Traumatic performances in the digital age : why we need the video testimonies of Holocaust bystanders

Focusing on the Holocaust bystanders’ video testimonies, the article examines how the category of landscape in a testimonial framework might help us to grasp the main paradoxes of testimony as a mode of relation to the past. Therefore, it outlines the intertwining processes of digitalisation and petrification of the genre of Holocaust video testimony and its slow migration towards the (mythical) East of Europe: how at the same time it moved outside the safe space of library or home of the witness and ceased to be by default a survivor’s account. In case of bystanders’ video testimonies, their topographical position and performance of the act of seeing create a complex and intertwined phenomenon through which the paradox of spatial testimonial index might be grasped, and these visual documents - construed as a form of digital transmission of the trauma of the Other - may compel us to confront the Shoah from an utterly different, more precarious standpoint