Edinburgh Research Explorer Translation and the language of testimony Citation for published version: Davies, P 2019, 'Translation and the language of testimony: Filip Müller’s testimony at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial', Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History'. https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2019.1625118 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1080/17504902.2019.1625118 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Peer reviewed version Published In: Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History' Publisher Rights Statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Holocaust Studies on 21 June 2019, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17504902.2019.1625118 General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 Translation and the Language of Testimony: Filip Müller’s Testimony at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial Peter Davies University of Edinburgh Abstract This paper examines the interaction between the Auschwitz survivor Filip Müller, the interpreter Otto Stegmann, and the Presiding Judge Hans Hofmeyer during Müller’s cross- examination during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. A close reading of testimony, made possible by the audio recordings, allows us to show how Müller’s decision to speak German, as opposed to his native Slovak or Czech, led to an interesting dynamic between the participants: Müller’s testimony arises out of their interaction and the moments of conflict and collaboration that characterized it. In particular, this essay explores the role of the interpreter in enabling Müller to make his testimony, and shows how translation processes help to shape the way that the testimony is formulated. Keywords Translation; interpreting; Auschwitz; testimony; Sonderkommando; trial testimony; German language; Czech language 1 The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (1963–65) have attracted significant interest in the last decade or so, both in scholarship and in the German media: in particular, two well-received films have generated public interest (Im Labyrinth des Schweigens (Labyrinth of Lies), dir. Giulio Ricciarelli, 2014, and Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (The People vs. Fritz Bauer), dir. Lars Kraume, 2015). Work by historians and scholars of Critical Legal Studies has assessed the trials in terms of their significance for the jurisprudence of genocide or for the social and political context of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the 1960s.1 Less detailed attention has been paid to the witness statements themselves, though there has been work evaluating them as historical evidence, as well as interview projects with the surviving witnesses.2 The Frankfurt witnesses were in a very difficult situation: many of them had never been to Germany, except perhaps on one of the death marches in the final months of the war or as a displaced person. For many, Germany was still hostile territory, and, at least initially, there was little or no support available for the witnesses when they arrived, including translation services: voluntary associations took on this role, for example the Sh’erit ha-Pletah group and volunteers led by Emmi Bonhoeffer. Even before they arrived, witnesses from Eastern Bloc countries had often gone through an elaborate process of briefing and political pressure from the authorities at home. The proceedings themselves could be an emotional ordeal for the witnesses: even questions about family or personal details could evoke memories of family members who had been murdered. The institutional and linguistic rituals of the trial, which aimed at neutrality and objectivity, could have unexpected effects on the witnesses: for example, a simple question about the witness’s family circumstances could bring up agonizing memories of family members who had been murdered. The requirements of court testimony often clashed with the way in which the witnesses told their stories, and the need to produce verifiable evidence clashed with the need of the witnesses to bear witness to their own suffering, and pay tribute 2 to the dead. This could produce a situation of tension and mistrust, made more intense by the fact that the witnesses were standing in the courtroom under the eyes of the accused. Translation was a problem in the court, as it was hard to find specialist translators available for the many languages spoken by the witnesses. The translators themselves worked in different ways; there appears to have been no agreed standard on the perspective that the translator should take up, for example, whether to use to the first or third person when translating a witness’s words. Some appear to feel it is their job to support the witness, while others are concerned to take up an ‘objective’, professional distance. There would be important questions to ask about the work of the interpreters in terms of their accuracy and professionalism, but in this case, I am interested in how processes of translation will often structure the situation that makes testimony possible, how the interpreters support the witnesses, and how they contribute directly to the formulation of the testimony. So, rather than automatically assuming that translation is a problem or a barrier, it is useful to show how it enables the testimony; making translation visible is therefore not about separating out the ‘pure’ testimony from the translation, but is instead a way of helping us understand how a testimony emerges in a specific context. These general points will be illustrated by looking at the Frankfurt testimony of the Slovak Jewish Auschwitz survivor Filip Müller and the interaction between Müller, the interpreter Otto Stegmann, and the Presiding Judge Hans Hofmeyer. Born in 1922, Müller was deported to Auschwitz in April 1942. He was selected to work for the Sonderkommando, that is the group of Jewish prisoners who were forced to dispose of the bodies and possessions of those who were murdered in the gas chambers. Though most of the Sonderkommando members were themselves killed after a short time, being replaced by others, Müller survived through a combination of luck, manipulation and political solidarity with members of the Czechoslovak resistance in the camp. His testimony is thus unique – he may be the only prisoner to survive 3 three years of work in the Sonderkommandos both of the Auschwitz main camp and the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Müller gave testimony to trials in Czechoslovakia shortly after liberation, and collaborated on a testimony in Czech with other survivors and resisters. He was called to Frankfurt in 1964 to give evidence to the trial of 22 former Auschwitz guards, some of whom he had known well; during his testimony, he described his own experiences, paid tribute to other prisoners, and provided evidence for the sadistic behavior of the defendants. His unique testimony played a key role in the conviction of former SS officers who had organized the operation of the gas chambers and committed many other acts of sadistic murder. He emigrated to West Germany in 1969, after the Prague Spring, and continued to speak and write about his experiences for a number of years, before withdrawing from public life in the 1980s. At various key moments in his life, translation played a decisive and defining role in the way he performed the role of witness in public, but this paper will concentrate on the one that has attracted the least attention, namely certain details of the interaction between the witness, the judge and the translator during Müller’s testimony to the Frankfurt trial.3 My intention is to try reading this testimony in terms of translation, by bringing questions of translation to the foreground. In doing do, I want to look at how the translator contributes through a few interventions to the situation in which the testimony is given, and to think about what this means for the testimony itself. Is it possible to think about this testimony in terms beyond its value as evidence in a trial or as historical documentation? If we look at it carefully, we can see this kind of trial testimony as a specific form of collaborative performance, with the testimony produced in the interaction of the agents involved in this specific situation – with its ritualistic structure, its rules and particular language, and with its inbuilt power imbalances. Witnesses act within a shifting network of relationships and temporary alliances within the highly structured dialogues of the witness 4 examination, and have a certain amount of space for strategies that conform to their own interests.4 But there is still a tendency amongst scholars working on Holocaust testimony to downplay the value of trial testimony as a source of knowledge beyond its evidential value in the terms set by the legal system – trial witnesses are seen by scholars of testimony and memory, such as Aleida Assmann as passive, caught in a ritualistic process of question and answer that allows them no agency and may simply reproduce their victimhood.5 For this reason, the knowledge to be gained from their statements is of limited value, as it conforms only to the specific needs of the court. There is some truth in this – the interests of the court and the interests of the witness in describing his/her own experiences may be very different – but it is not the whole story.