The Media of Testimony

Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic

S. Jones

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137364043
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The Media of Testimony explores testimony relating to the Stasi in different cultural forms: autobiographical writing, memorial museums and documentary film. Combining theoretical models from diverse disciplines, it presents a new approach to the study of testimony, memory and mediation.

1

The Media of Testimony

As we have seen, eyewitness testimony and individual experience have played a significant role in shaping the socio-political debates surrounding collective memory of the GDR and the processes of dealing with its legacy. This chapter seeks to give an overview of the approach to testimony, media and memory that will be taken in my analysis of a selection of these texts, exhibitions and films, as well as introduce two new theoretical terms that emerge from the study and which have wider relevance: mediated remembering communities and complementary authenticities.

However, before I proceed with my analysis, it is important to set out what I understand by the concept of ‘testimony’, as this is not an undisputed term. Testimony has deep historical roots, which John Durham Peters (2009, p. 24) identifies as belonging to three key domains: law, theology, and atrocity. The use of the witness as a form of evidence ‘is ancient and is part of most known legal systems’. In theology, the concept of witness as martyr, developed in early Christianity, is also found in other religious traditions. In the third and most recent context, that of atrocity, we see the ‘witness as a survivor of hell, prototypically but not exclusively the Holocaust’ (Peters, 2009, pp. 24–25). These three forms of testimony have different social, cultural and communicative implications and we might thus view them as being of different genres (A. Assmann, 2006b). So, what are the key differences between these modes of testimony and which is the most relevant to the texts considered in this study?

Aleida Assmann (2006b, p. 266; see also 2006a, p. 85) considers that the legal witness is required ‘to provide factual information that will help to discover the truth’; in this way, the testimony is largely separated from the biography of the testifier. Indeed, the ideal witness from the legal point of view is the objective recording of the machine, devoid of the subjectivity inherent to any form of personal testimony (Peters, 2009, p. 33). In contrast, the witness to atrocity is, in Avishai Margalit’s (2002, p. 150) terms, a ‘moral witness’. Margalit uses this term to describe ‘one who experiences the suffering – one who is not just an observer but also a sufferer’. Thus the personal biography and, in particular, the physical experiences of the witness to atrocity are inseparable from the story that s/he tells and his or her social and cultural authority to tell it. Nonetheless, as Thomas (2009, p. 92) notes, if we return to the understanding of the term ‘witness’ in Hebraic law this distinction begins to dissolve: ‘the ancient witness could be both witness in another’s case or the claimant or plaintiff who accuses’. Indeed, Thomas (2009, p. 93) sees recognition of this potential double role as ‘crucial to understanding the contemporary use of witnesses in regard to modern atrocities’.

The distinctiveness of the witness to atrocity is further blurred when we compare this form of witnessing to the figure of the religious martyr. The martyr must also suffer in order to bear witness; however, it is not s/he who will testify; rather, s/he is dependent ‘on someone to witness the suffering, to identify him or her as a martyr [ . . . ], and to codify the story for future generations’ (A. Assmann, 2006b, p. 268; see also 2006a, pp. 87–88). The witness to atrocity is, in contrast, both ‘the person who experienced the ordeal and the person who testifies to it’ (A. Assmann, 2006b, p. 269) – they are not reliant on the secondary witness in this sense. And yet, if we view witnesses to atrocity as testifying also for those who cannot, that is, ‘for those who died and were forever silenced’, then they too can be viewed as secondary witnesses (A. Assmann, 2006b, p. 269). Moreover, they are reliant on the wider community to act as a further form of secondary witness by ensuring that their testimony finds broader relevance: ‘the appeal in this case is not to a divine authority but to humanity at large, which – to the extent that it registers and memorializes the event – constitutes itself as a moral community’ (A. Assmann, 2006b, p. 269; see also 2006a, p. 89). In fact, the witness is always reliant on the recognition by an audience to carry out the act of witnessing, for it is only in the socio-cultural context that the role of the witness is defined and ascribed: a witness is not a witness unless there is someone to hear his or her story (Thomas, 2009, pp. 101–02).

