No. 14 2021

Witnessing as political activism: Zeitzeugen in Asia and the Middle East* Hilal Alkan, Heike Liebau, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

Annette Wieviorka (2006) identifies our time as the “Era Keywords: witness to history, Zeitzeuge, memory, political activism, of the Witness”, an era in which witness statements truth commissions, citizen history projects appear among the key components of public history and national narratives. It is an era in which individual of the term can be traced back to the Eichmann trial narratives based on memories of events of social sig- in Jerusalem in 1960, where survivors of concentration nificance began to compete with, challenge, and also camps appeared as witnesses against the Nazi crimi- shape official histories. It is an era that began in the nal Adolf Eichmann, recounting their own personal ex- aftermath of World War II and has been made possible periences as victims of fascist violence (Wieviorka 2006: by the technological developments that allowed audio-­ 56-66). With regard to the German discourse about visual recordings to become increasingly available. It the Holocaust and the crimes of the National Social- has involved a change in the primary location of giving ist regime, the late 1980s saw a growing presence of testimonies (from the courts to the public sphere), in the Zeitzeugen (plural form of Zeitzeuge) in German TV and diversity of witnesses (increasingly coming from mar- other media (Ernst/Schwarz 2012: 32). ginalised groups), in the mediums used (from written or Like Wieviorka, speaking about an era of Zeitzeuge, oral statements saved in archives to Youtube videos or Sabrow observes a Zeitzeugen movement accompa- even holograms), and finally in the function of witness nied by a commodification and exchange of Zeitzeugen accounts (from consolidating singular hegemonic nar- within the so-called Zeitzeugenbörsen (markets of wit- ratives to multiplying historical truths). The witness in nesses). He raises a question about the effects of such Wieviorka’s account corresponds to the broad discus- commercialization, and asks whether the growing role sion on the concept of the Zeitzeuge and the narrative of Zeitzeugen in the public discourse about history is about its rise as a public figure in the German academ- related to a declining role of history writing and pro- ic debate (for instance: Sabrow 2012; Krämer 2012, for fessional historical research. However, Sabrow argues a broader view, see also: Krämer/Weigel 2017). against a polarization or simple opposition between A person who lived through a specific time, who witnessed the historian and the witness, noting rather a trend an event or a period, can become a Zeitzeuge1—one who towards a “self-historization” and a growing charis- constitutes through her narrative her own “world of matization of historical proximity and immediateness happening” (Geschehenswelt). The term Zeitzeuge in leading to a boom of Zeitzeugen as witnesses (Sabrow the German language publicly appeared in the 1970s, 2012: 20–21). used to name a person who recounts a past that she Zeitzeuge is an exceedingly sharper word than “wit- had been part of (Sabrow 2012: 17). The emergence ness”. Die Zeit is the time, der Zeuge is the witness. By being the time-witness, the witness of a time period, the

* This paper has been written at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Zeitzeuge points to a specific function, easily leaving and is to a great extent informed by discussions that took place out the connotations of testifying as a witness in court within the research units Trajectories of Lives and Knowledge (2014–2019) as well as Representations of the Past as a Mobilizing as well as religious witnessing as a declaration of faith. Force (2020– ). We would like to thank members of these research A Zeitzeuge is by definition a public and political figure, units for their input, comments, suggestions and critiques. We were aiming to unearth unknown truths of a shared past, to especially inspired by the intensive discussions on the idea of the start or sustain a political debate about who we are Zeitzeuge or the role of subjectivity and materialities (Riecken, Lie­ as a society. A Zeitzeuge is a witness to history, to a bau 2019). Special thanks go to Norman Saadi Nikro, Veronica Fer- reri and Farzana Haniffa for reading and commenting, and to the particular history that becomes relevant in a particu- anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. lar present. Therefore, the set of questions relating to the present arise when Zeitzeugen perform: When and 1 Throughout this paper, we work with the German term Zeitzeuge where does the Zeitzeuge speak? And, for whom does (pl. Zeitzeugen) or the widely used English translations “witness to the Zeitzeuge speak? history” or “time-witness”. With all forms, we face the challenge of gender inclusive language. While the witness is gender neutral, The notion of Zeitzeuge has so far been mostly explored Zeitzeuge is a masculine form. In order to avoid cumbersome ways in national contexts, concentrating on European, and of writing, including symbols like * or / , we decided to use these in particular German history (Wieviorka 1999, 2006; terms as generic forms and, when it comes to pronouns, we give Assmann 2007; Sabrow/Frei 2012). One reason is that preference to the female form whenever this seems possible. We the Second World War and the Holocaust have long also use Zeitzeugenschaft to denote the act and practice of bearing witness. been central reference points for the emergence of the www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 1 Zeitzeuge as a public figure. This figure represented I The Zeitzeuge: A conceptual discussion an authentic voice able to speak on the unfathoma- Martin Sabrow (2012) introduces the Zeitzeuge as a ble violence of the Holocaust, difficult to fully assess “wanderer between two worlds” (“Wanderer zwischen through prevalent historical sources. New research by zwei Welten”) referring to a particular present and a and about Zeitzeugen and Zeitzeugenschaft has shift- past. Tensions and dialogues between the two worlds ed to other events and periods of time. These include can be both a prerequisite and a result of the activities the break-down of the socialist system, the nuclear ca- of Zeitzeugen. Such practices imply processes of history tastrophe of Chernobyl, the war in Afghanistan, the in the making, when the past, as a person experienced violence of the Stalinist system, or the German mas- it, is transformed into history and becomes part of a sacre of the Herero in Namibia (see for instance: Er- historical narrative or debate through performance in nst/Schwarz 2012; Aleksievič 1992, 1999; Scherbakova front of an audience. Witnesses of the past become wit- 2003, Hammerstein 2016). This implies a geographical nesses to history once they give testimony on their ex- expansion as well as translocal approaches, as witness- perience in public (de Jong 2018: 38). Thus, wandering ing has become part of the political activist repertoire between two worlds does not only relate to two time- in many non-European settings. Research interest is worlds. We can relate this wandering to at least three thus not limited to national boundaries, but also en- frames of travel that have found their way into the in- compasses comparisons and aspects of connectivities ternational academic debate on Zeitzeugen. and translocal entanglements. First, there is temporal travel. Zeitzeugen move be- In this paper, our aim is to broaden the discourse on the tween a period or an event in the past and a present concept of the Zeitzeuge. We expand the geographi- time which requires an engagement with the past the cal scope and concentrate on societies in Asia and the Zeitzeuge witnessed. Second, being a Zeitzeuge re- Middle East, where witness testimonies have been used quires mediating between the private and the public. in post-conflict situations, often under non-­democratic, Zeitzeugen move between individual experiences of fundamentalist, or authoritarian structures. We present an event/period and the collective/public memory of case studies from Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, India, Kash- them. This movement is structured by the expectations mir, and Sri Lanka. Based on our understanding of the of an audience as well as the role of the media. Finally, Zeitzeuge as a political figure and Zeitzeugenschaft objects like images, photographs, buildings, or plants (“witnesshood”) as political activism, we investigate could, through their materiality, mediate between the the agency, the political agendas, and the practices witness and the audience and become part of the per- these Zeitzeugen develop as political actors. With their formance of the Zeitzeuge throughout and even be- testimonies in politically contingent contexts, in soci- yond the lifetime of the person. eties that face conflicts, crises and transformations, their acts of making statements are often potentially Temporalities dangerous for them, especially if they challenge es- Questions of temporality lay the foundation for the tablished historical narratives. The aim here is, there- concept and practice of Zeitzeuge. First is a notion and fore, to explore the wide array of political agendas of understanding of time that is comprised of a past, a Zeitzeugen and the different modalities they assume. present, and a future. The relative weight of these three After discussing the main debates on the concept of timescapes changes socio-historically from one era to the Zeitzeuge in the first part of the paper under the another, and personally within the life-course of an in- subtitles of temporalities, medialities and material- dividual. Being stuck in the past, being future-oriented, ities, the second part is organised around practices, and living for today are phrases that mark not only indi- which are inevitably shaped and defined by political vidual traits but also certain historical moments. and social structures and the conditions at the time of While exploring the notion of historical time, as distinct their emergence. These structures and conditions may from chronological (planetary) time and biological time, allow proliferation, as well as inhibition. We look at Reinhardt Koselleck (2004) untangles the relationship Zeitzeugen in citizen truth commissions, Zeitzeugen in between the past and the future. For him the past is the education and citizen history projects, and Zeitzeugen space of experience, while the future stands for a hori- in artistic representations. Unlike studies that fore- zon of expectation. Both are anchored to the present. ground aspects of evidence and question how reliable testimonies of Zeitzeugen are and how far they can Experience is present past, whose events have been incor- provide historical truth, our main interest derives from porated and can be remembered… Similarly with expecta- the agency of the Zeitzeugen themselves. Which ideas tion: at once person-specific and interpersonal, expecta- of justice are behind their activities and what do they tion also takes place in the today; it is the future made in use in order to claim authenticity? Zeitzeugen accounts the present (2004: 259). are pleas for justice. They make the unknown knowable These two notions, experience and expectation, respec- and undeniable. They flesh out what is lost in interna- tively pointing to the past and the future, are certainly tional agencies’ reports, statistics, and numbers. They not symmetrical, but they are mutually dependent. ‘No invite the audience to look truth in the eye, to believe expectation without experience, no experience with- it, and to act accordingly. In the contexts discussed in out expectation’ (p. 257), says Koselleck. The first part this paper, this often means going against the grain, of the statement is easier to grasp: our expectations swimming against strong tides. rely on our past experiences. Experiences give expec-

