Finding aids to the past: bearing personal witness to traumatic public events

Abstract

The past compels us for what it tells us about the present. It is no wonder, then, that nearly everyone with a voice claims territoriality for it wide-ranging collectives like nation-states; large-scale interested groups bonded by ethnicity, class and race; professional communities driven by expertise, like historians, filmmakers or journalists. Each strives to colonize connections to the past as a way of lending credence, cohesion or even a simple perspective to life in the present. This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/87 1 Finding aids to the past: bearing personal witness to traumatic public events Barbie Zelizer The past compels us for what it tells us about the present. It is no wonder, then, that nearly everyone with a voice claims territoriality for it wide-ranging collectives like nation-states; large-scale interested groups bonded by ethnicity, class and race; professional communities driven by expertise, like historians, filmmakers or journalists. Each strives to colonize connections to the past as a way of lending credence, cohesion or even a simple perspective to life in the present. But the past's compelling aspects in particular, its lived and experienced dimensions do not begin when we position ourselves as members of groups. Rather, they draw us already as individuals, amateur presences who connect through a personal need to interact with the past. This need makes us act in atypical ways, particularly when we face public events of a traumatic nature. Situated as bystanders to history-in-the-making, individuals in such cases often respond in ways that are out of the ordinary. They hoard and store newspapers from events of days long past. They compile personal videotape archives of television news broadcasts from events as wide-ranging as the Kennedy assassination, the Gulf War or the death of Princess Diana. And, as in the recent case of thousands of New Yorkers and others who painfully plodded to the site of the World Trade Center attacks, they allow time to stand still as they search for a way to respond to the trauma that unfolded there. What is it, then, that propels actions that are so out of the ordinary yet patterned in their typicality across space and time? This article attempts to clarify what it means to forge a personal connection with a traumatic public past. It ponders whether there is a space for connecting as individuals to the past that in turn shapes its ensuing collective appropriations. The project is unevenly structured, considering two very different kinds of traumatic pasts one long gone, the other which we are still experiencing. It uses the responses by individual liberators to the liberation of the concentration camps in the Second World War as a template for considering the responses now being shaped to the 11 September World Trade Center attacks by residents, firefighters, police and emergency medical personnel. In each case, the personal need to respond to traumatic public events generates individual acts of bearing witness that unify the collective, forged primarily through one mode of documentation photography. Photography, and the ritual practices it involves, helps individuals establish moral accountability in a way that helps them move on, and in so doing they reinstate the collective after traumatic events temporarily shatter its boundaries. Bearing witness to a traumatic past Although trauma initially denoted a term for the physical wounds causing pain and suffering, it now reflects a range of cognitive-emotional states caused by suffering and existential pain. Scholarship on public trauma first drew attention during the late 19th century, when spreading industrialization and the use of technology produced industrial accidents to which the public was unaccustomed (Young, 1996). Technology both increased the occurrence of traumatic acts and access to them. The responses to traumatic events unfold in patterned ways. Public trauma occurs when actions wars, major disasters or other large-scale cataclysmic events rattle default notions of what it means morally to remain members of a collective. Individual response is key here, for individuals face fundamental questions about the collective's capacity to accommodate both the personal and group needs arising from the trauma at hand. It is no surprise, then, that when faced with public trauma, people work towards recovery by drawing upon personal aspects of their identity, which remain at the core of recovery's three stages -establishing safety, engaging in remembrance and mourning, and reconnecting