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The Era of the Witness (review)

Article in Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies January

2008
DOI: 10.1353/sho.0.0182

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Rosanne Kennedy
Australian National University
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218 Book Reviews

a few), by far the majority of Frances 600,000 Jews today and thus the wave of
the immediate future (p. 23).
One wishes at times that Noldens analysis provided more substantial
comparative means for assessing these works. From Chapter Three, it would
be interesting to place Ccile Wajsbrots La Trahison (The Betrayal, 1997) in
relation to a work from the same year, La Compagnie des spectres (The Company
of Ghosts, trans. Christopher Woodall [Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press,
2006]) by non-Jewish writer Lydie Salvayre. On the surface, their approaches
seem similar: a younger female narrator discovers that the return of the re-
pressed (Vichy) haunts our every day even at the end of the twentieth century.
In Wajsbrots case, however, the novel argues that France still refuses to face its
haunting past (pp. 9293), while Salvayre accuses a neurotic obsession with
this history. To what should we attribute such divergent perceptions? (While
Salvayre is not Jewish, she is the daughter of refugees from the Spanish Civil
War.) Can it be explained by their membership in different communities? Or
by a different awareness of the debates concerning history and memory in
France? Similarly, Chapter Five would benefit from greater contact with the
theoretical and literary vogue of Maghrebi fiction in France, since there ex-
ist significant intersections on both sociohistorical and esthetic levels. When
looking within the community of Jewish writers in France, one foregrounds
the distinctions; comparisons with works from outside it can help restore a
sense of internal specificity.
These quibbles should not cause us to lose sight of the essential: Nolden
has provided an invaluable service with this extremely ambitious book. It is a
tremendous resource for scholars working in closely related fields, for it assem-
bles material that would take years for another scholar to replicate. Moreover,
since it is written with jargon-free clarity, it is also ideally suited for serious
readers wishing to discover for themselves some of the significant voices of
tomorrow.
Ralph Schoolcraft III
Texas A&M University

The Era of the Witness, by Annette Wieviorka, trans. from French by Jared
Stark. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 168 pp. $19.95.
When Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub published Testimony: Crises of Wit-
nessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History in 1992, they claimed that the
twentieth century was an era of testimony. Although their book helped to
launch the field of trauma studies in the Anglo-American academy, in part
by expanding the category of testimony to include literature, how testimony
Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
 Book Reviews 219

became a significant cultural form and how the Holocaust survivor acquired
legitimacy as a bearer of truth remained uncharted territory. In a lucid and ac-
cessible translation by Jared Stark, Annette Wieviorkas The Era of the Witness,
originally published in French in 1998, examines the conditions under which
testimony, and the social figure of the witness, emerged from the shadows
of the Holocaust to become a significant force in contemporary culture. She
describes three successive stages of testimony. Chapter One, Witnesses to a
Drowning World, considers testimonies left by those who did not survive.
Chapter Two, The Advent of the Witness, is concerned with the figure of the
witness as it emerged from the Eichmann trial, which foregrounded victim
testimony for its pedagogic and emotional value. Chapter Three, The Era of
the Witness, examines how the survivors authority as a witness has been con-
solidated, in recent decades, through films and videotaped testimony archives.
Wieviorkas insightful analysis of the changing historical and social conditions
under which testimony has been produced, circulated, and received, and how
these conditions have authorized testimony, is an important contribution to
Holocaust studies, and to other fields which are concerned with the uses and
effects of testimony, for instance in human rights and truth commissions.
In addition to tracing the rise of the social figure of the witness, Wievi-
orka is primarily concerned with the impact of testimony, with its grounding
in fallible memory, on the writing of history. Her fascinating analysis of the
Eichmann trial, which is profitably read alongside Hannah Arendts classic
account, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, is central to
her argument. Wieviorka maintains that the pivotal role the Eichmann trial
played in legitimating testimony as a form of truth telling about the past has
gone unrecognized. Victim testimony acquired an extraordinary force in the
Eichmann trial due to the judicial setting, which lent it all the weight of the
states legitimacy and institutions and symbolic power (p. 84). Moreover, as
a result of the Eichmann trial, the witness acquired a new socially recognized
identity as a survivor, which gave rise to a . . . new function: to be the bearer
of history (p. 88). The Eichmann trial, which sought to teach a history lesson
by foregrounding survivor testimony, has impacted negatively on the writing
of history. Writing history, Wieviorka contends, demands critical distance and
the ability to separate emotion and reason. The Eichmann trial used testimony
to appeal to the audiences emotion, and the audience, in turn, willingly identi-
fied with the victims story. She maintains that, until recently, historians writing
the history of the genocide have respected universal criteria of the profession:
to appeal to intelligence rather than emotion by holding events at a distance.
She reserves her harshest criticism for Daniel Goldhagens controversial book,
Hitlers Willing Executioners, which pulverized the universally established

