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Introduction

Mass Violence: from Experience to Knowledge

Les violences de masse, de l’expérience au savoir
Alexandra Garbarini et Boris Adjemian
p. 15-21

Résumés

Ce texte est l’introduction du numéro spécial de la revue Études arméniennes contemporaines consacré au thème « Le témoignage des victimes dans la connaissance des violences de masse ».

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1Until relatively recently, the appropriateness of using victim testimony as a source for studying and understanding the episodes of mass violence that punctuated the twentieth century proved deeply controversial. It inspired and continues to inspire methodological and epistemological debates among scholars across the social sciences and humanities, including historians, legal scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary scholars. Important differences exist across the disciplines, and even among scholars within the same discipline, about the notion of what constitutes testimony, in general; the status of victim testimony, in particular; and the functions it can be made to serve in elucidating crimes against humanity, crimes of war, or genocides. This special issue of Études arméniennes contemporaines takes as its starting point a questioning of the attitudes and practices of historians who are, by definition, experts in the interpretation of documents in their capacity to bear witness to the past. Yet historians are not the only ones to confront the specific category of sources that is victim testimony about mass violence. For that reason, the articles, interviews, and essays that compose this special issue explore different approaches to the topic among historians but also among scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in the legal field. The issue has pertinence for scholars working on any case studies of mass violence.

2No less controversial and varied than the status accorded victim testimony are the meanings and usages across these different disciplines of the very terms “genocide” and “mass violence”, “victim” and “testimony”. Debates about the definition of “genocide” are longstanding. Fixing the international legal definition of genocide and, relatedly, determining which instances of mass murder, in history and in the contemporary world, can and should be considered genocides have had significant international legal, diplomatic, political, and personal consequences. By contrast, “mass violence” is a descriptor that makes no reference to the causes or motives of the crimes therein categorized, and it carries no juridical status, unlike “genocide”. “Mass violence” has tended to serve as a catch-all term referring to a host of crimes typically perpetrated in conjunction with one another, including murder, rape, torture, the brutal consequences of forced population transfer and resettlement, committed against non-state actors by a state or by a more-or-less organized group of other non-state actors. For this special issue, in referring to “victim testimony and mass violence”, we have sought to cast a wide net in order to invite comparative and longitudinal perspectives on victim testimony, its production, and its subsequent significance in understanding genocide and mass violence. For that reason, we have purposely left open the question of differentiating between mass violence in general and genocide in particular. Most of the articles, interviews, and essays that follow analyze cases of genocides – but not exclusively – and we leave open for future consideration whether the production and reception of victim testimony with respect to genocides has qualitatively differed from that of mass violence overall.

3In a similar vein, our use of the term “testimony” is intentionally broad even though it is much more restrictive than the common definition of the word, which is by no means limited to a certain type of source and does not refer specifically to personal enunciations, much less to those of victims. However it is worthy of note that the prevalent usage of the term among contemporary scholars of the Shoah, especially Anglophone scholars, refers to all sources that represent the perspectives of victims of that genocide. Indeed, among historians and literary scholars of the Shoah, the encapsulation of different types of sources (among them: diaries; memoirs; legal depositions; voice recorded, videotaped, and transcribed interviews; as well as literary texts, including poetry and prose) under the rubric “testimony” emphasizes over all other factors, first, the identity of the author as a victim; second, the autobiographical nature of the texts; and third, the intentionality that underlay these sources’ production – that they exist because their authors chose to recount their own experiences in order to contribute to a broader understanding of the history of the Shoah. Several of the authors in their contributions to this special issue also explore other characteristics of these sources that are potentially occluded by the unified category “testimonies”, thereby demonstrating the importance of not only authorship but also genre, period, and the context of production in considering such sources. Nevertheless, despite the heterogeneity of this category of sources, this special issue explores in common what has characterized the status and uses of victim testimony. How might we explain the precarious status of such sources among scholars seeking to understand mass violence, as well as the pronounced divergences that can exist with respect to such sources from one field to another? The treatment of victim testimony in historians’ works on twentieth-century genocides serves here as our point of departure for further reflection.

4The historiography of the Armenian genocide, for example, has long privileged official documents and diplomatic or governmental sources, as well as the testimonies recorded by “third party” witnesses such as missionaries, doctors, or foreign consular officials who were in Anatolia during the First World War. Only beginning in the 1990s have historians of the Armenian genocide come to consider the testimonies produced by victims and survivors of the massacres and deportations as sources worthy of serious scholarly interest. The delay in the appreciation and use of such sources can in part be explained by the difficulty in accessing them for linguistic reasons and also because they existed only in manuscript form in archives. Indeed, the principal archival collections of Armenian victim testimonies remain underutilized to the present day. Beyond such technical matters, however, a certain reticence on the part of historians was also detectable, a reticence about basing a historically objective analysis on sources that, by their provenance alone, appeared to be tainted by the subjectivity of the victims and the experiences they lived through. Exacerbating the precarious status of victim testimony was a long-ascendant genocide denialism, which historians of the Armenian genocide were obligated to refute by establishing the intention of the perpetrators and the organized character of the killings. Historians of the Armenian genocide were, in other words, captives of the unceasing injunction to prove the facts. In such a context, the accounts of survivors, even those accounts recorded in the immediate aftermath of the events being described, did not seem to represent the events with sufficient precision, and all the more since what victims had lived through made it exceedingly difficult for them to construct coherent and verifiable narratives. Nonetheless, scholarly studies based largely on official archives were limited in their own right for being restricted to analyses of a more general nature of the political-military circumstances and the conduct of the genocide. It is the study of victim testimony, ultimately, that has made an essential contribution to establishing concrete knowledge of the implementation of Turkish policies in specific localities. In sum, the utilization of survivor testimony, in making possible the micro-historical study of the destruction of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, has considerably bolstered the historiography of that genocide.

