Browsing by Subject "Testimony"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Centering the Sonic: Sound Mediation in Holocaust Memory, Memorials, and Museums
    (2021-06) Huether, Kathryn
    While a great deal of scholarship has critically assessed Holocaust texts, films, and photographs for decades, scholars have largely overlooked music and sound. Musicologists and historians have made substantial contributions to understanding music during the Holocaust and how it functioned within the social makeup of the camps, yet on the role of sound and music within Holocaust memorial forms remains underexamined. In this dissertation, I examine the processes by which sound, music, and vocal affect are employed and ascribed to modes of Holocaust memory and how these applications in turn shape how that memory is received. A connecting thread throughout all my case studies is that these sonic elements are not necessarily considered the primary mode of mediation—at least by their curators—and that the sonic component is secondary to the overarching mode of memory. Overall, my findings demonstrate that despite largely being overlooked in scholarly discussions regarding Holocaust memorial representation, sound mediation is very present and drastically shapes a visitor’s engagement with each experience.
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    The prosthetic life: theatrical performance, survivor testimony and the Terezín Ghetto, 1941-1963.
    (2009-10) Peschel, Lisa A.
    During all periods in postwar Czechoslovakia when the World War II Jewish ghetto at Terezín (in German, Theresienstadt) could be discussed in the public sphere, Czech-Jewish Holocaust survivors created and circulated narratives about the cultural life of the ghetto and their own experience of agency and pleasure while engaged in theatrical performances. Focusing on two periods, the immediate postwar years (1945-47) and an early point in the political thaw leading to the Prague Spring (1963), I examine testimony that survivors addressed to their fellow Czechs in the public sphere as a rhetorical performance in its own right. The constative and the performative aspects of testimony have shifted over time; in each period, survivors needed or wanted their testimony to achieve different effects, and they provided different information about theatrical performance in the ghetto. The survivors clearly adjusted their narratives in response to period-specific pressures as they tried to reinforce both their subjectivity and their subject position in postwar Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, the testimony of both periods shares a consistent core of themes, suggesting that theatrical performance in the ghetto functioned as a social practice that increased the prisoners' resilience and ability to cope with the traumatic events occurring in the ghetto on a day-to-day basis. Their postwar testimony reveals a related function: they resisted objectification within the sometimes hostile environment of postwar Czechoslovakia by establishing and conveying the meaning they ascribed to their own experience, thus remaining speaking subjects.
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    The witness who may not have been there:Eastern European authors looking westward.
    (2009-05) Hudecova, Eva R.
    Using the tool of witnessing, Eastern European authors look westward intending to facilitate the reemergence of what the West imagines to be its limit-space: Eastern Europe. It is my dissertation's goal to increase the West's literacy about the history and culture of a region different from the West, yet one which the West increasingly considers the same. Through an examination of German, Slovak, and Polish writers, my dissertation reframes testimonial literature as a basis for communication between the Eastern writer and Western reader, bringing Trauma Studies, Eastern European Area Studies and Comparative Literature Studies into dialogue. I call this reframing of testimonial literature removed witnessing, since it is a witnessing very different from the narrow legal definition of testimony. In removed witnessing, bodily presence of the witness at an event is possible but not absolutely required. It is in the medium of literature that this kind of witnessing can be established.