ABSTRACT
Although an extensive range of scholarship addresses archived Holocaust testimony, particularly in terms of its ethical, narrative, and psychoanalytic dimensions, considerably less work examines how the interrelationship between institutional and individual practices mediates the process of witnessing.1 Furthermore, most of the critical inquiry on the subject focuses on the one-to-one transferential dynamic between the interviewer and the interviewee. It rarely extends to an analysis of how formal practices and institutional infrastructures shape not only the process of testimonial production but also dissemination and reception. This area of examination is particularly pressing, considering how Holocaust testimony archives have expanded in recent years in anticipation of the passing of the survivor community and the epistemological and ethical transition from living memory to postmemory.2 This begs examination of how experientially charged testimonies of the Holocaust will be resuscitated in the absence of living witnesses, and how their pedagogical and commemorative potentiality will be activated beyond the boundaries of the archive and the museum. Rather than suggesting that the testimonies of living survivors
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delivered in person at museums and other spaces are somehow raw accounts in contrast to their framed audiovisual renderings, this chapter underscores how both forms of witnessing are subject to interrelated mediating forces in an effort by archives and museums to channel the immediate, embodied resonances of traumatic memory.3
