Abstract
The chapter looks into the possibilities and limitations of the artistic use of testimonies of Shoah survivors. It discusses Hungarian progressive experiments in which testimony has become institutionalised, externalised, objectified and therefore translatable, transformable and transmittable from its original language, place, form and personal uniqueness into different registers of art and culture. Three curatorial strategies for using artistic methods to bring the audience back to the performative character of witnessing with the help of testimonies will be analysed. All three examples are unusual because they encourage us to activate those senses that we are less likely to relate to testimony mediated visually for a broader audience: listening (to background noise), touching and tasting.
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Notes
- 1.
For the questions of ‘Who has the right to represent the Holocaust?’ and ‘How should the Holocaust be represented to ensure its continued commemoration?’ see the special issue of Holocaust Studies 2019, 25: 1-2, especially the introduction (Berberich, 2019).
- 2.
See also https://cultureastestimony.wordpress.com/2018/07/25/briefing-paper-network-conference-culture-and-its-uses-as-testimony-11-12-april-2018/. Accessed 5 January 2021.
- 3.
He adds, “the forensics of the trial, the pains of the martyr and the memoirs of the survivor are all attempts to overpower the melancholy fact that direct sensory experience—from the taste of pineapple to the pains of childbirth—vanishes when put into words and remains inaccessible to others except inasmuch as they claim to share similar experiences. Sensation is encircled into privately personal ontologies. Only words are public” (Peters, 2001: 711).
- 4.
About the many faces of silence in testimonies see Greenspan, 2014.
- 5.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAFzjFkWJDs. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
- 6.
Just a few examples: Anna Sokolow’s Dreams in 1961 (Rottenberg, 2013); Pina Bausch’s company and its whole oeuvre from the middle of the 1980s; the Village trilogy of the Toronto-based group Kaeja d’Dance in 1995; Aide Memorie performed by the Kibbutz Dance Company in the 1990s with the choreography of Rami Be’er (see Mills, 2017); Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project by Stephen Mills in 2005 in Austin (https://balletaustin.org/stephen-mills/light-the-holocaust-humanity-project/, retrieved December 28, 2020); or John Cranko’s trilogy (see Bing-Heidecker, 2015).
- 7.
“This is to say that dance, as a nonverbal and non-textual form can be understood as a privileged site for fleshing out how (violent) social orders are both historically instilled in and negotiated at the level of the body in motion” (Fortuna, 2011: 44).
- 8.
Réka Szabó also filmed the whole process from the first meeting between Éva and Emese, through the exhausting rehearsals, to the first theatre performance. In the documentary, the viewer can also observe how the three women established an intimate friendship step by step. In both the theatre performance and the documentary, the testimony of Éva plays a formative role. The film The Euphoria of Being won international awards in 2019 and 2020 in Locarno, Sarajevo, Minsk, Budapest, Trieste and Munich. See http://thesymptoms.hu/film/a-letezes-euforiaja. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
- 9.
See http://www.yellowstarhouses.org/. Retrieved December 29, 2020.
- 10.
In the early summer and autumn of 1944, more than 55,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Austria. Seventeen thousand five hundred of them arrived in Strasshof. There, a veritable ‘slave market’ was organised to meet the demands of Austrian entrepreneurs who urgently needed manpower. The deported families had to work as slave labourers in Vienna and in Lower Austria on farms, in trade and, in particular, in the ‘war industry’. See Frojimovics and Kovács (2015) and also http://ungarische-zwangsarbeit-in-wien.at/
- 11.
The source, however, is not unique. See Pachter (1996).
- 12.
See https://www.centropa.org/biography/hedvig-endrei-0. Retrieved December 29, 2020.
- 13.
See https://golemszinhaz.hu/repertoar/szakacskonyv-a-tulelesert (retrieved December 30, 2020), or Czingel (2019).
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Kovács, É. (2023). The Sensual Memory of Shoah: The Meaning of Sound, Touch and Taste in the Culture of Testimonies. 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_12
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