www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 2 tations flesh, friction, and content. Yet our experiences only affected by the socio-political climate of the time are also mutually dependent on expectations, on two but also by the person’s own aging and maturing. De- levels. First, because the past itself was once a future, tails that bear significance change over time, as do the past expectations are the basis of experiences. Second, emotions they convey. our expectations, our orientations towards the future, Aging also creates a sense of urgency, not necessarily make experiences visible in different shades and forms for the Zeitzeuge herself but for the audience. Being a under different lights. Zeitzeuge is a role limited to the lifetime of that person. Sabrow’s “wanderer between two worlds”, the Zeitzeu- Her body is the registry upon which the experiences ge, may reside and perform in the present. However, were engraved. Her voice is the medium that makes her task is to communicate experiences in sync with the these engravings at least partially accessible to others. expectations of the future. Emblematic of this tempo- When the body ceases to exist, so does the memory, ral dimension is the slogan “never again”, used initial- with its affective, visceral, and material qualities. How- ly referring to Holocaust and later employed by Latin ever, witnessing does not stop there. With testimonies, American truth commissions and anti-autocratic move- museum collections, documentaries, sound archives, ments all around the world. It is a promise to the future, and oral history collections, these testimonies contin- with an explicit reference to the experiences of the past. ue to exist, albeit torn away from the body, which was The role of the Zeitzeugen is to make these experiences the pre-condition for their existence in the first place. available in the present, so that they would never be They are then taken up by the vicarious witnesses (Zeit- experienced again. lin 1998; Hartog 2017), who are witnesses of the wit- The second important question regarding temporality nesses. As interrogators, interviewers, or re-narrators of relates to what is considered to be the past. To quote the primary witnesses’ testimony, vicarious witnesses Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “[t]he past—or, more accurately are more than mere vessels—they become personal- pastness—is a position” (1995: 15). It is not something ly involved as embodied mediators who are intimately out there; the past is not a storage room from which affected and shaped by this second-hand witnessing experiences can be retrieved as they are. Rather, the (Zeitlin 1998; Scherbakowa 2003, 2012). past, or history for that matter, is made at the inter- Marianne Hirsch (2012) explores the intricacies of this section and through the interaction of present forces. intimate and embodied relationship through the no- Traces and effects of past times constantly inform and tion of “postmemory”. For Hirsch, “postmemory” de- shape societies, whereas processes of “relating the scribes the relationship that the “generation after” present to absent times” (Landwehr 2016: 142, our bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma translation) are always historically determined. This of those who came before—to the experiences they “chronoference”, as Landwehr argues, is the way the “remember” or embody only by means of the stories, present relates to non-present times (p. 28). images, and behaviours among which they grew up. Zeitzeugen are actors of history. They interact with a But these experiences were transmitted to them so time and the happenings of that time; are affected by deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memo- them and affect them. They are also the subjects of his- ries in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the tory. By using their voices to set the account straight, past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by im- they contribute to the making of history, to the writing aginative investment, projection, and creation (Hirsch of the historical narrative. However, they are neither the 2012: 5). Zeitzeugenschaft as a practice is then trans- only actors nor the only subjects. Their voices gain cred- ferred to the generations that follow. However, it is too ibility and significance only within certain socio-political early to forecast how effective and significant vicarious constellations. Their past is made the past only with witnessing will be when the Zeitzeugen accounts cease the contribution of other voices, other subjects who to be considered as Zeitgeschichte (contemporary his- claim the authority to define what counts as history. tory) (Wieviorka 2006; Ernst/Schwarz 2012). Zeitzeugen voices are constitutive of the past, but only as much as that past is simultaneously deciphered as Medialities the past by many other forces. We will consider these The Zeitzeuge is a person who embodies history, and social and political forces in more detail in the second this embodiment of history is performed in public (Wie- part of this paper. viorka 2006: 97). For our argumentation, the relation- A Zeitzeuge relates her present to her past and there- ship between uniqueness and universality is important. by sometimes overrides chronologies and linearities, Annette Wieviorka states that testimonies, which brings us to another significant moment of temporality: understanding the notion of Zeitzeuge in demonstrate this uniqueness using the language of the the realm of life course and generations. Becoming a time in which they are delivered and in response to ques- Zeitzeuge, by definition, happens at a different point in tions and expectations motivated by political and ideo- the life course of an individual than the time when the logical concerns. Consequently despite their uniqueness, act of witnessing took place. A Holocaust survivor now testimonies come to participate in a collective memory – talks about her childhood in concentration camps as or collective memories – that vary in their form, function, an old woman. We hear how the GDR youth tore down and in the implicit or explicit aims they set for themselves. the Berlin wall with their own hands from middle-aged (2006: xii) voices. These experiences and narratives are thus not

www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 3 Wieviorka’s historical account of the emergence of in the act of testifying” (Krämer and Weigel 2017: x). the witness as a key figure in the making of collective After the Eichman trial, the witnesses of the Holocaust memory is based on the collective remembrance of the found a social world that allowed for the flourishing of Holocaust. In this context, the first acts of witnessing Zeitzeugen. As part of global and particularly German took place even while the catastrophe was being inflict- atonement, they were invited to make their experiences ed upon European Jews (Wieviorka 2006). Those who public, through various media but also in schools and died or rarely survived in the ghettos and the concen- community establishments. They were encouraged to tration camps meticulously kept journals and mem- become explicit time-witnesses who speak out public- oirs, collected and hid material that would later prove ly. Hence, they aired the direct and indirect memories what they went through. This was a deliberate act in engraved on them as implicit time-witnesses of the Na- pursuit of survival—not necessarily individual survival, tional Socialist regime (Ernst/Schwarz 2012: 44). They but certainly survival as a people. They sought to leave were publicly given the authority to speak and the au- unquestionable traces that they existed and eventual- thenticity of their accounts was accepted. Hence they ly perished. We, the audiences to these records, have began to function within an interpersonal realm, where hardly been able to see the authors, the witnesses, their authenticity and the audience’s trust in them as themselves. However, their embodied statements have the source of epistemic validations were established reached us through these accounts of personal ago- (Koppelberg 2017). nies that claimed future publicity, as they had absolute- Unlike documents and other evidence that can be ma- ly no audience at the time of their bearing witness. The terially scrutinised for proof of authenticity, the authen- probably most famous Zeitzeuge of the Holocaust, Pri- ticity of a person’s account is profoundly dependent on mo Levi, argues in his last book The Drowned and the interpersonal trust. To be seen as acting earnestly and Saved (1986) that it is not those who survived (like him), truthfully, the person has to have personal authenticity but those who died in the camps, who are silent, who (Krämer 2012). However, personal credibility is a social could never return, who are the real, true witnesses. construct as much as a personal achievement. Not all According to Wieviorka (2006) and Sabrow (2012) Adolf witnesses receive the treatment the Holocaust survi- Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem opened a new stage for vors received after much effort post-1960s, certainly the witness as a social figure. This particular trial was not everywhere and not on every occasion. The political designed not only to prosecute a high-level Nazi officer, and social conditions that establish authenticity are not but more importantly to exhibit the span and depth of available to all. In the second part of this paper, we will the atrocities committed against the Jews of Europe. consider the social and political processes that nurture Hence the witnesses rarely had any direct accusations or limit (even prohibit) Zeitzeugen practices in different against Eichmann. The one hundred and twelve state- contexts. Lacking socially validated authenticity (how- ments collectively presented a huge and detailed pano- ever truthful their accounts may be), but more impor- rama of life during the Holocaust. In the chief prosecu- tantly lacking an audience, some witnesses are forced tor Gideon Hausner’s words, these spoken statements either into silence—or, even when they do speak, they “superimpose[d] on a phantom a dimension of reality” are simply not heard (see the groundbreaking works of (quoted in Wieviorka 2006: 70), by giving victims and Spivak 1988 and Piterberg 2006). survivors the central stage. Zeitzeugen do not always appear on stage or in the The journalists who were invited to follow the hearings witness stand. Musealization should also be men- disseminated this new reality to the globe. This thus cre- tioned here as another, less direct form of public “per- ated the audience for the Zeitzeugen; finally meeting formance” or public representation of witnesses. Life the essential prerequisite of bearing witness. Certainly, stories, narrations, and testimonies are made public in the Eichmann trial was not the first occasion on which museums and exhibitions by being adapted to the au- witnesses met their audience and became Zeitzeugen dience’s modes of perception. As elsewhere, commu- in an interrelational realm. However, it marked the start nicative memory becomes part of a collective memory of an era in which being a witness acquired increas- when such narrations are represented in a museum (de ing significance and authenticity, owing much to the Jong 2018). As the question here also involves the cre- carefully designed and framed performance of bearing ation of objects, or objects embodying testimonies, we witness as a globally broadcasted event. need to look more closely at the medium and materi- The moment the act of bearing witness is witnessed ality of the Zeitzeugen, which is the topic of the next by an audience, it gains its specific social and political subsection. value. Acting as a Zeitzeuge entails publicness at vari- ous levels ranging from family and schools to different Materialities media. Performances by Zeitzeugen or with Zeitzeugen In the case of Zeitzeugen, the messenger herself is of- are always complex interactions that take place un- ten the medium (Krämer 2012: 20). Here we find the der particular conditions. Political situations, societal combination of material and personal authenticity. The developments, or conflicts lead to debates on history witness, therefore, is also “an object” (de Jong 2018), that might require testimonies. In this vein, Krämer and she is even the “document” of a past, because she em- Weigel trenchantly argue that “it is not a single person, bodies the past in her experiences. She also possesses nor a single speech act, but an intersubjective situation personal authenticity because the audience regards her in a historically specific social world that is condensed as truthful and credible (Krämer 2012: 24). What hap-

