The Era of the Witness (review)

At a moment when increasing attention to testimony, witnessing, trauma, and oral history seem to be expanding and enabling dialogue among scholars and professionals in diverse fields, Annette Wieviorka’s book, The Era of the Witness, sends up some cautionary flares for the historian of the Holocaust. Published in 1998 as L’ère du témoin and beautifully translated in 2006 by Jared Stark, Wieviorka’s book recalls an earlier conception of the historian’s role, conceiving of a detached, objective, and analytic history along the lines of Hannah Arendt and Raul Hilberg. While careful in her conclusion not to position the historian in a battle “against memory and against the witness” (149) and respectful of the need for survivors to be heard, Wieviorka argues that an “explosion of testimony” (140) has displaced the scholarly historian and puts us in the “era of the witness.” Her view of history prizes analysis over emotion and personal opinion, abstraction over individual stories, and intellectual rigor over sentiment and sentimentality. Stark’s eloquent and clear translation makes accessible to English readers this critique that stands, if not in opposition to, than in spirited debate with work on witnessing currently embraced by scholars in diverse fields in this country. While I suspect that it will prove controversial for those of us who find value in the interweaving of individual memory, emotion, storytelling, and history, Wieviorka’s intelligent and deeply learned perspective serves as a sobering check to possible scholarly lapses in the name of empathy and sensitivity.

The stakes are particularly significant because how historians write about the Holocaust has become the “definitive model for memory construction” in general, according to Wieviorka. That is, in her view, the centrality of the position of testimony that now pervades the understanding of the Holocaust affects the ways in which we conceive of other historical phenomena and current events such as the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. The replacement of the historian with the witness/survivor as the scribe of events threatens the very transmission of the past to the future. The truth of individual memory now overshadows or even contradicts historical narrative. “How can the historian incite reflection, thought, and rigor when feelings and emotions invade the public sphere?” Wieviorka asks (144).

The volume builds chronologically as it leads us through changes in the role of the Holocaust witness. Wieviorka traces the function of survivors’ testimony as it has moved through three phases—from virtual erasure to preservation, as seen in the current amassing of archives of thousands of stories: “survivors have gone from being dispossessed to exploited and reified” (129). The first phase of testimonies she considers in the first of three chapters, “Witnesses to a Drowning World,” includes the voices from “beyond the grave” found in ghetto archives, diaries, and Yizker-bikher, or memorial books, that assembled survivors’ words. In this early phase, while such testimonies served as a form of resistance and immortality, they were often dismissed when recovered. One factor in their isolation lies in their being written in Yiddish, the language of the executed, which virtually disappeared or died with the Jews who spoke it. She considers how even Eli Weisel originally wrote Un di Velt hot geshvign in Yiddish but translated and adapted it into the French La nuit to transmit his message to a wider audience. Such acts of translation or rewriting that occur in literary texts, Wieviorka warns, also permeate memory and thus can change testimonies over time.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann transformed the role of the witness, Wieviorka argues, taking survivors’ stories from within the family sphere to the public. Gideon Hausner, the principal organizer of the trial in Jerusalem, understood the need to tell stories for future generations and “placed testimonies at center stage.” The trial inaugurated a second phase of witnessing, a listening to survivors’ stories and feelings, in which survivors “acquired the social identity of survivors because society now recognized them as such” (88). Wieviorka locates the...