The Trajectory of Holocaust Memory: The Crisis of Testimony in Theory and Practice re-considers survivor testimony, moving from a subject-object reading of the past to a subject-subject encounter in the present. It explores how testimony evolves in relationship to the life of eyewitnesses across time.
This book breaks new ground based on three principles. The first draws on Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” concept, transforming the object of history into an encounter between subjects. The second employs the Jungian concept of identity, whereby the individual (internal identity) and the persona (external identity) reframe testimony as an extension of the individual. They are a living subject, rather than merely a persona or narrative. The third principle draws on Daniel Kahneman’s concept of the experiencing self, which relives events as they occurred, and the remembering self, which reflects on their meaning in sum. Taken together, these principles comprise a new literacy of testimony that enables the surviving victim and the listener to enter a relationship of trust.
Designed for readers of Holocaust history and literature, this book defines the modalities of memory, witness, and testimony. It shows how encountering the individual who lived through the past changes how testimony is understood, and therefore what it can come to mean.
Author(s): Stephen D. Smith
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 250
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Foreword
PART I The Crisis of Witness
1 Name, Date, Place
The First Testimony
The Trajectory of Holocaust Memory
2 What It Means, and What It Doesn’t
The Hanging Scene
Witness and the Many Forms of the Present
Rehumanizing the Past
Limits of Collective Conscience
The Crisis of Witness
The Mandate
Resolving the Dilemma
3 The Constrained Witness
Limits of Language
Who Is a Holocaust Witness?
The Impossibility of Forgetfulness
4 All That Is Real (and Some That Is Not)
Sabina’s Missing Face
Being-for-Itself or Something-Others?
Testimony and Its Many Forms
Past in the Present
Witness as Authentication
Marvelous But Fallacious
Returns to Auschwitz
The Value of Rutabagas
(False) Testimony
PART II The Origins of Holocaust Witness
5 Witness within the Storm
An Audience of Strangers
Historiographical Defiance
6 They Were Not Silenced
The Need to Talk
The Awakening
No Traveler Returns
Dos Polyishe Yidntum
To Tell the World
That’s How It Was
The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz
The Theory and Practice of Hell
Ka-Tzetnik 135633
PART III Trajectories Beyond the Final Word
7 Deep Inside, I’m Still There
The Holocaust Man
Reasons to Speak
Scraps of Memory
Listen Then Listen Again
The Ossification of Witness
The Keyhole and the Clothesline
(Non)Closure
Index