www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 4 pens then, when the Zeitzeugen cease to exist, when Things as witnesses are objects that bear a connec- they die? Is it possible to preserve their experiences, the tion to a person that had been/is a Zeitzeuge (Malho- key feature of which is embodiment, in objects that can tra 2019). The object does not stand for itself. It is not outlive the witnesses? Is it possible to create (or maybe about “a” suitcase or “a” shoe, but rather a particular assume) witness authenticity in buildings, photographs, suitcase that belonged or might have belonged to a or ordinary items like shoes or suitcases? What is left prisoner in a KZ, or a shoe that was or might have been by the Zeitzeugen when they complete the course of worn by a person who died in the Holocaust. The ob- their lives? Is it possible to approach museums as sites ject can only speak to the observer through the knowl- of Zeitzeugen collections/collectives? edge the viewer has. Even if one does not know the To address these questions, we return to the notions of exact person, one knows the history, and the object the “vicarious witness” (Zeitlin 1998) and “post­memory” then manifests its authenticity. The interplay of imagi- (Hirsch 2012). As stated above, being a Zeitzeuge is a nation and evidence that Marianne Hirsch writes about role limited to the lifetime of that person, yet the mem- is again evident here. ory can be transmitted to younger generations. Howev- er, it is not only persons who inherit memory and can II Zeitzeugen: Modalities of witnessing as a political thus act as vicarious witnesses. Under specific condi- act in Asia and the Middle East tions, things, images, and objects can also take on this “The functions of witnesses to history are defined by role. In Camera Lucida (1981), Roland Barthes ties his the settings in which the individual witnesses appear,” analysis of photography to his own autobiography and writes Steffi de Jong (2018: 37). Such “settings” gener- directs his gaze to the photographs of his late relatives. ate the social and political conditions in which people He goes through the photographs of his mother and who experienced or lived through a particular period tries to capture what is left of her in these small paper of time become witnesses to history. In the second objects. He then concludes, rather decisively: part of this paper, we will discuss the political agendas and practices of witnesses to history in three such set- The important thing is that the photograph possesses an tings: political activism and citizen truth commissions, evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the education and citizen history projects, and artistic rep- object but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, resentations. The examples we analyse come from dif- in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds ferent countries in the Middle East and Asia and deal the power of representation (1981: 89). with situations in which bearing witness to history is often an act of resistance or protest. We propose an So even if we cannot get to know the people in these analytical perspective that situates the statements and photographs, hear their stories, or even learn about acts of Zeitzeugen vis-à-vis the dominant national his- their context in full, even if we need to put imagina- torical narratives concerning their respective contexts. tive energy to work in order to make sense of them, At the same time, the three settings we consider call the photographs testify that these people existed. They for a translocal perspective, as local and national pro- were there, some time ago, as according to Burke, “im- jects are often influenced by international movements. ages, like texts and oral testimonies, are an important They make use of globally proved models, techniques, form of historical evidence. They record acts of eyewit- or strategies, and refer to political developments world- nessing” (2001: 14). wide. With these in mind, our perspective foregrounds This testimonial capacity of photographs, however, is the agency of the witnesses to history, while not ignor- very much debated, given that it is possible to tamper ing or exclusively concentrating on their status as vic- with photographs even with the most basic technol- tims of persecution. At the centre of our analysis are ogies, let alone today’s digital miracles. There is also the ways Zeitzeugen recompose national narratives the question of staging and framing and, certainly, of and challenge them in order to fill their gaps, and how context. Closely considering second-generation Hol- they raise their voices and speak from the margins to ocaust memory through her own collection of family undermine and question national narratives. photographs, Marianne Hirsch (1997) acknowledges these hazards and situates them within the frame of Zeitzeugen in citizen truth commissions remembrance: Truth commissions are one of the major mechanisms of transitional justice, which is defined by the Internation- Photographs in their enduring ‘umbilical’ connection to al Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) as life are precisely the medium connecting first- and sec- ond-generation remembrance, memory and postmemory. the ways countries emerging from periods of conflict and They are leftovers, the fragmentary sources and build- repression address large-scale or systematic human rights ing blocks, shot through with holes, of the work of post- violations so numerous and so serious that the normal memory. They affirm the past’s existence and, in their flat justice system will not be able to provide an adequate re- two-­dimensionality, they signal its unbridgeable distance sponse (2020). (1997: 23). As such, transitional justice is extraordinary justice, re- But our intention is not to simply regard the object per quiring extraordinary and time-limited tools, which are se as a time-witness to history. Rather we are interest- not limited to criminal prosecutions and punishment. ed in the connections between objects and persons. The final goal is reconciliation and to establish the

