The Phonographic Holocaust in the age of digital media

Ian Biddle

This paper: • examination of the processes by which mediatisations of the Holocaust have been enacted

• emphasis on sound and sound reproduction technologies

• interrogation of the (missing) historiography of Holocaust mediatisations

• interrogation of the ‘objects’ and ‘objectiles’ of Holocaust mediatisation (Object-Oriented Ontology)

• Holocaust phonography

EARLY HOLOCAUST MEDIATISATIONS

Early mediatisations of the Holocaust

• Injunction to ‘collect and record’ [in Yiddish ‘zameln un farshraybn’]

• Continuation of ‘eleventh hour ethnography’ (Gilbert 2008: 110)– “collection work that is premised on the threat of the imminent disappearance of a tradition or culture, and the urgent need to document the remnants of that culture before it is too late”

Both • A bearing witness to the horrors of the Holocaust and • A desire to mark continuity, the survival of the

sheyres hapleyte (the living remnant)

Early mediatisations of the Holocaust

(from Shmerke Kaczerginski’s ‘hakdome’ to his collection dos lid fun vilner geto)

The urge to collect and record

• ‘gather and secure all materials and historical documents that would enable [us] to reconstruct the most tragic page in the history of our nation’ (JCHC)

Many forms of bearing witness emerged:• yizker bikher (memorial books) in Yiddish and/or Hebrew

• Collections of diaries, usually in Yiddish, some in Hebrew

• Children’s essay projects, in Yiddish, Polish, German and Czech

The urge to collect and record

• Literary responses (Elie Wiesel’s nakht, or Sutzkever’s geheymshtot, for example)

• Filmic responses; Natan Gross’s Undzere Kinder (1947) for example

• David Boder’s recorded interviews and songs on an Armour wire recorder (1946)

• Musical responses (Schoenberg, Edel, Partoš et al)

MEDIA REGIMES OF THE HOLOCAUST

A tentative medial historiography

• Early silent film footage (Wiener)• Surveillance recordings• Early cinematic sound recording in Soviet Union (Aleksandr Ford’s Majdenek, 1945, for example) - non synchronous sound

• Silent newsreel (liberation of Auschwitz, for example)

• Wire recording (Boder’s use of Armour wire recorder) ethnographic turn

A tentative medial historiography

• Tape recording of testimonies (from 1950s) and Soviet taped recordings

• Filmed testimony Shoah (Lanzmann): synchronous sound ‘realism’

• Video testimony (more widespread): confessional tone

• Digital remediatisations and redistributions - blurring of distinctions between mediatisations

Digital translations• Towards a ‘hypermediated’ Holocaust• Digital ‘translations’ enable access to ‘primary’ auditory materials (.wav, .mp3, .mp4 and so on) to proliferate

• These formats, and their incessant availability, enable new relationships with (and representations of) the lived experience of the Holocaust

Digital translations• These new mediatisations are implicated in new modes of production

• Uwe Boll’s Auschwitz, 2011, for example, was shot on the same set as his BloodRayne: The Third Reich (based on the video games developed by Terminal Velocity)

• Mixed narrative/confessional style (interviews young Germans)

• References gaming aesthetic

Framing the Holocaust• Shaviro’s ‘media regimes’

– ‘…we are now witnessing the emergence of a different media regime, and indeed a different mode of production, than those which dominated the twentieth century’ Post-Cinematic Affect (2)

– New ways of manufacturing and articulating lived experience

• Media ‘epochism’ – Steven Connor’s critique of Friedrich Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme

– ‘epochal, all-or-nothing view of the ages of media’

Framing the Holocaust• ‘neutral’ digital ‘snapshots’ (conservation, storage, etc.)

• ‘medial window’: myth of the unburdening of information from ‘the shackles of matter’ (Blanchette and Drucker)

• Digital archivism• Privatisation of the Holocaust

Holocaust phonographyImplication of new sound media, new sound collection and storage media, in shaping radically new symbolic imaginaries of the Holocaust:• Post-traumatic (Joshua Hirsch)• After the survivor generation (Marianne Hirsch)

• Multidirectional memory (Rothberg)• Confessional realism (sonic ‘staging’)• Narrative sincerity (mixing of ‘primary’ auditory materials with staged representations)