Moreover, we might consider the complexity of the term ‘witness’ itself, which ‘can be an actor (one who bears witness), an act (the making of a special sort of statement), the semiotic residue of that act (the statement as text), or the inward experience that authorizes the statement (the witnessing of an event)’ (Peters, 2009, p. 25). In this regard, to be a witness is to have sensory experience of an event – to see, hear or feel something perhaps unintentionally and passively – but witnessing as a verb implies more than this, it ‘is also the discursive act of stating one’s experience for the benefit of an audience that was not present at the event and yet must make some kind of judgement about it’ (Peters, 2009, p. 25). In terms of the testimony itself, this is both the act of speaking or writing about personally experienced events, and the outcome of that act, that is, the ‘witnessing text’ (Frosh, 2009, p. 60) – the ‘semiotic residue’ (Peters, 2009, p. 25) that is its product. In this study, it is, in fact, the witnessing texts (in the broadest understanding of the term) that are the object of my analysis, rather than the process of witnessing itself.

Margalit (2002, p. 148) states that the ‘moral witness’ should experience ‘suffering inflicted by an unmitigated evil regime’. We might consider that this definition would not apply to those persecuted in the GDR. However, if, with Aleida Assmann (2006a, p. 90), we understand the term ‘moral witness’ as being a witness ‘who experienced the crime to which they testify on their own body’, then we can argue that most of the witnessing texts analysed in this study have been authored by individuals who might claim this status – that is, they are produced by those who suffered directly at the hands of the Stasi or SED and who give an account of this suffering. Nonetheless, I, in fact, take a much broader definition of testimony, based on the concept of the conjoining of passive (experiencing) and active (narrating) witnessing. I understand testimony as the subjective account of a personally experienced event by that same individual in written or spoken form and directed towards an implied or actual audience. Where the definition of the ‘moral witness’ has an ethical dimension, which excludes the perpetrators of state violence (see Peters, 2009, p. 30), this broader definition might in fact include their accounts and allow me to explore differences in the mediation of testimony by different groups.

Consideration of the testimony not only of victims but also of perpetrators, bystanders and others with direct experience of the past highlights the fact that the witness always speaks in contested territory: ‘any act of witnessing, confession, or testimony – even in “historical” cases – relates to disputed, unstable, conflicting, or transitory realities’ (Thomas, 2009, p. 96). Beim and Fine (2007, p. 61) point out that testimony ‘would not take place if the truth to which they [the witnesses] were testifying were not contested (explicitly or through forgetting)’. Indeed, as Frosh (2009, p. 62) argues, because the witnessing text claims indexicality to past events, ‘it can be verified, modified, or challenged by other similarly taken reports’, which is not the case for works marked as fiction. This means that the ‘ideational ecology’ in which witnessing takes place is ‘par-excellence the arena of symbolic and representational politics, in which questions of legitimacy, accuracy, and corroboration arise in the struggle between rival testimonies’ (Frosh, 2009, p. 62). Testimony and witnessing are thus intimately linked to power – the power to determine the ‘truth’ about the past and its meaning for contemporary society.

The ubiquity of the witness: Mediating testimony

The power of the witness also goes some way towards explaining why personal testimony is viewed as indispensable in the process of uncovering, documenting and memorialising collective pasts. Indeed, it is not only in the context of the GDR that we see the dominance of eyewitness testimony in representations of traumatic events. Witness accounts in a variety of different media forms dominate at museum and memorial sites in several other post-socialist and post-conflict contexts in Europe and beyond. The House of Terror in Budapest, for example, contains numerous video testimonies relating to Communist oppression in Hungary. The 9/11 Tribute Center in New York incorporates a large number of personal accounts of and by victims of the terror attacks and their families. And the experiences of Israeli soldiers involved in the second Palestinian uprising were the subject of a successful exhibition in 2004, which was composed of ‘videotaped testimonies, personal memories orally shared by the organizers as they guided visitors along the exhibition walls, and military vignettes exchanged by viewers in facing the visual display’ (Katriel and Shavit, 2011, p. 77). Victim testimony has also become central to transitional justice processes; for example, the research project PhotoVoice in Central and South America has, according to Lundy and McGovern (2008, p. 272), ‘provided an opportunity for communities, groups, and individuals to create a “public testimony” of their experiences’.