www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 5 rule-of-law. Within this framework, truth commissions While official truth and reconciliation commissions act emerge as key venues where human rights violations on a high political level, often installed and controlled could be recognised, acknowledged, and possibly ad- by the respective state, and thus aim at changing or dressed. They act on the premise that forgetfulness correcting a national narrative to create, consolidate, might lead to resentment on one side and vengefulness or regain national identity, there exist various means to on the other, thus fuelling future conflicts. While ac- challenge existing national narratives from other per- counting for past atrocities, they are essentially future spectives. Among them are also “unofficial truth pro- oriented institutions: they aim to create the conditions jects” (Bickford 2007), based on the efforts of non-state of peaceful co-existence in a society, yet their success actors or civil society, in which witnesses to history act is contingent. as mediums for challenging homogeneous and singu- Providing testimonies to truth commissions is often an lar national narratives by offering alternatives and mul- act of Zeitzeugenschaft, as it involves linking the past tiplying historical truths. Struggling under contingent with the future and mediating between the private and or violent conditions, citizens’ truth commissions or as- the public. Truth commissions rely on individuals’ pri- sociations aim for minority voices to be publicly heard, vate memories that are made public through hearings recognised and integrated into larger processes of rec- (Ross 2003). The level of publicity and the level of pri- onciliation and national consolidation, hence making vateness depend on the commission’s mandate and the truth more encompassing. method, yet it is still people’s recollections that are used Unofficial truth projects resemble official truth commis- to create a public account of truth about past events sions not only in their endeavour to champion acknowl- (Andrews 2003). However, both the selection of these edgment of past atrocities as the first step towards individual stories and the way they are categorised, his- societal peace-building, but also in their methods: col- toricised, and framed is a deliberate task that brings lecting documents, conducting forensic research, and certain narratives to the fore and obscures others. Ac- most importantly recruiting Zeitzeugen to give testimo- cording to Molly Andrews (2003: 46), truth commissions nies about a period or event. Most of them are smaller “both produce and are produced by grand national in scale, yet when it is not possible to establish a truth narratives, and must be understood in the particu- commission, or when official initiatives would be politi- lar context(s) in which they emerge and the particular cally compromised, they perform vital functions. These goals, either implicit or explicit, which guide their work.” range from therapeutic (both for individuals and society Truth commissions are often “educational enterprises” as a whole) to deeply political, as they create venues for (Mamdani 2015: 72), crafting the outlines of “new” so- stories that were once unknown to the general public. cieties and disseminating them to the public. Unofficial truth projects are visible in many forms However, as Paul Silverstein and Ussama Makdisi around the globe. Mock trials are one of them, as in the (2006: 12) remind us, “[b]ecause reconciliation by defi- case of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribu- nition depends on compromise, all processes of recon- nal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery held in Tokyo in ciliation depend on a partial ‘forgetting’”. Therefore, it 2000 (Henry 2011). Other times, they mimic and act as is important to remember that the grand narrative a replacements for truth commissions, as in the case of truth commission produces is only one truth among the Nunca Mais initiative in Brazil, which has collected many others (Bakıner 2015; Mamdani 2000). The val- classified military documents and witness statements ue of this singular truth is dependent on how large in order to document torture and human rights abus- and inclusive it is of the truths of the individuals who es under the military dictatorship between 1964–1985 came to testify and who make up the society (Mamdani (Dassin 1998). Yet, as in the case of the My Story ini- 2000). It is contingent upon how much the testimonial tiative in Bosnia Herzegovina, these unofficial projects narrative produced by the commission is loyal, respect- may keep their scope deliberately small. Rather than ful, and encompassing of what individuals witnessed, collecting as much as possible, they often focus on out- experienced, and finally narrated. The narration itself, reach to create mutual understanding, empathy, and however, is very much shaped by what is asked—the finally true reconciliation between hostile groups (Ober- questions determined by the mandate of the commis- pfalzerova/Ullrich/Jeřábek 2019). Despite the specifics sion and the focus of inspection. For the famous South of each context, all these projects are translocally en- African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that func- tangled, because they learn from each other, form al- tioned between 1995–1998 and collected more than liances, establish networks, and create benchmarks for 21,000 testimonies, the mandate was limited to indi- future projects to flourish. In this section we will focus vidual extra-legal human rights violations. It failed to on two unofficial truth projects, from Iraq and Sri Lanka, account for the perfectly legal structures of racialised to discuss their political premises and imperatives and dispossession and disenfranchisement the Apartheid how Zeitzeugen played a crucial role within them. regime had been built upon (Mamdani 2000; 2015; on In 2003, The United States-led invasion of Iraq ended the relation on law and testimony see Sander 2007). the notorious Ba’ath regime. Yet the transition brought Hence, the truth of the TRC covered the experiences of neither peace nor reconciliation. Amidst violence that anti-Apartheid activists, but not of those for whom the has erupted sporadically ever since, there have been activists had fought. This serious limitation, despite the many calls and attempts to establish a truth and recon- tremendous achievements, led some to criticise the TRC ciliation commission (Sarkin/Sensibaugh 2008; Hidary for legitimizing Apartheid (see for example, Wilson 2001). 2009; Sterling 2009; Emmerson 2013). However, it has

www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 6 never been realised, mostly—although not exclusive- tablishing a memorial site as a public space for com- ly—due to fears about acknowledging the torture and memoration in a way true to the survivors’ perspective. violence American troops and administrators commit- This coincided with other memorialization efforts. Most ted during the invasion. Therefore, the Supreme Iraqi importantly, the comprehensive Kurdistan Memory Tribunal of 2005, which ended with the hasty execution Programme (kurdistanmemoryprogramme.com) was of Saddam Hussein and a few of his accomplices, has launched in the same year. It continued to collect and been the only transitional tool used to investigate the broadcast Zeitzeugen statements from survivors to cre- crimes of the Ba’ath party to date. According to Mlo- ate a broad and encompassing picture of the atroci- doch (2012), while the trial finally created some space ties. Every year on 14 April, the victims of the massacres for the Kurdish victims, it fell far short of providing them (which have been recognised as a genocide by the tri- justice, acknowledgement, and reparations. Moreover, bunal) are officially commemorated. Various channels because there was no outreach programme, the wit- use video testimonies for this purpose (see for example, ness statements have remained buried in the 963-page Anfal files in Rudaw 2020). concluding trial judgment (Trahan 2009), never reach- However, the Anfal women’s initiative to create their ing the audience they were intended for. own monument has achieved more than memorializa- Yet the desire to establish the truth about the Ba’ath tion. As Karin Mlodoch (2011, 2012, 2017) aptly illus- regime’s atrocities has not died down since the trial. trates, women’s motivations and expressions of agency Several informal initiatives that in different ways, qual- have changed significantly over time. Mlodoch docu- ify as unofficial truth projects flourished. An early and ments how the narratives of the Anfal women trans- significant example is the Iraq History Project led by the formed, from first searching for their missing relatives to International Human Rights Law Institute of De Paul focusing on their own experiences, thus showing “their University, between 2005–2009. The researchers gath- long and painful path from victims to survivors” (2011: ered 8900 testimonies, that amounted to more 55,000 19). She also illustrates how narration and mourning pages,2 and produced a book with a small selection of turned into protest and demands: the creation of an them (Iraq History Project 2007). The testimonies were Anfal memorial, the demand for the prosecution of the collected from across Iraq and the project was hoped Kurdish collaborators with the Ba’ath regime, and the to be a precursor to official transitional justice efforts. demand to open the mass graves. Although the voic- However, the project neither produced this outcome es and testimonies of the Anfal women did not initially nor satisfied the particular recognition needs of minor- reach the national level, the women moved from being ities, such as the Kurds of Northern Iraq, who survived the suffering innocents to persons with a loss, yet also the large-scale and coordinated Anfal operations of the with a future and a voice (Mlodoch 2012: 83). Hence, Ba’ath Party. Below, we focus on an unofficial truth pro- in this particular example, given the lack of an official ject that was initiated by Kurdish women who survived truth commission and the patriarchal blindness of the the Anfal, and which was studied in depth by Karin Mlo- Kurdish elite to the women’s plight, women achieved doch. solidarity and healing by creating their own space and The Ba’ath Party’s Anfal operations against the Kurdish thinking about how to represent themselves. And, most population of Iraq took place in 1988. Over a period importantly within the scope of this paper, they estab- of several months, the regime under Saddam Hussein lished themselves as sovereign, credible, and legitimate conducted a violent campaign against the Kurdish mi- Zeitzeugen. nority in Northern Iraq, including chemical attacks. Vil- Our second example comes from Sri Lanka, where, lages were destroyed, tens of thousands of people were after the civil war (1983–2009), in addition to official killed, and thousands disappeared (Kelly 2007). Only af- commissions of inquiry (COIs), a number of initiatives ter 2003 could public demand for truth and evidence have been established, including truth telling projects about the Anfal operations be raised. Anfal women, a to investigate the past. The country had to cope with name given to the female relatives of the dead and dis- the disruption, separation, and loss resulting from more appeared also began their search for justice and truth than thirty years of hatred and violence. While the com- at that point. When Kurdistan-Iraq gained autonomous missions of inquiry (COIs) had “the mandate to investi- status in 2005, the regional government made Anfal gate and inquire into past incidents”, they often acted into an integral part of their claims to national identi- with limited powers and under pressure from outside ty and for regional autonomy (Mlodoch 2012). In the (Fonseka 2017: 204). There were, however, attempts meanwhile, they had also acknowledged the suffering to develop a unique “‘Sri Lankan approach’ to truth, of the victims, and the public status of the women had memory and justice” (Gunatilleke 2015: 89), which in gradually changed. However, neither this recognition a context of continuing religious violence (Aliff 2019; nor the monument erected by the government were Yusoff/Sarjoon 2019) did not yield success. This has led satisfactory enough to meet their demands and desire to a proliferation of truth telling and justice projects to self-represent (Mlodoch 2012: 83). They were utter- that were initiated semi-officially or unofficially in order ly unhappy being presented as shepherds stuck in a to “provide a platform for diverse and multiple actors frozen past. Finally, in 2008, the “Anfal Women Memo- to come forward and contribute their lived narratives” rial Forum Project” was launched with the aim of es- (Fonseka 2017: 200). Taken together, they point to the plurality and complexity of perspectives, needs, and in- 2 https://law.depaul.edu/about/centers-and-institutes/international-­ terests (Guruparan 2017). human-rights-law-institute/projects/Pages/iraq.aspx www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 7 Among the many violent acts and processes that and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) by President marked the Sri Lankan civil war between 1983-2009, Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2010, there finally was a “state one significant incident was the expulsion of 75,000 mechanism that acknowledged their [the northern Muslims from northern Sri Lanka by the militant Lib- Muslims’, HL, HA] experiences” (Haniffa 2015: 12). eration Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 1990. Many Unlike the case of the Anfal women in Kurdistan-Iraq, Muslims who had been expelled in 1990 and wanted who through their organised struggle to establish a site to return after 2009 were seen by the authorities as of commemoration developed from mere “victims” to “better off” victims who were not in desperate financial active “survivors” (Mlodoch 2011), Haniffa shows that need compared to other groups. Thus, Muslims had to through the citizen project in Sri Lanka, Muslim witness- fight against a “hierarchization of victimhood” (Haniffa es testified about their losses and thus claimed the po- 2015: 11) during the transition period following the end litically and economically crucial status of victimhood. of the war during which they were expected to return In both cases, Zeitzeugen took part in political struggles to their former areas of settlement. for official recognition of their suffering and losses, and Many of them narrated their stories after 2009, in a pe- in doing so contributed to reconciliation processes that, riod of increased anti-Muslim sentiment in the country in the end, were intended to ensure dignity and justice (Gunatilleke 2015: 16–17). These Muslims who had be- for them. come witnesses to history are at the centre of Farzana Haniffa’s paper about a “community-based ‘truth tell- Zeitzeugen in education and citizen history projects ing’ transitional justice project” (2015: 2). The Citizens’ Witnesses to history are, on some occasions, invited to Commission of Investigation founded within this project narrate their stories in history classes or oral history pro- supported the struggle of expelled Muslims from North- jects as “authentic sources”. Manuals for teachers ex- ern Sri Lanka for official recognition of their status as plain how to prepare and conduct interviews and how victims. According to Haniffa, who coordinated the work to use and interpret them. Pupils search for Zeitzeugen of this commission, it was founded “precisely in order to to be interviewed in classes, history competitions, or for address the insufficient attention paid in narratives of school projects. Utilising digital media, testimonies of the Sri Lankan conflict to the story of northern Muslims” Zeitzeugen have been collected, stored, and performed (2015:2). Within this context, the Citizens’ Commission not only in educational settings but also in large-scale of Investigation mobilised narratives of victimhood to citizen history initiatives. Through such oral history pro- influence national policy. Haniffa states: jects, which aim to provide orientation and produce historical knowledge, representatives of different gen- … persons affected by conflict may mobilize their stories of erations, political orientations, and religious or social victimhood for political purposes, towards memorialization origins speak and listen to each other. Despite their dif- or healing, to access aid and to seek justice for atrocities. ferences, they engage through this encounter with col- Such mobilization may be understood in terms of different lective memories and multiple perspectives on history. forms of subjectivization in response to different modes of As a consequence, witnesses to history can contribute governmentality (2015: 10). not only to a growing awareness of particular histori- cal events and developments, but also to processes of The commission, which had been initiated by the Law and peace making and justice. Society Trust, worked for two years and collected approx- In Lebanon, where the state had practiced a policy of imately 390 statements, submitting its final report “Quest “dismemory” (Nikro 2012, 2019) with regard to histori- for Redemption” (QFR) in 2011.3 Its major concern was cising and commemorating the civil war of 1975–1990, truth seeking and establishing visibility (Haniffa 2011). cultural and educational projects began to emerge af- One reason for the lack of attention paid to the con- ter the war and played a decisive role in processes of cerns of northern Sri Lankan Muslims was that both “ReMemory” (Nikro 2017, 2019). Such “memory practic- organizations like UNHCR and local actors worked with es” can, according to Saadi Nikro “initiate alternative different definitions of victimhood. These had conse- modalities of social exchange to the predominating quences for decisions on compensation and the right parceling of political communities and advocacy ac- of the Muslims to return. Haniffa argues that “victim” cording to confessional allegiance” (Nikro 2019: 5). was a technical term for UNHCR and a political term Among such alternative memory initiatives was The for the commission, as outlined in the report “Quest Atlas Group led by the Lebanese artist and photogra- for Redemption” (QFR) (Haniffa 2011). When Muslims pher Walid Raad between 1989 and 2004. Its aim was were allowed to come back to their former areas of to document and research the civil war by collecting settlement after 2009, they were not given the victim and exploring stories of individual experience and status through UNHCR. While the Sri Lankan state had memories. The Atlas Group Archive consists of diaries, registered them as IDPs (internally displaced persons), notebooks, photographs, stories related to material ob- UNHCR did not. Haniffa sees here a conflict between jects or to historical events and experiences which had the work of humanitarian actors like UNHCR and lo- been preserved in minds and houses before they were cal transitional justice actors like the QFR commission. shared publicly. These stories were directly submitted With the installation of the Sri Lankan Lessons Learnt by first-hand witnesses or indirectly through vicarious witnesses, some of them anonymously.4 3 https://www.lstlanka.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/The-Quest- for-Redemption-Book-English.pdf (accessed 9 January 2021). 4 https://www.theatlasgroup1989.org/ (accessed 31 December 2020).

