On Shandler's Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age

Abstract

On Shandler's Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age Shaina Hammerman Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors' Stories and New Media Practices. By Jeffrey Shandler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 232 pp., ISBN 1503602893. US $25. Every semester, I ask my students to think back to the first time they learned about the Holocaust and how that knowledge was imparted to them. The results of this survey are varied but expected: Anne Frank's diary, Elie Wiesel's Night, family stories, museum visits, Schindler's List (1993). My lesson to students is that although we can only approach the past in mediated ways, any study of the Holocaust comes with a remarkably diverse and consistently revitalizing set of sources for our analysis. It is because of Jeffrey Shandler's body of work—stemming all the way back to his (once controversial) first book, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust—that I have the language to teach about Holocaust beyond history and memory and toward the various tensions produced by its mediation.1 Since his first book, Shandler has become the undisputed expert in assembling some of the most compelling materials on how American Jews mediate their identities through emerging technologies. In his newest monograph, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age, he revisits an old topic—survivor testimony—and offers fresh insight into how these testimonies have been preserved, organized, and disseminated. Focusing on the newly digitized Visual History Archive (VHA), the central product of the Shoah Foundation (established by Steven Spielberg in 1994), [End Page 117] Shandler questions the impulses behind the preservation of survivor testimonies, how and why survivor video came to be the authoritative document for Holocaust history, and the complex ways individuals' stories merge with their mediation. The book takes on the tensions between the limits of video technology in the 1990s (tapes had to be changed after 30 minutes of recording, interrupting the story's "natural" flow) and the seemingly limitless, customizable search capacity of digitized information (a vast index of terms allows searching by language, geography, and "experiential" content such as the multiple, discrete categories of Holocaust childbearing). Shandler demonstrates how survivors shaped dramatizations of the Shoah, most famously in Schindler's List. More fascinating still is his exploration of how popular retellings like Schindler's List in turn shaped survivor narratives. For example, many testimonies refer to the film, either confirming or challenging its veracity or offering the nonsurvivor interviewer (and presumed viewer) with a useful reference point for their stories. As more accounts of the Shoah emerge—graphic novels, performances, exhibitions, films, second-generation memoirs—these new accounts do more than respond to testimony. They produce new testimony. As Shandler writes, "interviewees' discussions of Schindler's List complicate the notion that these [videotaped testimonies] offer straightforward presentations of survivors' recalled experience" (63). Following his detailed description of the VHA, one that places the archive in its historical and contemporary contexts, Shandler complicates any simple reading of the archive through three discrete lenses: "Narrative," "Language," and "Spectacle." The material he introduces becomes progressively more riveting as the book advances. The section on language explores the linguistic conditions of the interviews. What language do interviewees speak, and in what language do interviewers respond? Under which conditions do interviewees switch languages? What compels survivors to choose a language: because it renders a memory accessible? Because they are speaking to culturally specific details? Because they want as many future viewers as possible to understand them? Shandler contributes broadly to scholarship on the relationship between language and memory. He expands on his previous work about the "post-vernacular" life of Yiddish, demonstrating how Yiddish can serve in survivor testimonies as both signifier and signified.2 He draws our attention to the parallels between Yiddish and Holocaust memory—both widely perceived as [End Page 118] "dying" and in need of preservation. But the parallel stops there. To rescue Yid-dish, Jews and others are obliged to use the language, but to preserve Holocaust memory for future generations, survivors must transmit memories in languages everyone can understand (92). The book's final section unravels some of the visual outcomes of filming survivors, such as when they share photographs...