Memory on film

Virtual performance

Nonetheless, it is not simply the narration of events by an individual with subjective experience of suffering that constructs authenticity. The testimonies are embedded in the film in a particular way that creates further links between past and present, and which is likely to generate a specific emotional, physical and cognitive response in the viewer. An important part of this is the mode of narration, which can be described as what Nichols terms ‘virtual performance, or the everyday presentation of the self’: that is, the presentation of ‘the logic of actual performance without signs of conscious awareness that this presentation is an act’ (1991: 122). In their reviews of the film, critics noted the lack of ‘distractions’ (Scally, 2009); the director is praised for allowing ‘his protagonists to express themselves’ (Finger, 2009); and for ‘avoiding any unnecessary additions or didactic material’ (Deutsche Film- und Medienbewertung, 2012). The witness interviews are received by these reviewers almost as unstaged raw footage.

Indeed, when the witnesses narrate their past, they do so largely unselfconsciously and with genuine affect; they do not appear to be aware of performing. Yet their emotional response to the telling of their story has a powerful effect on the viewer that is comparable to actual performance in fictional film. The virtual performance or everyday presentation of emotion creates an impression of subjectivity which, in turn, has the potential to generate empathy. As Nichols argues, the impact of the ‘expressive dimension’ of ‘virtual performance’ is augmented in documentary by ‘the sense of historical authenticity and privileged access’ (1991: 122). The apparent lack of performance makes the medium of film appear transparent to the viewer, who gains the impression that what they are observing is the event of testimony itself, not a filmic mediation. This impression is heightened by intradiegetic background noises – cars going past, clocks chiming – which give the sense that we are viewing the world, not a world (see Nichols, 1991). This may be an illusion, like all representations, a ‘mediated immediacy’ (Pirker and Rüdiger, 2010: 18), not a window onto reality. Nonetheless, the construction of medial transparency in this way is a powerful method of generating authenticity. As Richter states: ‘the authentic representation presents “the represented through its representation as not represented”’ (2010: 50; emphasis in original). The viewer experiences the witness accounts as authentic because they are constructed as being unmediated, unperformed and unrehearsed testimony.

Embodiment

The apparent transparency of the medium also means that the viewer feels directly confronted with the victim. As Plantinga observes, in contrast with textual forms, ‘the filmed interview allows us to see and hear the interviewee, giving us information about spatial context, gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, and inflection’ (1997: 70; emphasis in original). The political potential of this emotional appeal can be highlighted with reference to Landsberg’s (2004) concept of prosthetic memory. According to Landsberg, through engaging the visitor or viewer both physically and cognitively, feature films and interactive museums allow the individual to suture ‘himself or herself into a larger history’: he or she ‘does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live’ (2004: 2). Central to Landsberg’s argument is the concept of cinematic identification: seeing the world from the victim-protagonist’s point of view promotes empathy with that subject position (see Landsberg, 2004). Documentary testimony may not have the same power as fiction to involve the viewer physically in a story; generally, the narrative of the past is recounted rather than shown. However, the apparent medial transparency still has the power to engage the viewer in the events being depicted: that is, the testimony of the witness; the gaze of the audience becomes that of the interviewer behind the camera (see also Hallas, 2007; Nichols, 1991).

With Hallas (2007), I see this as a form of embodiment of the film’s narrative, the account of life in the GDR, the attempt to leave the country, arrest, imprisonment, release, and traumatic after-effects. The film is structured around these six stages in the victims’ biographies. The work makes an argument about the GDR’s past and its relevance for the present, particularly the grotesqueness of Ostalgie for these individuals and the failure to punish those responsible for human rights abuses. However, it makes its argument not through the use of ‘voice of God’ narration (Nichols, 1991), but through individual testimony: in combination with virtual performance and the apparent transparency of the medium, this testimony becomes embodied for the viewer – no longer abstract, but imaginable as pain inflicted on a real person. This is particularly important in terms of Assmann’s (2006) definition of the ‘moral witness’, as bearing the marks of the trauma that they narrate, of authenticating their testimony with physical presence. It also demonstrates the interaction between witness and experience authenticity and the inseparability of the two forms. The witness authenticates because they have direct links to the past; however, the physical presence of the victims and the immediacy of their testimony are illusions experienced by the viewer through the construction of medial transparency.