www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 8 Other projects have pursued an educational agenda, The Zeitzeuge and the student somehow merged the like the one initiated by the Permanent Peace Move- times to build a specific “chronoference”, which Achim ment (PPM), an organization founded by a group of Landwehr defines as the relationality (Relationierung) Lebanese university students in 1986. Between 2009 which can connect present and absent times, i.e. pasts and 2014, PPM worked in collaboration with the Ger- and futures with presents (Landwehr 2016: 28). man Zivik/IFA Institute for Foreign Relations and invit- The narratives recorded within the Badna Naaref pro- ed high-school students to engage with the history and ject were kept in a larger database maintained since consequences of the war through a range of activities, 2005 by the Lebanese non-governmental organization including meetings and conversations with Zeitzeugen. UMAM Documentation and Research. UMAM started The activities took place at symbolic places and on sym- as a “citizen resource centre”7 with the main goal of bolic dates, like the 13 April, the civil war commemora- collecting and preserving narratives that would not tion day. Theatre performances, walks through towns, otherwise be preserved in official state archives, and and film screenings, among them of the Zivik-funded thus aimed at “resisting societal amnesia and to fos- student film “War Stories”, took place under the slogan ter public discourse about the civil war” (Hegasy 2019: “Remember – Forgive – Change”.5 257). In the following, we take a closer look at another Documentation and preservation are crucial require- memory and educational project in Lebanon which ments to oral history and education projects. Such ar- became subject of academic analysis (Nikro 2017). In chives of testimonies help to challenge official political February 2011, the high-school project Badna Naaref narratives and to undermine state politics of forgetting (We want to know) began in several schools in Beirut.6 and silencing. As Sonja Hegasy has shown for Moroc- High-school students interviewed representatives of a co, Egypt, and Lebanon, such acts of “archive activism” generation who had been children or teenagers dur- can be a conscious political strategy on the part of “ar- ing the civil war. The people interviewed told their sto- chive partisans” to break with state controlled and mo- ries as adults, for another generation who were now nopolised representations of the past and thus provide teenagers and high-school pupils who wanted to “gain the ground for new debates about past atrocities and and record knowledge” (Nikro 2017: 196). Students violence (Hegasy 2019; see also Hegasy 2017). Sadly, approached the interviewees with their questions in and quite tellingly, one of the founders of UMAM, the a given political context, social frame, and location (a activist, publisher, and filmmaker Lokman Slim was as- school). This educational project was carried out under sassinated in southern Lebanon on 4 February 2021, the direction of the International Center for Transitional while this paper was under review.8 Justice (ICTJ) Beirut. Interviews were conducted in and Considering South Asia, the 1947 partition of India rep- around Beirut. In his analysis of the project, Nikro raises resents a traumatic historical event, which, decades the question of the expectations of the audience, in this later, became the topic of intensive public and aca- case the high-school students. What answers did they demic debates. New approaches, including oral history, expect? What answers they might have wanted to get? have given voice to diverse individual stories and the While the testimonies of the narrators depended to a history of material objects (for example: Butalia 2000; great extent on the questions posed by the interview- Bajpai/Framke 2018a/b, Mahn /Murphy 2018, Malho- er, the whole process of listening was “not a passive tra 2019). In The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the undertaking” (Nikro 2017: 204). The students prepared Partition of India, Urvashi Butalia (2000) foregrounds photographs to show their interviewees and asked experiences of female witnesses and argues that by them whether they carried a particular image with(in) paying respect to their voices, oral history provides a themselves that they would associate with their civil way to understand what history means for them, how war memories. These photos became material symbols they embodied the past, and how they carry the past in of visualised remembrance (Nikro 2017: 196), “image- their present lives and to the next generations. Aanchal texts” as Mitchell (1995) calls them, which attest to a Malhotra (2019) has also collected stories about the past that is now to be communicated to future gener- partition told through the trajectories of objects that ations. had encapsulated memories about times their owners Interestingly, Nikro does not speak about different could hardly speak about. Biographical objects here, as times connected by the narrators and the students’ act we argued earlier, speak to the observer through the of listening. Rather, he observes that in this particular story of the relationship between the object and the situation there was no past; there were two now-times person it had belonged to. They become tools for acti- in the performance of the witnesses to history during vating and narrating memories (Malhotra 2019). the interviews. This “chronoference” (Landwehr 2016) is expressed through the Arabic word “halla”, which, 7 https://www.umam-dr.org//about/ (accessed 9 September 2020). according to the author “entertains two temporalities – the now-time of the experience of enduring violence, 8 Lokman Slim was a long-time partner of the ZMO in the research and the now-time of the interview” (Nikro 2017: 201). project Transforming Memories (https://archiv.zmo.de/forschung/ projekte_2008_2013/Transforming_Memories_e_2008_2013.html). Sonja Hegasy writes about him: “With him, we and the nation of 5 http://www.ppm-lebanon.org/ (accessed 1 January 2021). Lebanon loose an exemplar, courageous, open, generous and love- able intellectual with quite a dark humor. He had a vision for his re- 6 https://www.ictj.org/news/badna-naaref-lebanon%E2%80%99s-on gion. This vision stems from a universal ’Never again!’”. See: https:// line-wartime-diary (accessed 21 December 2020). www.zmo.de/personen/lokman-slim (accessed 24 April 2021).

