“The Traumatic Paradox”: Fantasy, Veracity, and Empathy in the Scholarship of Janet Walker

Noah Shenker

Colgate University

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In 2006 I was a PhD candidate in Critical Studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television and had started to conduct research on my dissertation examining the mediations of Holocaust video testimonies collected across three of the largest archives of their kind: The Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Video Testimonies at Yale University (Fortunoff Archive), the Oral History Department at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, (USHMM), and the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (Shoah Foundation) and its Visual History Archive (VHA). Although by that point I had already viewed and analyzed a growing sample of testimonies from across the over 50,000 combined testimonies collected across those three institutions by that time and had been doing research within their respective institutional archives, I was struggling to develop a conceptual framework for approaching this vast array of primary sources.

I soon found that framework when attending one of my first academic conferences, the 31st Annual Film and Literature Conference, held at Florida State University in February of 2006 and focused on the theme of “Documenting Trauma, Documenting Terror.” While in both my graduate coursework and through my review of secondary literature for my dissertation I had already made some initial forays into debates about the challenges of representing the Holocaust, this conference marked my first substantive exposure to trauma theory writ large and to the ways it might help shape our understanding of a growing collection of Holocaust testimonies.

It was also at that conference where I first met Janet Walker, who was there to give one of the keynote lectures alongside other luminaries including Dominick LaCapra and Brian Winston. I have a vivid memory of being in the auditorium audience as Walker and LaCapra entered into a lively debate about Claude Lanzmann’s canonical film, Shoah (1985). Walker masterfully argued that LaCapra was placing far too much emphasis on the psychoanalytical concept of transference as marking the crucial link between Lanzmann and the survivors whom he interviewed, rather than examining Lanzmann’s filmic techniques, especially those that fostered analytical distance and self-reflexivity. Walker was immensely gracious and constructive in her dialogue with LaCapra, while also demonstrating a masterclass in close, sophisticated analysis of Lanzmann’s work—an analysis that continues to guide how I aspire to interpret films and other media.

Following the conference, I left for the airport in Tallahassee to start what would be a series of transfer flights back to Los Angeles, only to find my plane delayed. As it so happened, Janet Walker was sitting a few seats away in the gate area and we effortlessly struck up a conversation, one that would fill and enrich the hours waiting at airports and on the plane journeys back to California. That conversation has never ended since that day in Florida and has been one of the most consequential dialogues of my professional and personal life. Her razor-sharp intellect, warmth, generosity, and passion for finding connective threads between seemingly disparate areas of inquiry made me think anew on the research that lay ahead.

In the months and years that followed that conference, Walker offered to read the roughest of drafts of my dissertation chapters, writing copious and incisive notes and, without any prompting or intimation on my part, asked to be the outside member on my dissertation committee—an offer I was profoundly honored (and giddy) to accept. What had started as a conversation between a burgeoning graduate student and a highly accomplished senior scholar evolved into a mentorship and, eventually, peer collaboration. Most importantly, it transformed into an enduring friendship. Janet has been nothing short of a model, someone who demonstrates through her very character, disposition, and intellect a deeply rigorous and profoundly humanistic and empathic way of seeing and being in the world. Whether in her explorations of areas as wide-ranging as the Western film genre, feminist documentary, environmental media, and films documenting incest and the Holocaust, she approaches them less as objects of study than as subjects with whom she is generating an authentic and organic conversation across multiple histories, cultures, and methodologies. She has never stopped being a tireless autodidact, someone intent to become an expert in navigating the diverse intellectual paths that she continues to pursue to this day.

Janet’s impact on me while I was attending and departing the conference was all the more striking as it was embedded before I had even read her book Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust, which had come out the year prior. However, after arriving back from Tallahassee, I made quick work of reading it and what struck me from the onset was the challenge posed by the very title itself. What did the Holocaust have to do with incest? What was the relationship between films like Shoah (dir. Claude Lanzman, 1985) and Capturing the Friedmans (dir. Andrew Jarecki, 2003)? What I soon came to understand was the extent to which Janet had helped define a vital area of feminist film scholarship, particularly the ways in which we can understand the experiences and memories of those deemed to be marginal or unreliable, including but not limited to Holocaust survivors and to women and children subjected to sexual abuse.

I had, until that point, been basing my approach to testimony on the rich scholarship of Lawrence Langer, particularly his groundbreaking book, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. In that book and elsewhere, Langer had expressed his reservations about analyzing video testimony through the conventions of literary analysis, arguing that people do not talk in the same manner in which they write—that the latter form is less spontaneous and more stylized than the oral expression.[1]

While Langer’s scholarship draws attention to the complexities of Holocaust testimonies, he seemed averse to drawing attention to the mediated, stylized aspects of video interviews. He had described in his consulting work for the USHMM Oral History Department the “artlessness” of testimonial recollection by witnesses and their ability to verbally express pure, raw expressions of memory absent from the “enhancement of narrative style and tone and form” associated with written forms.[2] As compelling as that interpretation seemed when I first came across it, as I viewed and listened to more and more testimonies, I found myself pushing back against Langer’s discussion of “artlessness.” I came to realize that audiovisual testimony is never free of formal, stylistic choices. Rather, it is always generated in concert, and at times in conflict, with institutional histories and practices, not to mention in conversation and often in contest between witnesses, interviewers, and videographers, among others.

