The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival, and: Testimony after Catastrophe: Narrating Traumas of Political Violence (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival, and: Testimony after Catastrophe: Narrating Traumas of Political Violence Michael Bernard-Donals (bio) The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival. By Michael G. Levine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. xii + 236 pp. $21.95 (paper). Testimony after Catastrophe: Narrating Traumas of Political Violence. By Stevan Weine. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006. xxiii + 181 pp. $29.95 (paper). In 1991, in a book entitled In an Era of Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Shoshana Felman called the current era "an age of testimony, an age in which witnessing itself has undergone a major trauma" (105). She did so in the context of describing Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah, and had in mind the way the film calls into question the relation among testimony, representations of atrocity, and the ethical demands those relations place upon the eyewitness in the context of the Holocaust. Testifying to something we've seen with our own eyes is difficult enough—time and memory intervene between the moment of seeing and the moment of saying, and the extremity of the event may stand in the way of description altogether—but matters become even more complicated when trying to account for the secondhand witness, the one who was not there on the spot but who has seen or "remembered" events nonetheless, either through listening to other's testimonies, or by seeing representations of those events (film, television, and video-recorded testimonies to name only three). But while the Holocaust may remain a watershed atrocity (and while it certainly remains a watershed event), there are fewer and fewer survivors, those who were there on the spot, to whom we can turn to help us understand how, as Felman says, "witnessing has itself undergone a major trauma." It might be fair to say that now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century—a full sixty years since the end of the Second World War—we live in an era of secondhand witnessing, in which what Marianne Hirsch has called post-memory (the recollection of events of which we don't have first-hand experience) has vastly complicated the relation among events, our experiences of them, and the testimonies and other discourses that result. That so many witnesses to the events of September 11, 2001—millions of whom saw the events unfold in real time on television—said that the images were "like a movie" is only the most obvious sign of this complexity, suggesting that witnessing has [End Page 340] become so mediated as to make us unsure of where testimonies end and representations of events begin. Michael Levine and Stevan Weine's books attempt to deal with the problem of the secondhand witness, each in different ways. What, they ask, is the obligation of those who witness the eyewitness testifying? In Weine's case, the secondhand witness is the psychoanalyst or the psychiatrist specifically charged with understanding the nature of trauma that lies at the heart of testimonies of atrocity, and with helping the victim work through that trauma. There are three basic concerns for the secondhand witness: "How to relieve suffering? How to create cultures of peace and reconciliation? How to document histories?" (Weine, xxii). For Weine, psychotherapists have tended to treat survivor testimonies as "one-dimensional clinical trauma stories [and as such] they may become closed and isolated from the broader expanse of human experience and interaction to which they truly belong" (xviii). Analysis must involve taking the survivors' testimonies as valuable in and of themselves as narratives, narratives that not only tell what happened but provide a glimpse of what is unavailable to the witness and certainly invisible to representation. Levine is also concerned that we lend an ear to what is mimetically unrepresentable but which may be audible as "excess" (in Emmanuel Levinas's terms, as "inflexions of forgotten voices" [Otherwise than Being, 26]). Such excess is only available "in the very process of speaking toward another in the fluid space of transmission opened between the precariously fluctuating positions of the witness and the witness to the witness" (4...