail a specific testimony is as worthy of consideration
as the interviewee’s own subject position and the viewer’s preconceived biases and
expectations.
Take, for example, the testimony of Helena Tichauer, a Polish camp survivor. In an
astute study of Tichauer’s testimony Meredith B. denounces the interviewer’s continual
interference in the testimonial process. At its worst, this style of questioning degenerates into
an incessant and highly intrusive investigation – with deplorable results. Thus Meredith: “If
Helena had been allowed to just talk freely without answering specific questions, new stories or
new memories may have popped up, and the conversation could have gone a completely
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different direction.”21 Meredith’s critique is to the point. At the same time, it should be noted
that a total absence of interference may not be the solution either. As the two veteran
interviewers of Holocaust survivors Henry Greenspan and Sidney Bolkonsky maintain, paying
attention to chronology may invite a “fuller recounting rather than constricting it,” and some
interviewees actually welcome the protective function of the process.22 Either way, when
paying attention to the framing of a particular life-story, students become aware of the
significance of dominant discourses that may unwittingly drive the interviewing process and of
the interviewer’s as well as the viewer’s implication in the reception of testimony.
The testimonies’ disproportionate emphasis on persecution and the concomitant
neglect of the pre- and postwar period is problematic as well. Not only does it detract from the
victims’ life experience, it also predisposes viewers to exclusively focus on the tragedy. Viewers
themselves may bear part of the blame for the “selective listening” that often substitutes for
thorough engagement with a particular interview. Approaching testimony with exaggerated or
faulty expectations hampers the overall learning experience. As Armando C. correctly remarks,
“[o]ur expectations prevent us from analyzing the victims from different viewpoints, limiting
perhaps the knowledge or lessons learned.”23 Meredith B. agrees with this. When viewers
automatically expect dramatic accounts of shootings and gassings, other important information
such as “background, family life, and early childhood” is easily dismissed as “boring and
insignificant when in reality, every piece of information from these interviews is an integral part
21
Meredith B., HIEU 158, spring 2013, UC San Diego.
Henry Greenspan and Sidney Bolkonsky,” When Is an Interview and Interview? Notes from Listening to
Holocaust Survivors,” Poetics Today 27.2 (Summer 2006), 448.
23
Armando C., HIEU 158, spring 2013, UC San Dieog.
22
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of history.”24 Indeed, expectations of gruesome accounts of persecution as well as dramatic
emotional outbursts may hinder our appreciation of the traumatic nature of past experiences.
Warnings to the contrary notwithstanding, deconstruction need not necessarily
degenerate into relativism. For one thing, the emotional connection a viewer forges with a
particular witness by virtue of listening to him or her for several hours provides a
counterweight to this danger. Indeed, if one were to look for the most distinctive feature of
video testimony compared to written texts, one would probably fix on the issue of emotion. A
consideration of empathy is essential to a victim-centered approach to genocidal persecution.25
In my experience, the vast majority of students view the affective dimension of video testimony
in positive terms. Not only do most of them not find their own emotional response problematic
or even detrimental to learning – in fact, it is what many consider to be the unique value of
video testimony in the first place. Jeffrey L., for example, who watched an interview with the
Polish camp survivor Morris Liebermensch describes the emotional information conveyed as a
desirable complement to traditional sources such as a text book: “the factual information, while
it provides a sense of continuity and validates the accuracy of Liebermensch’s story, is a less
important aspect of Liebermensch’s testimony than are his vivid descriptions combined with
the emotion he conveys and expresses.”26 Emotion succeeds in conveying the lasting effect of
the Holocaust on its victims, i.e. the fact that “the experience of the Holocaust never died in the
souls of most survivors,” as Jeffrey notes. Witnessing these effects not only allows the viewer to
24
Meredith B.
On teaching a victim-centered perspective of the Holocaust see Jeffrey C. Blutinger, “Bearing Witness: Teaching
the Holocaust from a Victim-Centered Perspective,” The History Teacher 42.3 (May 2009), 269-79.
26
Jeffrey L., HIEU 158, spring 2013, UC San Diego.
25
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“relate and sympathize with the survivors” but also brings home the devastating magnitude of
the catastrophe and thus enhances rather than jeopardizes understanding of the past.27
Enhanced understanding born of feeling would not be possible, I believe, if the student
did not forge a personal connection with the interviewee. Emerging during several hours of
viewing and listening, this connection is an invaluable aspect of studying the Holocaust and its
aftermath through video testimony. Andrea N.’s thoughtful reflections are pertinent in this
respect: “Video testimony allows the viewer to establish an intimate relationship with the
survivor; in recounting his or her story, every detail, emotion, or omission of narrative
communicates the victimization and trauma the survivor endured. Only in accepting and
making use of video testimony can we embrace the unique stories of each survivor to further
our understanding of the experience of the Holocaust.”28 The kind of “intimate relationship”
that is being envisioned here depends on the viewer’s cognizance of his or her own part in the
witnessing process. Andrea is clearly aware of her response to the testimony she chose to
study. Because of her own affective involvement with the testimony of a Polish child survivor
named Samuel Gesundheit, she decided to refer to him “by his first rather than his last name,”
as she explicitly acknowledges, adding: “[T]he personal nature of video testimony makes me
feel as if I have established a relationship with Samuel and that he is telling his story to me.”29
Needless to say, such a relationship cannot be hoped for when students are exposed to brief
clips or asked to search the archive for scraps of factual information. Ultimately, empathy may
27
Jeffrey L.
Andrea N., HIEU 158, spring 2013, UC San Diego.
29
Andrea N.
28
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be the most important reason for studying video testimony in the college classroom. [Example
3: Rwandan genocide survivor Freddy Mutanguha]
Education After Auschwitz
Several years of using video testimony in the college classroom have brought me to a
deeper appreciation of its value as a pedagogical resource. Approaching the breakdown of
equity, diversity, and inclusion within specific historical contexts, through the voices of primary
witnesses, equips students with the conceptual tools to recognize injustice and exclusion in the
present. As I have argued in this paper, a sound-bite approach neither reveals the narrative
logic of a particular interview nor does it establish a meaningful connection between viewer
and listener. Most importantly, it “entails an education of both the heart and the mind,” in the
words of Thomas Trezise.30
In his famous address on education after Auschwitz, Theodor Adorno connected
barbarism with a lack of reflection. He declared: “One must labor against this lack of reflection,
must dissuade people from striking outward without reflecting upon themselves. The only
education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection.”31 Genuine
self-reflection is by definition beyond the reach and responsibility of the collective. Regardless
of broader social forces and historical context, the truly human task always and everywhere
begins with a sense of individual responsibility. In the encounter with a man or a woman who
30
Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2013), 225.
31
Theodor W. Adorno, “Education After Auschwitz,” in Adorno, Can one Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical
Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 21. Emphasis added.
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has endured some of the last century’s most destructive calamities, we are asked to reflect on
the human quality of the face before us – and of our own. [Example 4: Porrajmos survivor
Wellesina McCrary]
Susanne Hillman, Ph.D., UC San Diego