Moving to the root argument and central premise of ts course—i.e., witness and testimony—let us comment upon, respond to, and analyze the reading assignment due today.
In an ACE'd paragraph, first briefly summarize Parts I-II of the article titled "Trauma and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle" (Laub 1991). Then in a second paragraph look deeper into the text, analyzing it for figurative lang., rhetorical devices, and any latent, socially-dominant messages—i.e., hegemony—which are suggested by Laub's writing, those which may be either upheld or vaporized..
The first two parts of "Trauma and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle" by Dori Laub center around the act of giving witness. The excerpt beings up several important questions including who is responsible to give witness and what makes up said act of witnessing. For Laub, not telling a story only serves to increase the trauma and stigma associated with it. "The events become more and more distorted in their silent retention and pervasively invade and contaminate the survivor's daily life" (Laub 64). As the story lingers in memory, it becomes increasingly changed and distorted as time blurs what was once so clear. This bleeds into the next main point of the excerpt- what role do bystanders have in the process of giving witness? Examining a Holocaust interview, Laub explains the idea of "witnessing from within" (Laub 66). With an event as horrific as the holocaust, the victims are so scared that it many cases, they cannot give witness to themselves. In such a case, it falls on the bystanders to provide their testimony.
ReplyDeleteThe case study that Laub relies on is that of the Holocaust and the act of giving witness to it. In that sense, she details the hegemony of the Nazis over the Jewish people and its relation to the act of giving witness. The entire Nazi approach to the Jewish population in Europe was to not only annihilate it, but to strip the Jews of their dignity and pride. Starting with the Nuremberg Laws which took citizenship away from the Jews, to the creating of Ghettos and then Death Camps, the Nazis attempted to create a race that was not only seen as sub-human by the rest of the population, but also regarded themselves as such. In this way, the process of lending witness to the holocaust is distorted. Laub claims that "The burdensome secret belief in the Nazi-propagated 'truth' of Jewish humanity compels them to maintain silence" (Laub 67). The overlying message here therefore, is that the act of giving witness can go beyond simply relaying a series of stories are various information. Instead, bearing witness can have overarching social and cultural implications, particularly when dealing with something as complicated as the Holocaust.
In the first two parts of Dori Laub’s Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle, Laub reflects inward on her ethos as child survivor of deportation and encampment during the Holocaust. She acknowledges that her childhood memories are “vivid… but these are the memories of an adult,” (Laub 61-62). Reflecting on her recall, it is perhaps too vivid and furthermore too sophisticated for a child that young. Laub claims that not even she is a perfect witness because her memories have settled into the brain of an adult narrator, and are therefore tainted.
ReplyDeleteShe calls this process the “collapse of witnessing… [something] central to the Holocaust experience,” (Laub 65). Dori Laub’s argument, that there is no true witness of the Holocaust, requires that she builds her persuasive essay in a way that deconstructs her ethos rather than affirms it. Whereas most writers aim to appear as the strongest source available on the topic, Laub recognizes her prose as a part of the problem she describes. She both directly challenges her own memory as well as calls out writers, including herself, for making publications about the topic too late. This approach strangely strengthens Laub’s claim, because her humility and self-reflection places the text within the proposed larger narrative.
Dori Laub’s work discusses the true meaning of witness. He posits three types of witness: firsthand witness, secondhand witness, and the witness of the process of witnessing. Parts I-II discuss mostly firsthand witnesses of the Holocaust, and the destructive power of Nazi ideology that eroded much meaningful witness that could be recounted by either victims or bystanders. The dehumanization of Jewish victims leads witnesses to keep their silence, and thus dilutes the historical record of the Holocaust and its true horror.
ReplyDeleteThe depth of impact of Nazi ideology, Laub posits, stretches beyond the human cost in death and suffering, but sinks into the psyches of everyone within the scope of WWII, even and especially its victims. Internalized anti-Semitism, particularly when it is as violent as it was in Germany, was, along with guns and legislation, another weapon used by the Nazi regime to oppress its Jewish population. Laub uses this to draw out the psychological intricacies of persecution, and how the use of this weapon means that populations targeted by the Holocaust feel its effects decades later.