Vol. 26, No. 4 2008

220 Book Reviews

criteria for the academic writing of history (p. 90). With its juxtaposition
of horror stories, Goldhagens work, which belongs to the aftermath of the
Eichmann trial, uncannily reproduces the methods used by Gideon Hausner,
Eichmanns prosecutor (pp. 92, 95). For both Hausner and Goldhagen, feeling
substitutes for analysis and explanation. Moreover, Goldhagen blurs the line
between history and law by adopting the tone of a prosecutor and judging the
past (p. 94). Wieviorka argues that historians should not overwhelm readers
with a succession of horror stories, as Goldhagen does, or allow emotion to
substitute for critical reflection. Holding events at a distance, Wieviorka sug-
gests, does not lead to a lack of empathy, but rather restores the dignity of the
thinking person which Nazism destroyed (p. 90). Of course, the relationship
between emotion and intelligence, like that of history and memory, is at the
forefront of much critical work today, and is more contested than Wieviorka
acknowledges. While some historians argue that foregrounding stories of suf-
fering and trauma, and thereby producing an affective response, may lead to
the abandonment of critical thinking, others argue that an affective engage-
ment can enhance critical reflection on the past.
In the epilogue Wieviorka reiterates her concerns about the impact of
testimony on history. Discussing testimonies by Jewish children who were
hidden during the war and have only recently begun to tell their stories, she
observes that in these accounts [t]estimony . . . detaches itself from history,
distances itself further from the event. . . . While acknowledging the power of
these stories, she questions their historical value:
Reading or hearing the voices of these hidden children, one learns much about
childhood and about humanity, about the violence inflicted by certain traumas
in their irreparable character. But does one learn history? The repercussions of
an event inform us about the power of that event but do not account for what
the event was. (p. 149)

These reflections raise two issues that, although heavily contested amongst
contemporary historians, are not always clearly articulated. Firstly, should his-
torians focus on documenting and explaining events by attempting to recon-
struct what the event was for the society in which it occurred, or should they
instead explore the ongoing effects of events in the present? Privileging the past
or the present is one of the fault lines amongst contemporary historians. The
second issue concerns the status of the event in historical writing. Although
Wieviorka uses this concept uncritically, postmodern critiques of history have
questioned the usefulness of a nineteenth-century concept of the event for
explaining modernist events. Hayden White, for instance, maintains that,
in our technologically sophisticated era in which events are overwhelmed by
a multiplicity of meanings, it is no longer possible to provide an account of
Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
 Book Reviews 221

a complex and traumatic historical event that will achieve consensus (The
Modernist Event, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the
Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack [Routledge, 1996]). The status granted
to the event, like that of whether to prioritize the past or the present, distin-
guishes historians and their approaches. In laying the blame for an erosion of
universally accepted criteria of the discipline of history at Goldhagens feet,
Wieviorka underestimates the impact of postmodern critiques, and the rising
fortunes of memory, on the authority of the historical profession. Testimony
is no longer regarded simply as a document to be interpreted by historians,
but as an interpretation of historical events in its own right, which competes
for authority with historians accounts ( James Young, Between History and
Memory: the Voice of the Eyewitness, in Witness and Memory: The Discourse
of Trauma, ed. Ana Douglass and Thomas Vogler [Routledge, 2003]). The val-
ue of Wieviorkas account lies in her acute analysis of the changing conditions
under which testimony has been produced over half a century, and in the clarity
with which she lays out the theoretical issues for further discussion. Given the
increasing use of testimony as a mode of transmitting the traumas of the pres-
ent and recent past, The Era of the Witness is a timely contribution. While sug-
gesting fruitful new avenues for research, Wieviorka also tempers an unfettered
enthusiasm for testimony through careful critical reflection on its limitations.
Rosanne Kennedy
School of Humanities
Australian National University

This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz, by Piera Sonnino,
translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 218 pp.
$21.95.
Ann Goldsteins translation of Questo stato (This Has Happened) by Piera
Sonnino arrives on the American literary scene as a valuable addition to both
Jewish and Italian historical and cultural studies. Sonninos book also posi-
tions itself within the literature of memory. This is understood not as purely
individual remembrance, but mainly as an analysis of the sites of both personal
and collective memory.
For 42 years, Piera Sonninos text existed only as a personal autobiog-
raphy. In May 2002 it was her daughters who sent the 60 typewritten pages
to the editorial office of Diario, which had invited readers to tell their fam-
ily stories as part of a long-term memory project. It is unclear whether the
manuscript was simply a first draft or if it represented the last of numerous
revisions, or if Sonnino originally typed the text herself. Diario published the
Vol. 26, No. 4 2008

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