5Beyond the Armenian case, questions about the status and uses of testimony are pertinent to a broad range of studies of mass violence, including the pogroms in Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, the extermination of European Jews and Roma and Sinti during the Second World War, the mass murders perpetrated in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, the genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, the crimes committed in the course of recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Chechnya, as well as various episodes of repression in colonial settings and by Latin American dictators. The mainstream historiography of the Shoah outside of Israel itself only belatedly integrated victim and survivor testimonies, notably with the work of Saul Friedländer in the 1990s-2000s. Prior to that period, English- and German-language historians generally held to the position, most famously articulated by Raul Hilberg, that survivor testimonies were less reliable than Nazi documents because they contained more factual inaccuracies. The German historian Martin Broszat, in his public exchange of letters with Friedländer in the late 1980s, went much further than Hilberg. He dismissed survivor testimony as mere “mythic memory” and argued that it could have no contribution to make toward the “historicization” of the National Socialist past. Even for those historians who did not share Broszat’s derisive attitude, Jewish sources appeared to have few insights to offer into understanding the pressing questions they sought to answer about the evolution of Nazi policies toward Jews, perpetrator motivations, and ordinary Germans’ responses to state-sponsored anti-Semitism. Today, however, the study of the destruction of European Jewry no longer privileges bureaucratic sources, nor does it exclusively focus on dissecting the mechanics of destruction, but also attempts to understand and explain the experience of annihilation. Historians now regularly make use of a wide range of testimonies, from correspondence, diaries, and depositions recorded by survivors in the immediate postwar period, to texts of a more literary nature, even poetry. Of equal significance are several other developments in the field of history in general that have had a substantial impact on the historiography of the Holocaust. The prominence of cultural history and memory studies have awakened interest in new areas of research, and they have also precipitated a marked change in how historians think about objectivity and subjectivity and the constructed nature of all sources. More generally, as Annette Wieviorka compellingly argued in her reflection on the advent of the “era of the witness”, the respect accorded Holocaust survivors and the interest in their wartime experiences are broader cultural phenomena, extending beyond academic discourse and transcending national boundaries. One of the objectives of this special issue is to ask to what extent, precisely, Wieviorka’s reflection can be transposed to analyze memories of other episodes of mass violence.

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6The questions posed here, far from referring to a single branch of knowledge, nor to one specific case or form of mass violence, are cross-disciplinary and call for comparative approaches. They open up for consideration the status of victim testimonies, and in particular their reception and uses in the historiographical realm over the course of the last century. Yet because historians tend primarily to look to testimony as a window onto the past that has the potential to reveal new information or objective truths, it is essential to look beyond the field of history to the other social sciences and humanities, to explore what, in its multiplicity, documentation coming from victims contributes to our understanding of the experience of catastrophe, thereby also integrating into our study of such violence an analysis of the individual and collective meanings residing in the very act of bearing witness. Literary scholars, for example, remind us that testimony is also a phenomenon in itself, encompassing many forms of expression, including literature and poetry, and opening up unlimited possibilities of interpretation.

7Several of the texts that follow focus primarily on “early testimonies,” that is, testimonies recorded in the immediate aftermath of the events they recount, particularly after the First and Second World Wars. What significance ought we to accord such early testimonies vis-à-vis other testimonies that came into being several years – or even several decades – later, as was the case for the tens of thousands of testimonies recorded by the foundation Steven Spielberg created in the United States in the mid-1990s or for the testimonies produced in the context of criminal trials or as part of Truth and Reconciliation commission hearings? It might appear logical to privilege testimonies collected in the immediate aftermath over those recorded subsequently, since in the latter case it is easier to suspect survivors of having reconstructed their experiences in accordance with the needs and considerations of the present, as well as to assume that misrepresentations are likely to result from the distance in time between a testimony’s recording and the events described therein. But in reality the difference between “early” and “later” testimonies is not as straightforward as it may appear. Efforts to “collect” the testimonies of victims, or of bystanders or “third parties”, about experiences of mass violence – efforts which were undertaken already in the early twentieth century in response to the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the German atrocities in Belgium, and the genocide of Herero and Nama in the German colony of South-West Africa – serve as so many examples of the fact that the preservation and transmission of victim testimonies and the constitution of archival collections were hardly neutral projects, despite their proximity in time to the events. Regardless of whether the actors involved were states or independent organizations or groups, their interest in collecting testimony stemmed directly from the goals they hoped to accomplish when the opportunity presented itself to condemn criminals, to demand reparations, or to punish an enemy state. Closer in time to the present-day, the successive collections of testimony carried out by non-governmental organizations in the aftermath of the genocide of Tutsi perpetrated in Rwanda in 1994 and also, in subsequent years, in judicial settings, continue to invite reflection on the status of victim testimony and the ongoing importance of testimony to the creation of knowledge about mass violence among scholars in all fields.

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Alexandra Garbarini et Boris Adjemian, « Mass Violence: from Experience to Knowledge »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 5 | 2015, 15-21.

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Alexandra Garbarini et Boris Adjemian, « Mass Violence: from Experience to Knowledge »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 5 | 2015, mis en ligne le 15 juillet 2015, consulté le 28 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/743 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.743

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Auteurs

Alexandra Garbarini

Associate Professor of History, Williams College, Massachusetts

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Boris Adjemian

Historian, Curator of the Nubar Library, Paris

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