Those dynamics were evident in the VHA testimony of Julia L., a Romani woman born in Germany in 1926, and which was one of the central case studies I was grappling with for my dissertation. Julia’s videotaped interview continued to confound me after multiple viewings—I simply didn’t have the language to interpret what was unfolding on tape. The testimony, recorded on 12 November 1995, was framed in much the same way as most of the other VHA testimonies I had examined. Its main segment commences with Julia sitting in a chair in her living room, with the interviewer just off to her left and adjacent to the camera. Julia is animated and charismatic in her demeanor, and she often makes strong gestures with her hands as she articulates various points. She talks with a sense of grandeur and joy about growing up as a “Gypsy” and living in a close-knit family. Julia seems in command of the details as they pertain to her experiences and layout of the camp, and she enlivens her story with gestural and vocal flourishes. She describes being interned with other women on one side of Birkenau but also peeking over the wire to the other side of the camp, where she saw the skeletal appearance of other inmates and heard the “screaming going out.” In recounting an incident when she was whipped for stealing food, Julia’s gestures imitate lashing motions, and she describes in detail the implement of torture.[3]

Some glaring moments of tension arise later in the testimony, when the interviewer’s insistence on reconstructing the details of life in Auschwitz-Birkenau comes into conflict with Julia’s memory of events. The interviewer poses the question: “When did you find out about the gassings and the crematoria, was that right after you arrived, or were you sheltered?” Julia responds by spinning her hands in the air as she describes the smoke she saw billowing in the sky: “Oh yeah, our dad told us about that, and of course . . . when you were made aware of the situation and you could be looking around and you could see smokestacks . . . there was just black smoke coming out twenty-four hours a day.” Seeking clarification on how Julia acquired this knowledge, the interviewer asks, “So your father told you?” to which Julia responds, “Yeah, they told us, my dad told us, other people too.” Her response fails to fully satisfy the interviewer’s query—and the archive’s preference—by blurring the precise source of her information, in particular what Julia had witnessed firsthand and what she heard secondhand. Here she struggles to articulate what is indescribable, urgently proclaiming: “You’re living with five-hundred people in one block. Let me tell you something. It’s like putting—visualize yourself, can you visualize five-hundred people in so much square foot there? With the open toilets . . . with the . . . smell . . . and the people lying dead piling up in the back?” At this moment, Julia looks forcefully at the interviewer, asserting the vividness of her memory and revealing the existential paradox of the experience, “You adapt. You adapt—I don’t mean you survive it, but you adapt.”[4]

Rather than asking Julia to reflect on the associations between survival and adaptation, the interviewer presses for more information about what she learned from her father: “How did he tell you?” she asks. Julia replies by mimicking how her father used his hands to delineate the camp layout and describe the machinery of death:

Julia: He told us, there is where the gas chambers are, and you see that smoke over there, that’s where the bodies are burned. And he was trying to tell us that there was some kind of conveyor system—I have never seen it—but he said that on the gas thing, they opened up, because so many were dying there they couldn’t handle them all by hand, so they had kind of a conveyor system in there, I imagine. And they got rid of so many bodies . . .

Interviewer: Did you ever see the conveyor system?

Julia: [Nodding her head in confirmation] I’ll tell you, I dreamt about it many times. Later in life, when I was out of the concentration camp, I used to dream that I see this conveyor going, and there was [sic] little men on that conveyor, and I used to go half up to it, and then slid off again. It was a horrible dream. But lately I haven’t had it. I haven’t had it for years. But I had it for a long time, that conveyor, that screaming going up there.

Interviewer: But did you see it, or was it just from your father talking?

Julia: [Nodding her head in confirmation] You see it, after, we see it . . . when you start going on the outside working . . . you work around crematoriums . . .[5]

At moments during this intense exchange, Julia’s hands imitate the movement of the conveyor belt and the little men falling off it.

It was not until I started to substantively delve into Trauma Cinema that I was able to find the terms for interpreting Julia’s interview. There is certainly an oscillation between what Julia saw in her dream and what she actually witnessed in real life, and the interviewer ultimately insists on having Julia clarify the nature of what she saw firsthand, what she heard secondhand, and what she saw in her mind’s eye. For Julia, however, what she dreamt, heard and saw “in the flesh” seem intermeshed. In certain respects, this moment in Julia’s testimony echoes that analyzed by Dori Laub (who’s interpretation was in turn explored by Janet in Trauma Cinema), of a woman survivor giving testimony to four chimneys (rather than one) being blown up inside of Auschwitz.[6] Janet’s book enabled me to see and hear that Julia was not giving testimony to an experience that could be defined according to traditional, legalistic understandings of veracity. It is historically true that no such conveyor belt existed, but her image of it seems to have been an integral part of how Julia structured her experience at the time of her imprisonment, including her receiving of knowledge from her father, as well as critical to her framing herself as a survivor. The experience appears central to her personal history but cannot be easily accommodated in an official history or archival project that aims to establish unquestioned truth. The VHA protocol, which attempts to document what survivors remember from the Holocaust, and then to test those remembrances against established historical narratives, can fall short when it encounters expressions such as these, which reside in the emotional experiences and dream lives of survivors. The exchange between Julia and the interviewer seemed to embody the very “traumatic paradox” that Janet had introduced in her book: “Whereas popular and legal venues tend to take an ‘it happened or it didn't’ approach that rejects reports of traumatic experiences containing mistakes or amnesiac elements, contemporary psychological theories show that such memory features are a common consequence of traumatic experience. Forgetting and mistakes in memory may actually stand, therefore, as testament to the genuine nature of the event a person is trying to recall.”[7] The Shoah Foundation aims to clearly demarcate historical “fidelity” from the “subjectivity” of individual memory rather than engaging with their necessarily entangled relationship.

