Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics

5. “Witnesses against Themselves”: Encounters with Daughters of Absence

168 c h a p t e r f i v e “Witnesses against Themselves” Encounters with Daughters of Absence The fragility of Eurydice between two deaths, before, but also after the disappearance . . . the figure of Eurydice seems to me to be emblematic of my generation and seems to offer a possibility for thinking about art. —b r a c h a l . e t t i n g e r , “Que dirait Eurydice?” You are witnesses against yourselves. —Joshua 24:15 daughters of absence: memory in blue Already in 1998, historian Annette Wieviorka noted, with some trepidation, that traditional ways of representing history had been recently challenged by imaginative interpretations of the past. In contrast to objective and emotionally distant historical accounts, these representations often focus on transmitting sensory and emotive experiences , and on producing the effect of sympathy in the viewer. Visual works of art in particular have been increasingly accepted as legitimate forms of testimony. Indeed, they are even considered unique in their ability to evoke what falls outside of historical knowledge.1 This final chapter looks back to the concepts of “the witnessing subject ” and “disappearing traces,” developed in previous sections of the book, in order to inquire what it means for visual works of art to “bear witness.” It focuses on art created by the daughters of survivors and considers them as performative reenactments through which the witnessing subject constitutes itself by returning to and departing from the site of trauma. By examining the dialectic between inherited trauma, wounded memory and loss, and creative work oriented toward rebirth, promise, and restitution, I argue that it is by no means a coincidence that the interpretive shift in dominant modes “Witnesses against Themselves” 169 of representing history, toward the privileging of imaginative works of art and literature, occurred at the same time that the children of survivors, the so-called second-generation, were coming into voice. The inquiry is also situated in the context of the feminist reflection on women’s art, in relation to the culturally established role of daughters of survivors as “memorial candles.” Commenting on her childhood as a daughter of Holocaust survivors , second-generation artist Bracha Ettinger writes, “As a child, I was a witness to witnesses. When I paint or when I listen, I am that too” (quoted in Pollock 1995, 130). Unsurprisingly, such acts of witness are marked by a conflict between the obligation to the past (which these daughters never experienced yet whose traces they carry) and a desire to unburden themselves of traumatic memory, the tension being far more pronounced in the second generation than in the generation of survivors. These artists are thus often “witnesses against themselves,” who resist the imperative to testify even though the positing of the witnessing subject is the prime impetus in the work. In Levinas’s terms, such witnessing “occurs whether one wills it or not” (Hatley 2000, 94). What is the modus operandi of these memory events if what they remember is someone else’s memory, an unimaginable, inaccessible memory of “Over There”?2 How do these “witnesses without the event” (Ettinger’s phrase) testify to what Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman (1992) describe as an “event without a witness” (75)? Moreover , according to what criteria do we consider the authenticity of this “secondhand” memory work? To whom does this memory, which constantly transmutes the artwork into sites of mourning, belong? This chapter offers an exploration of the artists’ intimate journeys through the memory of their parents’ trauma, as it shaped their lives and work, yet at the same time it examines a larger social significance of the artwork as a witness to historical events in the past and a site of working through the community’s unmasterable past. What emerges, therefore, is art’s potential not only to represent but to fashion and even bring about new models of intersubjective, communal existence. In critical analyses of art and literature of the second generation, scholars often draw attention to the writers’ and artists’ attempts to reference traumatic contexts in ways that problematize definitions of art as a means of representation. In Régine Robin’s (2002) words, they look for ways to “transmit otherwise than in the fullness of representation ” (135; translation and emphasis mine). In the context of “Witnesses against Themselves” 170 an inquiry into the status of the visual work of art as witness and the artist as...