www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 9 In recent decades, we have also witnessed the emer- never a willing participant in the events that unfolded. In gence of large-scale internet-based citizen history pro- other words, the space for complexities and contradictions jects developed to collect, store, and educate. Such is steadily erased once the affective project of memoriali- projects often provide archives with enormous num- sation begins overshadowing the project of critical history bers of documents, objects, and witness voices. The (Kaur 2016). above-mentioned Kurdistan Memory Programme is While historiography and official national history have one such example. Another is the 1947 Partition Ar- foregrounded political aspects of the history of par- chive, founded in 2010, which became a translocal un- tition, subjective experiences and multiple popular dertaking. Volunteers in India and elsewhere, trained memories have only recently become widely discussed as “citizen historians”, were invited by the founders of (Butalia 2000; Mahn/Murphy 2018; Bajpai/Framke the project to conduct interviews with survivors of the 2018a). The “interplay of memory, testimony and his- partition of India in South Asia and among the South tory helps craft alternative narratives”, argues Nonica Asian diaspora in other parts of the world.9 The initi- Datta (2017: 61). By making such fragmented histories ators of the 1947 Partition Archive, based in Berkeley, across class, caste, and geographical origin visible and US, describe their initiative as a non-profit, non-govern- archiving them, the Partition Project and its like make mental organization consisting of “concerned global further investigation and historical research possible. citizens committed to preserving this chapter of our Furthermore, the initiators’ claim challenges the no- collective history”.10 Their aim is to collect life stories tion of the “archive” as an intended and systematically shaped by the partition of India in 1947. So far, nearly planned and controlled collection of documents (Datta 9500 oral history stories from witnesses of the partition 2017; Chakravarty 2018; Hegasy 2019). have been collected. They are based on interviews con- ducted in 12 countries and 36 languages.11 Some of the Zeitzeugen in artistic representations narrations have been anonymised, while some are told In this section, our focus will be on art projects that in the third person. Interviews were mostly conducted foreground Zeitzeugen voices. Artistic representations with video-cameras, although not all of them are dis- and curatorial practices bring forth the questions of played publicly. A large number of volunteers, citizen medialities and materialities discussed above. They of- historians, scholars, and writers from various countries ten provide solutions to the problem of what happens are supporting the initiative. The initiators claim that when the Zeitzeugen have died. In their own ways, they “[t]he 1947 Partition Archive has democratised histori- conserve Zeitzeugens’ voices and make them accessi- cal documentation, bringing forth voices from commu- ble beyond their lifetimes. They also have yet anoth- nities previously underrepresented and histories previ- er, more immediate function. The use of Zeitzeugens’ ously unknown.”12 accounts in art often has the aim of creating new vi- However, there are also critical voices expressing carious witnesses; people who can act as witnesses scepticism against an exclusive concentration on the when the original Zeitzeugen cannot be heard, either human or personal dimension, making it impossible because they are dead or because they have been si- to adequately show the complexity of politics before, lenced. Hence, through art, Zeitzeugens’ voices are am- during, and after partition. Ravinder Kaur, the author plified and reach far beyond their initial audience, turn- of Since 1947: Partition Narratives among the Punjabi ing them into significant devices of political activism. Migrants of Delhi (2007), in an online article argues for This activism can serve different aims, though—some a systematic connection of the partition events to larg- more conservative than the others. er historical contexts and warns that 29 October 1998 was the 75th anniversary of the found- ing of the Republic of Turkey, which replaced centuries [t]he subject of memorialisation we increasingly meet of Ottoman rule in Anatolia and Thrace. In order to is mostly a passive victim of circumstances and almost take a retrospective and sociologically informed look at the 75 years of the republic, the prominent History 9 Dr. Guneeta Singh Bhalla, a natural scientist, was the initiator, sup- Foundation (Tarih Vakfı) organized a large exhibition in ported by colleagues from Berkeley and Stanford University. The Istanbul. The curator recruited seven academics to con- organisers teach their citizen historians in workshops and they then conduct interviews where they are located. Inspired by the Hiro- duct research and produce the visual, audio, and writ- shima Peace Memorial and other Holocaust memorials working ten material, on different scenes, or fragments, of the with oral history, the founders of 1947 Partition Archive want to republic ranging from labour relations to gender, from make stories of witnesses publicly heard and with these personal urban architecture to technological developments. accounts give legitimacy and importance to an event that, accord- Zeitzeugen accounts specifically gathered for the ex- ing to Bhalla, is often forgotten or told via numbers or politicians’ statements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_QYPCDuFPk (ac- hibition were prominent in all of the sections. Several cessed 13 December 2020) books devoted to the sections accompanied the exhi- bition, bringing together the exhibition material with 10 https://www.1947partitionarchive.org/about (accessed 13 December articles accessible to the public. Nükhet Sirman, who 2020). curated the gender section, later wrote an essay on the 11 https://www.1947partitionarchive.org/ (accessed 13 December 2020). Zeitzeugenschaft of the women interviewed during the preparation phase. 12 https://www.1947partitionarchive.org/ (accessed 18 September In her essay, Sirman diagnoses in these women’s ac- 2020); see also: https://thewire.in/history/1947-partition-archive (accessed 18.09. 2020) counts the current crisis of the republic—to be more

