A Comfortable Atrocity: Bearing Witness Beyond the Courtroom

open_access
Open Access
Author:
Conway, Samuel
Area of Honors:
English
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Lisa Ruth Sternlieb, Thesis Supervisor
Matt Tierney, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Holocaust testimony
bearing witness
non-juridical testimony
memory and representation
the gray zone
banality of evil
thoughtlessness
trauma and witnessing
Manichaean narrative
aestheticization
juridical testimony
show trial
Holocaust museology
sites of memory
popular culture
Primo Levi
Hannah Arendt
Shoshana Felman
Claude Lanzmann
Shoah
Zone of Interest
Eichmann trial
Demjanjuk trial
self-justification
perpetrator narrative
institutional resolution
incompleteness of testimony
silence as testimony
Sonderkommando
contamination and guilt
Holocaust testimony
Bearing witness
Non-juridical testimony
Testimony
Memory
Representation
Gray Zone
Banality
Trauma
Manichaean
Shoah
Zone of Interest
Shoshana Felman
Claude Lanzmann
Eichmann trial
Sonderkommando
Contamination
Abstract:
Holocaust testimony is a gesture that points to the limits of language and representation. A mode of remembrance and partial understanding, it bridges the gap between law and art, fact and emotion, past and present. Drawing on the works of Shoshana Felman, Claude Lanzmann, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Yossi Bloch, Daniel Sivan, Jonathan Glazer, and others, we can explore the paradoxes and complexities of human nature, the fragility of memory, and the incompleteness of testimony. Perpetrators portray themselves as victims, developing a narrative of self-justification. The courtroom, the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, and the defense regulate honesty. And the banality of evil manifests itself in the everyday language and behavior of both those who witnessed and those who carried out the genocide. Museums, films, and sites of memory share the courtrooms’ demand for resolution, routing visitors and viewers from atrocity toward meaning along a predictable and comfortable path. But they cannot do what the most powerful testimony does: linger on the unresolved and resist the clarity that institutions demand. Perhaps every framework built to remember the Holocaust has, in its own way, flattened what it claimed to preserve.