The Living Memory Problem

The living memory problem is the institutional problem the field of Holocaust education and remembrance faces as the survivor generation dies. The problem is not the loss of historical knowledge: the documentary record is more extensively preserved than that of any comparable historical event, and the wider historiography is in robust condition. The problem is the loss of the specific kind of knowledge that lives in the bodies of people who experienced the events and that disappears with them. By 2050 no living survivor will be able to speak. The transition from a living-memory culture to a post-living-memory culture is the central long-term question for the field, and the institutional, technological and pedagogical work to manage that transition has been under way since around 2000.

What is being lost

The forms of knowledge that live in survivors and that recorded testimony can capture only partially are several. The first is the unrehearsed answer to a specific question. A survivor in a room with a class can be asked anything and will respond as a person, not as a recording; the response may be evasive or refused, but it is the response of a particular person to that particular question on that particular day. Recorded testimony cannot do this. The second is the physical presence: the way a survivor stands, holds themselves, pauses, looks around the room, what they are wearing, what they look like at eighty or ninety. The third is the social fact of meeting a person who lived through the events; the encounter changes the student’s understanding of what the events are, in a way that recorded material does not. The fourth is the survivor’s own response to the experience of teaching: many survivors who began speaking in the 1970s and 1980s reported that the act of teaching had been a form of integration of the experience that they had not previously been able to achieve; that integration disappears with them.

The historian Annette Wieviorka, in The Era of the Witness (1998), set out the historiographical context for this loss. She argued that the Holocaust historiography has gone through three phases: the immediate post-war historiography of the camps (Kogon, Reitlinger, Friedmann, Hilberg in his first edition), the documentary-archival phase that ran through the 1960s to the 1980s (Hilberg’s expanded editions, Friedländer’s Years of Persecution), and the witness phase that has run from the 1980s to the present (the survivor memoir, the recorded testimony, the Shoah Foundation collection). The witness phase is the phase that is now ending; what comes after it has not yet acquired a name.

The institutional responses

The principal institutional responses to the living memory problem have been several.

The systematic recording of survivor testimony at scale, which the USC Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem and USHMM have collectively pursued since the 1990s, has produced an archive that will continue to be available indefinitely. The collected testimony is more substantial than the documentary record from any comparable historical event. The recordings can be used in classrooms, in museum installations, in academic research and in public broadcasting; they will not disappear with their speakers.

The Dimensions in Testimony project, the Beth Shalom Forever Project and similar interactive recorded testimony installations have attempted to preserve some of the responsiveness of the live encounter through pre-recorded answers to anticipated questions. The technology is not artificial intelligence in the strict sense; it does not generate new content but selects from the recorded library. The students who use the installations have reported, in the available evaluation studies, an experience that is closer to the live encounter than purely passive recording but that does not fully reproduce it.

The training of second- and third-generation educators (the children and grandchildren of survivors who can speak with personal connection to the family experience without claiming the survivor’s own authority) has been a substantial institutional commitment of the past two decades. The 3GNY (Third Generation New York) network, the British Generations of the Shoah Forum, the Children of Holocaust Survivors Association International and similar organisations train second- and third-generation speakers in school programmes and public engagement.

The formalisation of the survivor’s role in published testimony has been a parallel response. The substantial publishing of survivor memoirs in the 1990s and 2000s, the establishment of the Holocaust survivor memoir as a recognised literary and historical genre, and the building of institutional library collections has produced a substantial body of written testimony that will outlast the witnesses.

What the responses cannot do

The responses do not solve the living memory problem; they manage its consequences. The recorded testimony cannot answer the specific question the specific student asks. The Dimensions in Testimony installations approximate this but cannot fully provide it. The second- and third-generation speakers can transmit the family experience but cannot speak as the survivor speaks. The published memoirs can be read but cannot be the encounter.

The historians and educators who have written most carefully on the question (Wieviorka, Saul Friedländer, James Young, Aleida Assmann, Geoffrey Hartman) have been clear that the post-living-memory phase will be a different relationship between the public and the events. The relationship will be more like the public relationship to the First World War in 2025 than like the public relationship to the Holocaust in 1995. The First World War, with no living veterans since the death of Florence Green in 2012, is taught and remembered without first-hand testimony; the relationship is mediated entirely through documents, photographs, recorded interviews from before the deaths, and the institutional infrastructure of memorial sites and museums. The Holocaust will move into a similar relationship over the next quarter-century. What that relationship will look like in detail is not yet known and will be shaped substantially by the work of the educators and institutions of the next two decades.

The wider question

The wider question raised by the living memory problem is whether public engagement with the Holocaust will diminish, intensify or change shape as the events recede further in time. The historiography of the First World War suggests it will not necessarily diminish; the public engagement with the First World War in the centenary commemorations of 2014 to 2018 was substantially larger than at any previous point since the 1920s, despite the deaths of all veterans. The public engagement may indeed intensify as the immediate generational distance produces a more deliberate institutional commemoration. Whether this pattern will hold for the Holocaust is one of the open questions for the field, and one of the questions on which the work of the next generation will substantially depend.

See also

Sources

  • Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, Cornell University Press, 2006
  • James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, Yale University Press, 2000
  • Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity, Fordham University Press, 2016
  • Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust, Indiana University Press, 1996
  • Saul Friedländer, “Trauma and Transference”, in Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe, Indiana University Press, 1993
  • Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2012
  • Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony, Indiana University Press, 2015
  • USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, https://sfi.usc.edu