www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 10 precise, the crisis of republican values, which seem in- A particular breakthrough was the memoir of a human creasingly inadequate to meet the challenges posed by rights lawyer, Fethiye Çetin, who found out as an adult the social composition of the country, the changes in that her grandmother was a survivor of the genocide the political arena, and the increasing economic neo- and an Islamised Armenian. Her widely translated book, liberalism (Sirman 2006: 32). These women, who were My Grandmother (2008), was first published in Turkish invited to be Zeitzeugen to the birth and the early years in 2004 and was followed by many volumes that detail of the republic, seem to suffer under this crisis and re- the experiences of the survivors, their children, and their spond to it by interweaving the official national narra- grandchildren. Unsurprisingly, the overall theme of all tive with their own life-stories. During their interviews, these books is the silence and secrecy the authors and they speak very timidly, yet become more articulate their loved ones had to endure for more than 90 years at moments when their own lives become testaments (Altınay 2014). These voices, especially of the grandchil- to the successes of the republic, their own bodies the dren, attest to shame, fear, and confusion, as well as proofs of the worth of its values and principles. “They compassion and grief for those who had to keep their all had the sense of being the vanguards of the state” identities hidden. As vicarious witnesses (Zeitlin 1998; (p. 36), Sirman notes. Their stories relate a sense of pan- Hartog 2017) or carriers of post-memory (Hirsch 2012), ic over an anticipated loss, not only of social positions, these children and grandchildren of survivors, by the but also of a coherent story which cosily frames their acts of remembering and talking, actively work on their lives and makes them meaningful. They identify their memories and explore how their ancestors’ wounds achievements in life with republican modernization and express themselves in their own bodies, as pain, anx- feel an embodied threat in the changing global and iety and in their dreams (see especially the collection national context. Their present and their expectations by Altınay/Çetin 2014). They trace the slightly unusual about the future reshape their past experiences, or at taste of their grandparents, the extraordinary days they least their narrations of that past. seem to celebrate inconspicuously and the non-Turk- These “daughters of the Turkish Republic” (Bora 2011) ish words they use to make sense of who these grand- “stand as witness to a mythic time of homogeneity and parents were, and eventually who they, themselves, solidarity” (Sirman 2006: 45) at a time when both ho- are. For some of these narrators, like Fethiye Çetin, the mogeneity and solidarity are questioned with the flour- grandparents were the Zeitzeugen who told their chil- ishing of challenging memories. This challenge comes dren and grandchildren what they witnessed and lived with the sea change of the memory boom of the last through, albeit often sparingly. However, the narrators decades of the 20th century, which globally submitted themselves are not only vicarious witnesses, carrying the “governing myths” (Bell 2003) of the nations to the memories of others forwards. They are also the scrutiny in different contexts and with different ration- Zeitzeugen themselves: the witnesses of a time period ales. It also comes at a postcolonial moment when the defined by silence, denial, suppression and ignorance. hegemony of dominant groups over narrations of the Other Zeitzeugen and vicarious witnesses of the plight past and historiography is being questioned at various of the Armenians of Anatolia have also emerged since levels. Yet, as the example above illustrates, the flour- 2000. A Turkish-Armenian collaboration supported by ishing of Zeitzeugen does not always mean diversity, the German Foreign Ministry, the Speaking to One An- polyvocality, and deconstruction. other Project, employed an oral history methodology During the 2000s, Turkey’s shrinking Christian and Jew- to foster understanding and reconciliation between ish minorities became the subject of many scholarly Turkish and Armenian publics, especially youth. During and popular publications, films, and exhibitions. Arme- the project from 2009–2013, young people from Tur- nians occupy a particularly significant place among key and Armenia came together on many occasions, them. In Turkey, the Armenian genocide of 1915 is visited each other’s cities and together received train- subject to staunch official, and largely societal, denial. ing on oral history from Turkish and Armenian schol- While the deportation of Anatolian Armenians is men- ars. Similar to the Lebanese example described above, tioned in the official narrative, even in schoolbooks, they interviewed elderly people from Turkey and Arme- calling it a genocide or ethnic cleansing, despite the nia about the events of 1915 and their aftermath. The overwhelming evidence from Ottoman archives (Dün- project produced a book (Neyzi/Kharatyan-Araqelyan dar 2008), is still a taboo. However, since the 1990s, a 2010) and, more importantly, an exhibition that trav- new “Post-Nationalist Critical Narrative” (Göçek 2006) elled to many cities in Turkey and Armenia, as well has emerged among critical historians (see, for exam- as Tbilisi, Berlin, and Paris. Some of the participating ple, Akçam 2006, 2013; Öktem 2008; Dündar 2008). youths then continued to conduct their own oral his- This new scholarly endeavour stands against the “Re- tory research or created documentaries. Through this publican Defensive Narrative” (Göçek 2006) and offi- lengthy embodied experience, they themselves become cial pressure to suppress the knowledge of the events vicarious witnesses who feel obliged to make what they of 1915 and to silence their remembrance. Alongside lived and experienced widely heard. the academic output, the (post)memories of Armeni- Finally, we briefly explore an emerging genre that has ans and their offspring have also become increasingly become a significant medium in representing memories, available in other formats, particularly exhibitions, as testimonies, and remembrances of violence, displace- discussed below, talking not only about 1915 but also ment. and oppression. The 2000s came with a graphic its never-ending aftermath. novels boom that moved comics increasingly away

www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 11 from fiction and fantasy towards journalism, memoires, resentation in the graphic novel. In Munnu: A Boy from and history. Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993, 1996), Safe Kashmir, the readers are invited to become witnesses Area Gorazde (2000), Footnotes in Gaza (2009), Paying to Malik Sajad’s coming-of-age in conflict ridden Kash- the Land (2020); Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003); mir in the 1990s. Sajad (2015) represents himself and Hamid Sulaiman’s Freedom Hospital (2017); Zerocal- all Kashmiri characters with the image of a stag deer, care’s Kobane Calling (2017); and Kate Evans’s Threads the endangered Hangul of Kashmir. While this anthro- (2017), all inventively follow the footsteps of Art Spiege- pomorphic use of animals is a eulogy to Spiegelman’s lman’s Maus (1986). In it Spiegelman told the story of Maus—a translocal engagement that brings together his father, a survivor of Auschwitz, and his own com- horrors of different times and places—the unique tex- plicated relationship to Jewish identity and Holocaust ture of his drawings makes an explicit reference to his memory through illustrated panels and speech bubbles father’s profession: woodcarving. Using deer that look from the mouths of mice, pigs, and cats. The book is a like woodcuts, Sajad tells his own story of growing up testament of a vicarious witness to the plight and sur- in the midst of the Indian military presence, the great vival of his father, expressed in a narrative form upheld uprisings of the 2010s, a strict (and sometime violent) both by writing and illustrations. education system, attempts at assimilation, and youth Graphic novels have unique capacities to act as ad- stuck between fighting political factions and an occu- vantageous mediums for communicating Zeitzeugens’ pying nuclear power. With lucidity and incredible self-­ accounts. The panels fracture both time and space reflexivity, Sajad tells how he became the artist heis (McCloud 1993: 45) in a similar fashion to the workings amidst this turbulence, insecurity, and threats to his life. of memory. Memory’s fragmentedness, partiality, and As a Zeitzeuge equipped with more than human voice unevenly distributed attention to detail can be effec- and words, Sajad relates his experience with a combi- tively grasped and mediated by the fractured language nation of writing and drawing. His Zeitzeugenschaft is of the graphic novel. Moreover, being able to speak two made to endure and outlive him. The materiality of his languages—illustration and speech—at once, graphic witness account ties it to a future to come, in which novels can blend present and past into single panels Kashmir may have a different story. At the same time, (Beatens/Frey 2014: 220) by employing the present his references to Spiegelman and Sacco tie him to other voice over the graphic depiction of past events. Hence, places where the meaning of survival went beyond the the author, and the reader alongside, very effectively individual outliving the oppression and pointed to the travel between two time-worlds within less than a sec- survival of a people in the memories of others—a ques- ond. Finally, fractured into panels, shifting perspectives tion of existence. and focus all the time, graphic novels demand from readers an intimate engagement and mental labour. Conclusion The reader has to fill in the gaps and connect the frag- In this programmatic paper we aimed to broaden the ments to grasp the narrative. Through this dense and concept of the Zeitzeuge /witness to history by expand- sharpened attention and the sensory experience of be- ing its geographical and conceptual scope. We have ex- ing exposed to images, the readers can be pulled deep plored practices of bearing witness to the past as acts into the accounts of the Zeitzeugen. Hence, graphic of political activism in countries in Asia and the Middle novels prove to be an exceptionally good fit as a medi- East, where they often take place in view of an on­going um for time-witnessing. crisis or in a post-conflict moment with demands for The books mentioned above are either the memoires justice, peace-making, and reconciliation. With a fo- of the authors’ themselves, or they heavily employ cus on citizen truth commissions, public history and Zeitzeugens’ voices to tell the story. This is especially educational initiatives, as well as artistic projects, we the case in Sacco’s groundbreaking comic journalism. have looked into practices of giving testimonies about Sacco’s Bosnian, Palestinian, and Native American in- the past in order to cope with present tasks in various terlocutors speak with a direct voice, only mediated by social and political fields. Several conceptual debates Sacco’s artful depiction of their bodies, over many pan- we introduced in the first part of the paper can be re- els, even pages. They directly look the reader in the eye thought with the examples presented above. and speak of their experiences. Sacco is a witness to/ The Zeitzeugen practices we have discussed can be di- the guarantor of their existence, while we the audience vided into two analytical categories. First, direct Zeitzeu- become witnesses to their pain, loss, and sometimes genschaft involves those who experienced a certain cruelty. Hence, analysing Footnotes in Gaza, Nawal event or lived through a period in the past. The second Musleh-Motut states that are vicarious witnesses who hear from the Zeitzeugen and take on the task of testifying for their sake. First- much like photographs, comic images are more than pas- hand witnesses are the actors of history—they took sive entities that simply assist in documenting evidence of part in the story they tell. By acting as Zeitzeugen, how- suffering. Rather, they are active agents able to performa- ever, they also become the subjects of history—they tively facilitate the act of bearing witness, both to traumat- claim their right to define what counts as history, what ic events and the testimonies of their survivors (2019: 68). should be included in the historical narrative. All of the Zeitzeugen mentioned above can be used to illustrate One recent example serves the same purpose of recruit- this point, yet the most striking are the Anfal women. By ing more witnesses, yet here we hear the voice of the defying the national narratives, insisting on telling their Zeitzeuge himself, only mediated by his own artistic rep-