In order to examine the interplay between history and memory in testimonies of trauma, Janet has argued for the need to engage closely with both the rhetorical and performed aspects of those sources and, in doing so, to move away from a traditionally binaristic explanation of traumatic memory that claims that either a particular traumatic event occurred and its subsequent retelling is true, or that it did not occur and the retelling is false. It is possible and indeed necessary to maintain an investment in historical truth without jettisoning subjectivity or imposing false notions of closure on events and their aftermath. The challenge of representing histories, traumatic or otherwise, is to integrate the mythic memory of witnesses with the methods and principles of rational historiography. With that in mind, Janet advocates for a position that moves beyond the limiting binary of literalist versus social constructivist approaches. Such a position would develop strategies to triangulate traumatic memory—to examine testimonies, for instance, alongside other sources such as official written documents, in order to uncover new insights rather than to confirm preexisting historical accounts.[8]

Janet’s conception of the “traumatic paradox” was revelatory to me and it inspired my own distinct, albeit related idea of “testimonial literacy,” or an eye and ear for sensing the layers, ruptures, and tensions that mark the processes of giving and receiving accounts of the Shoah.[9] That literacy also entails an awareness of the messier, more unplanned moments that emerge throughout the testimony process but do not necessarily make their way into exhibited or officially transcribed testimonies. These include exchanges caught between takes as the camera continues to roll but the interviewer is unaware of that fact. It extends to the sighs and screams that are withheld from the transcript for fear of suggesting emotion at the expense of sobriety. Such moments that capture a sense of the mutual labor involved in testimony are often consigned to the periphery rather than the center of the archival process. In relegating them to the margins, archives often obscure the preferences and approaches that interviewers and archivists bring to the work of testimony. However, video testimonies can also exceed the intentions and methodologies of their respective archives. They can reveal the seemingly fleeting, ephemeral, and marginal elements that flicker across media screens or are left on the cutting-room floor, but that nonetheless represent unexpected and essential traces of meaning. Those “marginal” areas of inquiry are at the heart of Trauma Cinema and that book provides me with a constant reminder to tend to those voices that are often deemed to be inconsequential or fallible.

The ongoing transition from living memory to postmemory makes it all the more crucial to attend to the imaginative and poetic aspects of Holocaust memory that work in dialogue with more historically verifiable elements. The living memory of genocide survivors, the array of salvaged artifacts and documents, and the site-specific authenticity associated with the original topography of terror are always mediated within a larger set of evidentiary practices and discourses. The reluctance to acknowledge that mediation encourages a tendency to place far too great a burden on the corporeal and topographical remnants of traumatic events. Janet’s work begs the urgent questions: What will happen to engagement with memories of genocide after living survivors have passed on and physical sites have deteriorated? How will the historical and poetic aspects of traumatic testimony be preserved beyond the living memories and material traces of the Shoah and shape the contours of genocide remembrance more broadly? As her work has taught me, to place a burden of total historical veracity on Holocaust survivors risks losing sight of the more textured, imperfect, and often contested dimensions of how testimonies are produced, not to mention the ways in which recollections are often marked by the fractures and voids of traumatic memories. However, one of Janet’s most profound contributions to understanding the Holocaust and trauma writ large is her emphasis on the very limitations of that enterprise. Her work challenges the very idea of solving or reconciling the paradoxes of traumatic memory and instead compels us to keep their productive tensions intact as a way of honing our attention to the intertwined relationship between truth and fantasy.

Notes

[1]Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 19

[2]Correspondence and Analysis of Fortunoff Archive Testimonies from Lawrence Langer to Michael Berenbaum, USHMM, 4 April 1991.

[3]Testimony of Julia L., videotape 5891, November 12, 1995, VHA, USC Shoah Foundation.

[4]Ibid.

[5]Ibid.

[6] Janet Walker, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 5. The original analysis of this testimony was conducted by Dori Laub in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 62-63.

[7]Walker, Trauma Cinema, 4.

[8]Ibid., 16-17.

[9]Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 2.

Noah Shenker is an Associate Professor in Jewish Studies and Film and Media Studies at Colgate University. His research and teaching traverse the areas of Holocaust representation, documentary film, trauma studies, and Jews in American popular culture. He is the author of several publications in those areas, including the book Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Indiana University Press, 2015).