Abstract
This chapter gives an overview of the issues surrounding the use of perpetrator testimony—from the post-war period to the present day—in scholarly, cultural and educational contexts. The authors analyse the ethics and aesthetics of perpetrator testimony, exemplifying through a range of texts and the work of other critics that the importance of perpetrator narratives does not simply lie in the verification of historical detail or comparison with other accounts to reveal deceit. Arguing rather that complex insights into individual as well as group behaviour and mentality, and psychological mechanisms of guilt, responsibility or denial, contribute to greater understanding of the past, Hirsekorn and Vice illustrate how perpetrator testimony can be used to engage with moral choices and prevent immoral acts.
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Notes
- 1.
Such examples include what Kara Critchell, Susanne Knittel, and Emiliano Perra, and Uğur Ümit Üngör refer to as “democratic perpetrators” (2017: 9–10), who, in an attempt to bring freedom and democracy to another society, can end up committing violence against civilians of those societies, such as US soldiers in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq (Spring, 2010) or Israeli soldiers (Elizur & Yishay-Krien, 2009; Morag, 2012, 2013).
- 2.
The idea that people could under certain circumstances become perpetrators is also reflected in research that engages with how soldiers turn perpetrators in the twenty-first century, with the traumatic impact of acts of perpetration on the perpetrator himself or herself (see, e.g., Morag, 2012; Mohamed, 2015; Spring, 2010; Walker, 2020).
- 3.
- 4.
On the significance of Stasi files as life writing, as (auto)biography, see also Lewis (2003).
- 5.
As Sara Jones emphasises, interpretation of file content depends on the individual reader. This is therefore not an unproblematic process, as it may also restructure the memories of victims as well as the stories of informers, with bias as to what the files may reveal. (Jones, 2014: 71).
- 6.
Jones identifies variations of this use in examples on the Stasi such as Gesicht zur Wand (Weinert, 2009) and Jeder schweigt von etwas anderem (Bauder & Frank, 2009); disparate narratives of Stasi perpetrators illustrate that the officers were not necessarily a homogenous group, but that the argument the film develops with them remains coherent and widens the “remembering community” (181).
- 7.
For Canet, films in this category display four key features: they wholly or partly engage with perpetrator testimonies in relation to the individuals’ accountability; the atrocities are systematically conducted by an armed group in power who uses violence against another group within the civilian population (for social, cultural, political, ideological, racial, or religious reasons); the perpetrators commit atrocities as part of mass or collective violence, such as war crimes or genocide, that is, crimes against humanity; acts of violence committed under exceptional circumstances such as in situations whereby the acts are endorsed by an authoritarian government or state administration (Canet, 2020b: 169).
- 8.
Trauma and memory studies, film and media studies, genocide and perpetrator studies, human rights studies, visual culture studies, and gender studies.
- 9.
Stephanie Bird, Perpetrators in Literature; Robert Skloot, “Whose Evil is This? Perpetrator in the Theatre”; Diana I. Popescu, “Representing Infamous Others: Perpetrator Imagery in Visual Art”; Rebecca Jinks, “Cultural Codes: Holocaust Resonances in Representations of Genocide Perpetrators”; and Holger Plötzsch, Emil Lundedal Hammer, “Playing Perpetrators: Interrogating Evil in Videogames about Violent Conflicts.”
- 10.
Duvdevani and Yosef take Sheila Sofan’s understanding of this genre as non-fiction material in animated film (199).
- 11.
Rothberg develops this category of subject beyond perpetrator, victim, or bystander categories.
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Hirsekorn, U., Vice, S. (2023). Perpetrator Testimony. In: Jones, S., Woods, R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13794-5_24
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