www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 12 own truth and refusing to accept silent victimhood, they in the case of the Muslims in Northern Sri Lanka, or, as rewrite the recent history of Iraq and Kurdistan from a the example of the Anfal women in Kurdistan-Iraq sug-

different perspective—the perspective of women who gests, a space in national public memory materialised survived not only a genocide but also patriarchal op- by a memorial complex. The long-term results of the pression in its aftermath. work of citizen truth commissions or citizen history pro- While citizen truth commissions exclusively rely on the jects include collections of testimonies, pooled together first-hand testimonies of witnesses, educational enter- in alternative textual, audio, or visual archives that can prises and artistic representations that build on Zeitzeu- serve as the basis for further investigations or research. gen accounts deliberately aim to create vicarious wit- Art projects leave behind audio-visual material, booklets, nesses by mediating between the two. This mediation and objects which then become resources for critical en- requires a public that is ready and open to hearing an gagement and inquiry, just like Nükhet Sirman’s (2006) unsettling account of the past. It brings together ac- critical reading of the Zeitzeugen accounts of the wom- tive listening and asking questions on hard topics with en who witnessed the early years of the Turkish Republic. the imaginative work of filling in the gaps and painting Another temporal interplay in Zeitzeugen practices the background. Hence, vicarious witnessing, whether is that between generations. While this aspect is evi- done by school children interviewing the elderly in Leb- dent in almost all of the examples we have discussed, anon, or by the visitors to the exhibition on Islamised the project involving school children in Lebanon, the Armenians, requires creative work as much as atten- young “citizen historians” working for the 1947 Par- tiveness. Oral history and, in particular, art projects, can tition Archive, and the exhibition that promoted create and mobilise new vicarious witnesses via a stim- inter-generational­ interaction in Armenia and Turkey ulating example that makes one curious to inquire into particularly showcase the importance of intergener- one’s own family or town history, as in the case of the ational communication in bearing witness to history. Partition Archive or the grandchildren of Armenian gen- The Zeitzeugen want to be heard, especially by younger ocide survivors. Or, they can create historical immedi- generations who can carry their stories into the future. ateness through a level of abstraction as in the case of As interviewers, representatives of the younger genera- Malik Sajad’s Munnu, the graphic novel about Kashmir tion can change their perspectives and reflect on their that disseminates historical knowledge by activating place in history. They have a chance to put themselves emotions and sensibilities about justice. into the shoes of the Zeitzeugen, by asking (themselves) It is hard not to remember here one of the most fa- the question “what would I have done in the situation mous Zeitzeugen and holocaust survivor, the Romanian-­ they faced?”. No matter whether these intergenera- American writer Elie Wiesel, whose accounts made the tional acts of remembrance take place within a family Holocaust widely known for what it was. At the end of or beyond, they open ways of actively living with a past 2020, in an open letter published in the Guardian, UK that is never over, or completely frozen, but constantly Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis cited his well-known words, informing the present. “Whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness” (Mirvis We have also illustrated that visual, audio, or other ma- 2020), this time not reminding us of the Holocaust. Mirvis terial objects are not only supportive in mediating and transposed Wiesel’s statement all the way from the Hol- fortifying such practices of witnessing but—through ocaust to the Chinese persecution of Uighurs in Xinjiang. their own trajectories—can bear characteristics of vi- Listening to Uighurs’ experiences, he explained, he found carious witnesses within themselves. The voice of a wit- himself in a position of responsibility to give his own wit- ness preserved in a Zeitzeugen archive, the material ob- ness statement, to be the Zeitzeuge to their plight. ject of day-to-day life that had accompanied a person Although epistemologically different, these two types of through dramatic periods, or the photograph she had witnessing function via the same temporal interplay. As always carried with her embody memories that can go “wanderers between worlds” (Sabrow 2012), witnesses beyond spoken or written words. with their testimonies make a claim to authenticity and Furthermore, the ambivalent role of new media must their right to speak about, acknowledge, and interpret be mentioned. Providing platforms for documenting the past in order to do justice to all those for whom practices of Zeitzeugenschaft, they, on the one hand, they speak. These practices invoke the past as it has make the results accessible to a wider public and thus not been invoked before, to craft a future that excludes attract people who would not have access to a “real” the possibility of the recurrence of the same events. In- archive to read the witness testimonies. Alternative ar- formed by the motto “never again”, they build on the chives provide documents that would often not make it experiences of individuals to formulate new societal or into state archives, and thus make a claim for authen- communal expectations of the days to come. They col- ticity and justice and against state politics of forgetting lect and mobilise marginalised, forgotten, or unheard or biased commemoration. They are publicly effective voices, often—as in the cases explored here—under through new media. On the other hand, their liberal authoritarian regimes and in contested and violent cir- way of functioning and the unlimited dimensions bear cumstances. Hence Zeitzeugen practices can provide the danger of losing orientation, de-contextualization, a basis for processes of reconciliation, peace-making, or over-emotionalization. New media provide open- and understanding in particular societal circumstanc- ness; however, one can also observe a certain kind of es. The immediate results of these struggles might in- confinement due to the specific forms of presentation clude the recognition of a legal or political status, as digital tools require. While new media represent an in-

www.leibniz-zmo.de programmatic texts 14 · 2021 · 13 crease in speed, number, and entanglements, their use Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera lucida: Reflections on Pho- might at the same time lead to a lack of depth and tography. New York: Macmillan. analytical systematization. Bell, Duncan S. 2003. “Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and Finally, it has to be emphasised that acts of Zeitzeu- National Identity”, The British Journal of Sociology 54 (1), genschaft are never ends in themselves, but rather pur- 63–81. sue specific goals that depend on the circumstances, Bora, Aksu. 2011. “Mazinin Lekeleri: Döpiyesle Örtünmek” the actors, and the media involved in such practices. (Stains of the Past: Covering with a Suit). In Feminizm Kendi While there might be differences in stories of heroism Arasında (Feminizm among each other). Ankara: Ayizi Yayın- or testimonies of suffering, (implicit or explicit) claims to ları, 185–203. authenticity are always made. 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Hilal Alkan is a researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. She primarily works on migration and care with a particu- lar focus on gender. As an activist in Turkey, she has worked on gendered peace building and prospects of transitional justice mechanisms. Her most recent publications include “The gift of hospitality: (un)welcoming Syrian migrants in Turkey” (2021) and “Syrian Migration and Logics of Alterity in an Istanbul Neighbourhood” (2020). She has edited Urban Neighbourhood Forma- tions: Boundaries, Narrations, Intimacies (with Nazan Maksudyan, Routledge, 2020) and Politics of the Female Body in Contem- porary Turkey: Reproduction, Maternity, Sexuality (with Ayşe Dayı, Sezin Topçu and Betül Yarar, I.B. Tauris, 2021).

Heike Liebau is a Senior Research Fellow at ZMO, Berlin where she currently coordinates the research field Representations of the Past as a Mobilizing Force. She heads the ZMO team of the DFG-funded long-term project Das Moderne Indien in Deutschen Archiven (MIDA) and is co-editor of the Archival Reflexicon, and Thematic Resources, two open-access publications within the MIDA Research Portal. https://www.projekt-mida.de/rechercheportal/. Her research and writing broadly focus on aspects of the social and cultural history of colonial India, 18th to 20th centuries, with special interest in biographical studies and the history of knowledge production. Her recent publications include: “Networks of Knowledge Production South Asian Muslims and German Scholars in Berlin (1915–30)” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40 (2), 2020, 309–321.

The series ZMO Programmatic Texts publishes wider conceptual articles engaging with the interdiscipli- nary and inter-regional research conducted at ZMO. The series provides a platform for authors to pres- ent and discuss original and innovative contributions to current theoretical and comparative debates, in relation to ZMO’s programmatic research agenda. They are published online on the ZMO website.

The Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) is the only German research institute devoted to an interdisciplinary and com- parative study of the Middle East, Africa, South, Southeast and Central Asia from a historical perspective. Current research focuses on the interaction between predominantly Muslim societies and their relations with non-Muslim neighbours. ZMO was founded in 1996 as one of six university-independent, non-profit research centres for research in the humanities.

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