However, the paradigmatic case – and the one which many later uses of testimony seem to echo – is memory of the genocide of the European Jews; as Frosh and Pinchevski (2009, p. 3) note, ‘to speak of witnessing in this day and age is inevitably to invoke the discourse of the Holocaust witness’. The horrors of the Holocaust have resulted in a ‘crisis of witnessing’ (Felman and Laub, 1992, p. xvii) – ‘the traumatic event [ . . . ] has left its survivors speechless, not because they did not witness it, but rather because they did so all too overwhelmingly’ (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2009, p. 3). Agamben (2002, pp. 33–34) describes a ‘lacuna’ in Holocaust testimony, ‘which calls into question the very meaning of testimony’, for ‘the “true” witnesses, the “complete witnesses,” are those who did not bear witness and could not bear witness [ . . . ]. The survivors speak in their stead, by proxy, as pseudo-witnesses; they bear witness to a missing testimony.’ This crisis has, in turn, engendered efforts to create the conditions in which the survivors are able to bear witness retrospectively – notably the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale (Laub, 1992, p. 85; Wieviorka, 2006, pp. 107–17), the Holocaust Education and Memorial Centre of Toronto, and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, initiated by Steven Spielberg (Sabrow, 2012, p. 16; Wieviorka, 2006, pp. 110–17). The contemporary turn to such witness testimony in the context of remembering the Holocaust is often seen to have its roots in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, and the calling of victims of Nazi persecution as legal witnesses (for example: Hirsch and Spitzer, 2009; Rothe, 2011, pp. 1–2; Yablonka, 2012), an event that Wieviorka (2006, p. 145) describes as marking ‘the advent of the witness’.

In this context, Aleida Assmann (2006a, pp. 76–78) describes a ‘turn in victim memory’ from the figure of the hero or martyr to that of the traumatised victim, ‘who demands recognition and compensation’. This is in part the result, according to Assmann, of a universalisation of justice in the form of the assertion of basic human rights and the setting aside of nulla poena sin lege (no punishment without law) at the Nuremberg Trials. The inability of the courts to deal with the magnitude of the crimes committed during World War II engendered ‘the establishment of a general and binding memory, whose bearer is humanity in its entirety’. This ‘ethical turn that returned previously suppressed and forgotten victim experiences to the centre of consciousness and culture’ has meant that groups compete to prove their victim status, upon which they can build a new identity, ‘through which they demand media attention and social recognition as well as material restitution and symbolic reputation’ (Assmann, 2006a, p. 79).

Indeed, the moral authority of the victim voice demands to be heard: as Jeffrey Wallen (2009, p. 262) argues, ‘eyewitness testimony contains an imperative – you too must know, must remember, must bear the marks of the past – even as it states the impossibility of ever truly grasping the violations that the witness has undergone’. From a different perspective, but similarly emphasising the power of the victim-witness, Ashuri and Pinchevski (2009, p. 135) describe witnessing as a field in the Bourdieusian understanding of the term, that is, ‘as subject to contest and struggle, and hence as a genuine political arena’. They note that perpetrators are generally excluded from gaining the status of ‘witness’ and that ‘being a victim may count as a resource, a form of capital in producing testimony’ (138). This social capital is essential in terms of generating trust in the account of the witness, described by Ashuri and Pinchevski (2009, p. 133) as ‘the basic currency among the agents [of the field] and the object for which they compete’. In the context of post-socialist Germany, the ‘object’ for which different witnesses compete is collective understanding of the nature of life in the GDR and of the political system of state socialism.

The question of ‘trust’ in testimony and the battle to assert one’s voice over the testimony of others thus leads to consideration of the ‘fragility of witnessing: the difficult juncture between experience and discourse’ (Peters, 2009, p. 26). As Peters (2009, p. 26) states, ‘witnessing presupposes a discrepancy between the ignorance of one person and the knowledge of another’. This ‘veracity gap’ cannot be bridged by a ‘transfusion of consciousness’, which is impossible, but only by an exchange of words that must stand for experience. Trust in testimony is often constructed through the means of the body, particularly the body in pain. Notably, Assmann’s (2006a, p. 90) interpretation of the ‘moral witness’ highlights the importance of physical presence in assuring the authenticity of the account. Distance, in this respect, creates distrust: ‘we waver about another’s testimony because of our distance from the experience they narrate. In the same way, reports from distant personae are more dubious than those from people we know and trust’ (Peters, 2009, p. 34).

