ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 addresses the “archive fever” by exploring the role of the archive in shaping our understanding of the fact and the ways in which its function as an archetype of historical factuality impacted upon our modern understanding of testimony and memory. Investigating the impact of public discourses of the post-Shoah era on testimony, I retrace the genealogies of the testimonial post-Shoah culture and the shifts on the status of testimony. Furthermore, by examining oral and written testimonies by Greek survivors over a long period that spans from the end of the Shoah to nowadays, I focus on the transformations of testimonial narratives in relation to the public discourses and on the impact of archival collections of testimonies such as the VHA/USC Shoah Foundation in shaping testimony. The chapter investigates the extent to which the examination of the memory of the Holocaust and its influence on identity in Greece, which had one of the highest death rates in the European Jewish population, shifts some of our taken-for-granted assumptions about the development of Holocaust memory.
