Archivierte Zeugenschaft

Abstract

In what has been called “The Era of the Witness” (Wieviorka 1998) an international movement emerged that has collected and recorded an incalculable number of interviews with Holocaust survivors worldwide. The quantity and varying quality, documentation and availability of the testimonies is a challenge for their use as an academic source. This article takes this fact as its starting point and provides an overview of the essential collections of interviews with Holocaust survivors in the German-speaking countries. It does not claim to be an exhaustive list, but rather attempts, on the basis of selected projects, to address different methodological approaches, the ways of indexing, and positions taken on the question of the publication. Based on this overview, essential questions regarding the provision and publication of oral history collections as well as the challenges of their academic use are identified.