Yet, despite the distrust that distance creates, efforts to keep alive memory of the Holocaust and to ‘enable the survivors to bear witness [ . . . ] belatedly’ (Laub, 1992, p. 85) has precipitated the rise of, in Frosh and Pinchevski’s (2009, p. 1) terms, ‘media witnessing’, that is, ‘witnessing performed in, by, and through the media [ . . . ] the systematic and ongoing reporting of the experiences and realities of distant others to mass audiences’ (emphasis in original). Media witnessing is not only a response to the gradual loss of those with direct experience of a particular event. For individuals or social groups to have an impact on ‘society’s commemorative “agenda” ’ (Erll and Rigney, 2009, p. 9), witness testimony must be recorded and fixed in a way that allows wider distribution. Indeed, Frosh and Pinchevski (2009, p. 4) argue that ‘the unstated yet integral premise of Holocaust witnessing as pursued at Yale is the inexhaustible potential of reiteration, dissemination, and reproduction supplied by media technology’ (see also Assmann, 2006b, p. 270; Uhl, 2012, p. 236). In this context, Erll (2011a, p. 113; 2011b, p. 137) describes media and mediation ‘as a kind of switchboard at work between the individual and the collective dimension of remembering’, adding that ‘personal memories can only gain social relevance through media representation and distribution’. Awareness of the fundamentally mediated nature of memory and testimony leads to the recognition that ‘ “bearing witness” [ . . . ] is an act performed not by a witness but by a witnessing text. It is the witnessing text which creates presence at the event, which produces experience out of discourse’ (Frosh, 2009, p. 60). It is one of the aims of this book to examine a selection of such ‘witnessing texts’ and to consider their role in the construction of collective understandings of the East German State Security Service.

From social to media frameworks of memory

How then might we understand the interaction between the individual, collective and medial in the process of remembering the past? The specifically social dimension of memory has long been recognised. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Maurice Halbwachs (1992, p. 38), pointed out that the individual neither acquires nor recalls his or her memories in isolation, but rather in society. He argued that when we remember, we do so frequently because we have been asked to do so by others, and in order to answer their questions, ‘we place ourselves in their perspective and we consider ourselves as being part of the same group or groups as they’ (38). Halbwachs contended that to remember we turn outward, rather than inward; memories are ‘recalled to me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me the means to reconstruct them’ (38). This is the basis for Halbwachs’s social frames of memory, the collective frameworks, which are, in his words, ‘precisely the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society’ (40). Halbwachs’s work has been enormously influential in contemporary understandings of collective memory and has been essential in recognising the inherently social nature of individual memory. Nonetheless, Halbwachs touched only indirectly on the medial dimension of these social frameworks (see Erll, 2011a, p. 130; 2011b, p. 155).

The question of media form does, however, play a role in the development of Halbwachs’s work by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann. In Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (1992, pp. 50–52; 2011, pp. 34–41), Assmann divided collective memory into two modes: communicative memory and cultural memory. Communicative memory is constituted by memories that refer to the recent past, which the individual shares with his or her peers, principally in the form of oral communication. Cultural memory in contrast is memory that is foundational for the group, focused on fixed points in time, and institutionally secured and controlled. It is represented in cultural media, be they canonic texts, rituals, dance, myth, or commemoration (see also J. Assmann, 1995, 2008). Aleida Assmann (2006a) has built upon these theoretical reflections, notably through further dividing memory into four formats: individual, social, cultural and political. Social memory equates to Jan Assmann’s communicative memory – it is living memory communicated within the group (p. 28). Political memory is official memory: the narrowest and only truly collective form of cultural memory, which has the function of creating a strong ‘we-identity’ (p. 36). Aleida Assmann (1999, p. 20) has also turned her attention more explicitly to the media of memory, noting that, ‘each medium permits a specific access to cultural memory’. However, her understanding of media – be it literature, film, archives or memorials – seems to be primarily as storage technologies, conserving memory for its re-appropriation in the present (cf. van Dijck, 2007, p. 14; Sick and Ochsner, 2004, p. 13; Zierold, 2006, p. 89). In this regard the influence of Pierre Nora’s (1989) concept of lieux de mémoire can be seen in Assmann’s work – a concept that Erll (2011a, p. 22; 2011b, p. 25) describes as ‘one of the most influential [ . . . ] of the interdisciplinary “new cultural memory studies” emerging in the late twentieth century’. Insisting on a rigid separation of ‘memory’ and ‘history’, and asserting that there was little of the former left in the contemporary world, Nora (1989) examines the ‘memory sites’ of the French nation, including geographical locations, buildings, monuments, memorial days and philosophical texts. Nora describes contemporary memory as ‘archival’, relying ‘entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image’ and existing ‘only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs’ (p. 13).

Indeed, Assmann’s approach to the media of memory has been the focus of much criticism. Zierold (2006, p. 92), for example, argues that the Assman...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Translations
• Introduction: Remembering East Germany: Contested Heritage
• 1. The Media of Testimony
• 2. Literary Autobiography and the Stories That Can’t Be Told
• 3. Fragmented Auto/Biographies: Testifying with Many Voices
• 4. The Importance of ‘Being There’: Memorial Museums and Living the Past in the Present
• 5. Whose Memory Is It Anyway? Memorial Museums and Modes of Authority
• 6. Documentary Film: Being Moved by Memory
• Conclusion: Extending the Remembering Community
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index