We might link this usefully to Gaines’s concept of political mimesis: the ‘relationship between bodies in two locations – on the screen and in the audience … the starting point for the consideration of what the one body makes the other do’ (1999: 90). In the present context, the filmmakers do not use bodies in physical struggle, in order to inspire ‘audiences to carry on that same struggle’ (Gaines, 1999: 91; emphasis in original), but bodies demonstrating a psychological, emotional and political struggle. Nonetheless, this struggle is also physical: the victims show involuntary emotion at the recounting of the stories, and the medium of film encourages mimicry of this physical response in the audience (see Gaines, 1999: 91). Like Anne K, we may feel tears spring to our eyes as she recounts the story of a young prisoner being raped with a toilet brush. Following Landsberg (2004), the physical response has the potential to generate a ‘prosthetic memory’ of the trauma which, in turn, can inspire political action in the present. Documentary, as Gaines notes, is particularly effective at inspiring a political response because the ‘aesthetic of similarity establishes a continuity between the world of the screen and the world of the audience, where the ideal viewer is poised to intervene in the world that so closely resembles the one represented on screen’ (1999: 92). In this way, we see the interaction of indexicality (the referentiality of the work) and affect (the mimicry of victim emotions) in generating not only authority for the narrative of the film, but also in promoting political action on the part of the viewer.

Auratic sites

The question of presence and absence, and present and past, is complicated further in the film through the use of auratic locations: the sites where the suffering recounted by the victims took place. The victims’ oral accounts are interspersed with images of the prisons in which they were incarcerated in the GDR. In several scenes, the witness returns to the site of their suffering – the prison in which they were held or the land appropriated by the SED state – and narrates past experiences within this auratic space. So, what is the impact of this use of location?

In her analysis of the use of archaeological relics in documentary, Sénécheau argues that such objects ‘give the impression of offering “unadulterated” evidence of human action and thereby appear to allow “immediate” contact with the past’. She states that images of archaeological objects often stand for the claim of a documentary ‘to transmit authentic information, that is, to present “truth” and “reality”’ (2010: 93–94). The auratic spaces in Gesicht zur Wand perform a similar authenticating function: they seemingly provide literally concrete evidence for the crimes that the witness describes. This is a doubling of witness authenticity: both individuals who experienced the past and buildings with seemingly direct links to it. Moreover, the process is dialogical: the auratic site authenticates the narrative of the witness; however, the narrative of the witness provides the site with its authenticating aura as they mark it as a place of suffering. As Pirker and Rüdiger (2010) argue, the aura of an original object or an original site does not arise a priori, but only through such a process of ascribing significance.

However, the use of auratic sites adds to the testimony of the witnesses in a way that might be viewed as a further example of the authenticity of affect. With reference to Rea Tajiri’s 1991 film History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, in which Tajiri travels to sites related to her family’s past, Nichols describes revisiting space as:

staging the ritual (physically, corporeally) of seeking the touch of authenticity: to put oneself in physical contact with this (altered) geographical referent, to receive its imprint, to let the past reverberate through what it has become, and what we make of it. (1994: 8)

In Gesicht zur Wand, the blurring of levels of time, of past and present, is seen strikingly in the witness Mario R’s use of tense, as he recounts his experiences in the Berlin remand prison in which he was held, now a memorial museum: ‘[I] knew neither when I was first brought here … nor during the period of imprisonment, that I am here in Hohenschönhausen’ (emphasis added). The shift between time levels is augmented further by (re) constructed elements added to the testimony: the noise of a typewriter as Mario R recounts the extent and depth of his interrogation; the sound of booted footsteps walking down a long corridor as the camera fixes on the glass-brick windows of a prison cell. These reconstructed features add a spectral quality to the film, appearing as disembodied elements from the past returning to haunt the present of the victims.

As a result of medial transparency, the viewer is invited to accompany the witness on their journey to the past made present, and the witness provides a tangible link between the two levels of time: the historic site and its former function as a place of repression. As Anne K shudders when she returns to the former women’s prison at Hoheneck, the viewer may shudder with her, feeling viscerally the spectral presence of the past site in Anne’s life and, as a long-shot views it embedded in the German landscape, the country as a whole. In providing this link between past and present, the film authenticates a narrative not only of suffering, but also of the impact of this suffering on the present, and the political significance of this part of the German past. Anne K describes the whole GDR as ‘a big internment camp’, hardly permitting space for Ostalgie; we learn that the victims Andreas B, Lothar R and Mario R are unable to work because of the psychological effects of their experiences, whereas Mario R’s interrogator is apparently living very comfortably in the united Germany. The cognitive impact of these statements is augmented by the emotive and corporeal aspects of the film – the experiential authenticity or authenticity of affect generated by the sense of travelling back in time with the witnesses, and of being confronted directly with their testimony.

Remembering communities

It is significant that the viewer is not presented with a single witness, but with a set of five overlapping witness narratives. The testimonies are not presented as discrete wholes but intersect following a distinct trajectory, focusing on the six core stages as described previously. The cutting of the narratives occasionally gives the impression that one witness is able to finish the other’s sentence: Andreas B states ‘over and over they asked the same questions’; the film cuts to Mario R, who lists the particular questions he was asked; Lothar B states ‘then we were supposed to work’, the film then cuts to Catharina M, who seemingly completes his sentence with the word ‘forcibly’. This creates the sense that the victims are remembering together as a group, even though evidently their testimonies have been recorded separately. We might view them in this regard as a ‘remembering community’: following Aleida Assmann (2006), where memory can constitute community through generating a network of individuals whose memories intersect and overlap to lend one another coherence and credibility.

