“Post-testimony” The place of testimony in the historiography of the Shoah

Abstract

Abstract The analysis of survivors’ testimonies was unable to enter history-writing for many decades after the Shoah. If nevertheless it was, the testimonies served only as illustrations of the personal experience of victims in the Grand Narrative of historians. However, in the past 20 years, parallel to the opening of digital oral history archives, these testimonies became regular sources of mainstream historical research. Moreover, the memory culture of the Shoah has fundamentally changed in the Western world after 1989. From the perspective of my paper, the most relevant changes were a widespread appearance of the concept (cultural, social, historical) of trauma in public history, and the digital turn in testimony collections. It is a commonplace in psychological and sociological research on Holocaust testimonies and other ego documents that in the case of large digital collections specific analytical methods need to be used. However, Holocaust historians dealing with these sources have hardly applied such methods. My paper proposes specific sociological techniques of using personal accounts in history-writing (such as the intuitive analysis of testimonies by accumulating and testing data; qualitative approaches and quantifying the data of big qualitative collections). It also discusses the historical usage of large testimony collections with the help of current case studies of the Holocaust in Hungary. Keywords: Holocaust studies, oral history, digital archives, trauma, historiography