Reconsidering post-war narratives of involvement in Nazi violence

Abstract

While the testimonies of survivors have come to occupy an important place in the scholarship on National Socialism and the Holocaust, and their post-war reverberations, the lesser-known corpus of recordings of perpetrators in a narrow judicial sense and the wider non-persecuted German and Austrian populace continues to be under-researched and under-theorised. In this article, I will consider approaches to utilising these complex sources in light of narrative interviews with individuals who witnessed, became complicit in, facilitated, or benefitted from National Socialist violence. Drawing on a collection of recent interviews by a documentary filmmaker, I will demonstrate the importance of the context of their co-production and their socio-political and cultural embeddedness. I will develop an approach that goes beyond the divide between event and meaningfocussed uses of such sources, instead analysing them as cultural artefacts of a particular time and place. In doing so, I will identify a rise in anxiety in approaching Germans and Austrians on the side of persecutors and the appropriation of the figure of the contemporary witness or Zeitzeuge as practice, performance, discursive strategy, and subject position.