The Wonder of Their Voices:The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford Oral History Series) by Rosen Alan

The Wonder of Their Voices:The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford Oral History Series) by Rosen Alan

Author:Rosen, Alan [Rosen, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-11-03T16:00:00+00:00


The ascription of “strangely disembodied” to audio recorded testimony and the voices that it conveys has them lose exactly what Boder had hoped they would gain. This is true in two senses: (1) Boder thought the recorded voice would be able to do something that visual images could not; and (2) “their own voices”—recorded sound, language, words, grammar, and syntax—was the means by which the victims could best transmit experience. For Boder, their recorded voice was the best way to embody their experience.

Hartman used the term “disembodied” to evaluate the relative merits of different media. But James Young took it up to point out audio’s essential incapacities: “audio testimony alone [without the complement of video?] tends not to embody witness so much as to disembody it, to separate the speaker from his voice. Like the literary witness, the speaker in audio tends to be displaced by the words themselves.”15 Displacement here underscores disembodiment, and the very capacity to bear witness suffers in the bargain. The term “disembodied” means that audio comes off second best and, by implication, that the audio recordings archives of victim testimony would, by definition, not yield important material.

Not every interview project has abandoned audio and dismissed its viability. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Oral History Department, for instance, in some interviews will follow up a three-or four-hour video on the prewar and war years with an audio interview of the postwar years. Behind this unusual format lies a respect for audio’s power in the interview and on the audience. “Most interesting,” comments former director Joan Ringelheim,

is that many of the people seem to be able to be more open with the medium of audio. There is a greater intimacy to the conversation than is typically developed in the video interview. It may also be that the audience’s concentration will be different as well when listening to these tapes. Is it possible that we hear more by not seeing—at least sometimes? Needless to say, video is still important, especially for educational purposes, given the prevalence of video in the lives of students. Still, one can wonder about the effects of the different media.16



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