Reconstituting the internal 'thou'...The Witness

Witness:

1.  The first level, that of being a witness to oneself…as a…survivor…I have distinct memories…the subsequent life my family and I led there.  I remember both these events and the feelings and thoughts they provoke in minute detail.  They are not facts that were gleaned from somebody else’s telling me about them…

But these memories are those of an adult…the recall in a young child…It is as though this process of witnessing is of an event that happened on another level, and was not part of the mainstream of the conscious life…[of a child].  Rather, these memories are like discrete islands of precocious thinking and feel almost like the remembrances of another…removed, yet connected to me in a complex way…The remembrances of yet another child survivor,…subtly related to my own in the quality…will serve as a connecting, reemerging thread…

2.  …the process of witnessing is my participation, not in the events, but in the account given them, in my role as the interviewer of survivors…My function in this setting is that of a companion on the eerie journey of the testimony.  As an interviewer, I am present as someone who actually participates in the reliving and reexperiencing of the event. I also become part of the struggle to go beyond the event and not be submerged and lost in it.

3. …the process of witnessing is itself being witnessed.  I observe how the narrator, and myself as listener, alternate between moving closer and then retreating from the experience---with the sense that there is a truth that we are both trying to reach, and this sense serves as a beacon we both try to follow.  The traumatic experience has normally long been submerged and has become distorted in its submersion.  The horror of the historical experience is maintained in the testimony only as an elusive memory that feels as if it no longer resembles any reality.  The horror is, indeed, compelling not only in its reality, but even more so, in its flagrant distortion and subversion of reality.  Realizing its dimensions becomes a process that demands retreat.  The narrator and I need to halt and reflect on these memories as they are spoken, so as to reassert the veracity of the past and to build anew its linkage to, and assimilation into, present-day life.

“This essay will be based on this enigma of one child’s memory of trauma.”

There is an implicit imperative to ‘the testimony.’…an imperative need to ‘tell’ and thus to come to ‘know’ one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself.  One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life.  [p.78]

[In the unholy triangle…abuser, victim, witness]

….to maintain an integrity….that could keep itself uncompromised, unharmed, by…her very witnessing.  The perpetrators, in their attempt to rationalize the unprecedented scope of the destructiveness, brutally imposed upon their victims a delusional ideology whose grandiose coercive pressure totally excluded and eliminated the possibility of an unviolated, unencumbered, and thus sane, point of reference in the witness.

   What I feel is therefore crucial to emphasize is the following:  it was not only the reality of the situation and the lack of responsiveness of bystanders or the world that accounts for the fact that history was taking place with no witness:  it was also the very circumstance of being inside the event that made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist, that is, someone who could step outside of the coercively totalitarian and dehumanizing frame of reference in which the event was taking place, and provide an independent frame of reference through which the event could be observed…

   What do I mean by the notion of a witness from inside?  To understand it one has to conceive of the world of the Holocaust as a world in which the very imagination of the Other was no longer possible.

   There was no longer an other to which one could say ‘Thou’ 4  in the hope of being heard, of being recognized as a subject, of being answered.  The historical reality of the Holocaust became, thus, a reality which extinguished philosophically the very possibility of address, the possibility of appealing, or of turning to, another.  But when one cannot turn to a ‘you’ one cannot say ‘thou’ even to oneself.  The Holocaust created in this way a world in which one could not bear to witness to oneself.  The Nazi system turned out therefore to be foolproof, not only in the sense that there were in theory no outside witnesses but also in the sense that it convinced its victims, the potential witnesses from the inside, that what was affirmed about their ‘otherness’ and their inhumanity was correct and that their experiences were no longer communicable even to themselves, and therefore perhaps never took place.  This loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well.

   Survivors often claim that they experience the feeling of belonging to a ‘secret order’ that is sworn to silence.  Because of their ‘participation’…they have become the ‘bearers of a secret’ (Geheimnisstraeger) never to be divulged.  The implications of this imaginary complicity and of this conviction of their having been chosen for a secret mission are that they believe, out of loyalty, that their persecution and execution by the Nazis was actually warranted.  This burdensome secret belief in the…propagated ‘truth’ of Jewish subhumanity compels them to maintain silence.  As ‘subhumans,’ a position they have accepted and assumed as their identity by virtue of their contamination by the ‘secret order,’ they have no right to speak up or protest.  Moreover, by never divulging their stories, they feel that the rest of the world will never come to know the real truth, the one that involved the destruction of their own humanity.  The difficulty that prevents these victims from speaking out about their victimization emphasizes even more the delusional quality of the Holocaust.  This delusion, fostered by the Holocaust, is actually lived as an unconscious alternate truth, by executioners, victims and bystanders alike.  How can such deadlock be broken?

The Emperor’s New Clothes

…secret sharing of a collective delusion….the…delusion was ubiquitously effective in Jewish communities as well.  This is why those who were lucid enough…about the…destruction either through information or thorough foresight, were dismissed as ‘prophets of doom’ and labeled traitors or madmen.  They were discredited because they were not conforming by staying within the confines of the delusion.  It is in this way that the capabilities of a witness alone to stand out from the crowd and not be flooded and engulfed by the event itself, was precluded.

   The silence….after…[has] been a continuation of the power and the victory of that delusion.

Across the Gap

….any instance of its survival inevitably implied the presence of some sort of informal discourse, of some degree of unconscious witnessing that could not find its voice or its expression during the event….the historical imperative to bear witness could essentially not be met during the actual occurrence.  The degree to which bearing witness was required, entailed such an outstanding measure of awareness and of comprehension of the event---of its dimensions, consequences, and above all, of its radical otherness to all known frames of reference---that it was beyond the limits of human ability (and willingness) to grasp, to transmit, or to imagine.  There was therefore no concurrent “knowing” or assimilation of the history of the occurrence.  The event could thus unimpededly proeceed as though there were no witnessing whatsoever, no witnessing that could decisively impact on it.5

….The perspective I propose tries to highlight, however, what was ultimately missing, not in the courage of the witnesses nor in the depth of their emotional responses, but in the human cognitive capacity to perceive and to assimilate the totality of what was really happening at the time.

Witnessing and Restoration.

   Yet it is essential for this narrative that could not be articulated, to be told, to be transmitted, to be heard.  Hence the importance of historical endeavors…

   To a certain extent, the interviewer-listener takes on the responsibility for bearing witness that previously the narrator felt he bore alone, and therefore could not carry out.  It is the encounter and the coming together between the survivor and the listener, which makes possible something like a repossession of the act of witnessing.  This joint responsibility is the source of the reemerging truth.

…The testimony constitutes in this way a conceptual breakthrough, as well as a historical event in its own right, a historical recovery which I tend to think of as a ‘historical retroaction.’

   What ultimately matters in all processes of witnessing, spasmodic and continuous, conscious and unconscious, is not simply the information, the establishment of facts, but the experience itself of living through testimony, of giving testimony.

   The testimony is, therefore, the process by which the narrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as witness: reconstitutes the internal ‘thou,’ and thus the possibility of a witness or a listener inside himself.

   In my experience, repossessing one’s life story through giving testimony is itself a form of action, of change, which has to actually pass through, in order to continue and complete the process of survival after liberation.  The event must be reclaimed…

 ~Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub.  Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, pp.78-84