However, a remembering community in this sense is formed through the process of communication, particularly oral communication, and thus requires individuals to be simultaneously present. The creation of a remembering group in cultural media, where the narratives are disembodied and the testimony constructed via a medium of technology, is something rather different. These individuals cannot interact and their memories are not mutually negotiated in the same way that individual memories have been shown to change in conversational remembering (Welzer, 2002, 2010). In this respect, the testimonies are not originally produced in a remembering community; however, they are presented and might be received as a cohesive whole. They can be viewed as what I have described elsewhere as a ‘mediated remembering community’ (Jones, 2012a, 2012b). The construction of such communities not only creates a further sense of authenticity or authority for the narratives, as they appear to overlap and support each other, but it also allows the film to claim wider political relevance. Indeed, at the start of the documentary these witnesses are described as ‘standing for a group of approximately 72,000 people once imprisoned for attempting to flee the GDR’.

Unreliable witnesses

What is interesting in this respect is that many of the features identified as key to authenticity in Gesicht zur Wand also hold true for Alltag einer Behörde. The witnesses’ narratives can be described as a virtual performance, as they appear unrehearsed and immediate. Indeed, as indicated previously, although certain aspects are considered to be distortions or lies, generally the officers’ testimonies are received as offering privileged access to the attitudes and motivations of the Stasi elite. These are seen to be authentic, if self-incriminating. Moreover, the apparent transparency of the medium allows the viewer to feel directly confronted with the perpetrators – their testimony, too, is embodied. This effect is seen strikingly in Harmsen’s (2007) comment that ‘the film is a good opportunity to see the Stasi face-to-face, and not via the detour of a feature film’.

Nonetheless, the viewer is not encouraged to feel empathy for the subject position of the witnesses in this film. Their status in society as ‘perpetrators’ (a term repeated in reviews of the film) makes them morally suspect. In literary terms these narrators are unreliable, as the attitudes and views that they espouse are unlikely to be those of the viewer. Moreover, they do not stand alone in the text: from the beginning of the film, a ‘voice of God’ narrator competes with the witnesses’ accounts. As in traditional narrative, this third-person, unnamed and seemingly omniscient voice is authoritative precisely because it is not embodied and does not create an impression of subjectivity. The voiceover provides overarching historical commentary, framing the GDR as a totalitarian dictatorship and thereby setting the context in which the subsequent narratives of the witnesses are received. In the section, ‘Operative Procedure 2: Decomposition’ (Zersetzung), the ‘voice of God’ lists possible measures taken by the MfS to break up oppositional groups: encouraging alcoholism or sex with minors, destroying existing relationships, negligent treatment by doctors and anonymous telephone calls. The camera then cuts to former Stasi officer, Willi Opitz, who states: ‘I stand by my biography, with all ifs and buts, and I simply simply won’t be pushed into thinking I committed any crimes.’ Thus the viewer is encouraged to conclude that Opitz specifically does not view the wilful destruction of individual lives as a criminal activity. This interweaving of third-person and first-person narrative functions as a distancing mechanism, discouraging the viewer from seeing the world from the witnesses’ viewpoint.

Files and footage

The apparent objectivity of the ‘voice of God’ narrator is augmented by the fact that frequently he is not reading from a script, but from the Stasi files themselves. For example, in the section ‘Operative Procedure 4: Imprisonment’, the voiceover reads from the ‘house rules’ (Haftraumordnung) of the Stasi remand prisons as the camera pans over images of prison cells. The conditions in the prisons that emerge from this document seem to contradict directly the witness Siegfried Rataizick’s claims that former prisoners are lying when they state they were ill-treated. At other points, the files are used not to contradict the witnesses, but to authenticate what they say and simultaneously highlight the impact of their actions. For example, Kurt Zeiseweiss describes the illegal control of suspected dissidents’ post; this is cut with the voiceover reading from a file relating to similar actions against a victim with the codename ‘Schreiber’, including a confiscated letter.

Original footage from the period, generally (although not exclusively) recorded by the Stasi itself, is deployed in the film in a similar way to discredit the witnesses or to highlight the impact of their actions on their victims. For example, when former Stasi officer Horst Männchen states that the personal lives of normal citizens did not interest him, only the political aspects were worthy of surveillance, this statement is followed by a grainy recording from the Stasi archive of a man and woman dressing, evidently having been captured in flagrante by a secret police camera. Männchen’s assertion that such actions did not interest the MfS is contradicted further by the fact that this footage was used by the Stasi for training their officers. The voiceover narrating the original footage for this purpose expresses disgust at the ‘moral reprehensibility’ of this ‘female spy, over 50 years old’, who is having ‘extramarital sexual relations’ not only with her colleague, but also another acquaintance.

