The Testimony of Trees

Abstract

“The Testimony of Trees” undertakes a cross reading of Georges Didi-Huberman’s photo-essay Écorces (Bark) and Claude Lanzmann’s monumental film Shoah. The chapter situates Didi-Huberman’s apparently futile attempt to interrogate the trees surrounding Auschwitz-Birkenau within a long lineage of latecomers to the scene of the crime, including Lanzmann, all of whom have called upon the forest to act as a witness—not merely as a survivor of the event, but also as an agent of its erasure. By unpacking the series of ideas that Didi-Huberman pursues in Écorces, the analysis sheds new light on the theological framework that has galvanized his polemical conversation with Lanzmann. It further investigates the multifaceted role that trees play across the vast geographies charted by Lanzmann, from his debut Pourquoi Israël to his final film The Last of the Unjust, in a struggle of memory that is as much symbolic as it is strategic.