ABSTRACT
I started working with video testimonies of survivors of the Shoah in 1995 and moved to the United States in 1997. The question of my German heritage and its connection to my research has always had a choking quality for me: It casts me, burdened by a heavy load of irrevocable guilt, on a quest for redemption, caught up in an impossible repair project that will never materialize. I must labor eternally under this burden like Sysiphus under the heavy weight of his stone, without any hope of ever completing the task at hand. This question seems to imply that the impossibility of change weighs me down: I will always be trapped in an underlying dichotomy of perpetrators and victims, held hostage by the undeniable guilt of the generation of Germans before me.
