ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the challenges of one testimony in a restitution procedure sixty years after the war, with regard both to evidence and to defining the role of a witness. It explores testifying as social practice by scrutinizing a hearing from a recent restitution claim in Austria about returning a house that was aryanized in 1938 in Vienna. The chapter aims to reconsider the meanings of "testimony" in a restitution procedure and to show how the study of reparation procedures can make a critical contribution to the study of testimony and vice-versa. It argues that in scholarly debates and institutional practice, the topic of compensation to victims of National Socialism has often become mired in historical and legal details, instead of focusing on the social practice and its ambivalent effects. The "forgotten victims" of National Socialism were "(re)discovered" toward the end of the 1980s, while for some groups compensation issues were only addressed in the late 1990s.