The use of files and footage can be seen to play a similar role in terms of witness authenticity to that of the auratic sites in Gesicht zur Wand. As artefacts with a direct link to the past, they authorise the text in which they are embedded. However, in Alltag einer Behörde, this is not the account of the witnesses, but the argument about the world that the documentary is making. The footage and artefacts appear to be without narrative, or perhaps more accurately, without a narrative relating to the present political context. This means that the historical material can be appropriated in order to authenticate the argument of the film in which it is embedded, even where this argument might be contrary to the original intentions of those recording the images. In the case of the material taken from Stasi training videos, the footage undergoes a double (re)interpretation. First, the images recorded by the secret police with intent but without commentary, are given both context and explanation by those who used this material to educate MfS officers on the practicalities of their work and the nature of the ‘class enemy’. Subsequently, in a radically changed political environment, both original images and the commentary of the MfS are embedded in the documentary film, in the service of a narrative that undermines the legitimacy of this work and, indeed, of the very act of recording the original material.

Reconstruction

Nichols argues that in contrast with fiction, the documentary form works with ‘conventions that call for evidence drawn from the historical world indexically, as it was seen and heard to occur rather than with metaphorical likenesses’ (1991: 117). The use of files, footage and original artefacts would seem to conform to these unspoken rules. Nonetheless, Alltag einer Behörde uses techniques of reconstruction or metaphorical replication of the past. For example, the section ‘Operative Procedure 3: Arrest and Interrogation’ contains black-and-white images of two men walking purposefully from a typical GDR vehicle towards the door of a house as, on the audio track, former Stasi officer Wolfgang Schwanitz explains the arrest of suspected dissidents. This scene is followed by original footage from a Stasi training video, recording the arrest of the suspect ‘Revisor’. The only difference in the presentation of these two scenes is that the latter is marked with the acronym BStU (Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR, Federal Commissioner for the Files of the State Security Service of the Former GDR), indicating its status as an original document found in the Stasi archives.

Indeed, often it is difficult for the viewer to identify which aspects of the film are reconstructions and which are recordings from the period under discussion: the filmmakers use authenticating markers for the reconstructions (e.g. period clothing and objects, black-and-white or sepia tone, shaky camera movements) to suggest that what has been recorded in the present in fact belongs to the past. Moreover, the distinction between the filming of a pro-filmic ‘reality’ and the filming of its reconstruction is not clear-cut: the black-and-white images of a transport van entering a GDR prison are unlikely to be taken from pre-1989 footage, and indeed are not marked as such; however, the images appear to be genuine contemporary recordings of the former Magdeburg prison at Moritzplatz, now a memorial museum. The images of the interrogation block in the Berlin prison at Hohenschönhausen are images of a pro-filmic reality, but this reality is of the present memorial, not the past prison. The sound effect of the cell doors being closed and locked and of faint, almost supernatural, human screams as the camera pans back along the prison corridor, is a further (re) constructed addition which, as in Gesicht zur Wand, lends a spectral quality to the images.

The impact of these reconstructed elements in terms of authenticity is comparable to that of the interaction of past and present seen in the use of auratic locations in Gesicht zur Wand. The reconstructions similarly blur the two levels of time, filming present locations as if they were still past, and in the service of a narrative about the nature of the Stasi and its political relevance for contemporary Germany. Moreover, the re-enactments of the past are a reconstruction of victim experience for the most part: the film replicates transport to the prison, entering the prison wing, the interior of the cells and the heavy door closing and locking. As discussed above, re-enactments are an example of experiential authenticity: the images are felt to be authentic even where they are not originals. Their use in Alltag einer Behörde is also an example of authenticity of affect: these scenes are designed to evoke a visceral response in the viewer by transporting them metaphorically back in time and encouraging them to imagine what it was like for the victims of the people they see testifying on screen. In contrast to Gesicht zur Wand, this is a counter-subjectivity to that of the talking heads and a powerful method of ensuring that their perspective does not dominate, even when it is not verbally contradicted.

Indeed, the Stasi officers narrating their memories and experiences in this film would also seem to form a mediated remembering community. Their accounts of the past overlap and intersect with one another, confirming and validating each other; yet, as in Gesicht zur Wand, these individuals do not physically remember together. Their memories are brought together by the medium in which they are embedded, and the medium structures the narratives it produces, providing the framework within which the viewer is encouraged to understand and interpret the witness accounts. Moreover, the example of Alltag einer Behörde points towards the political significance of the form that the mediation of eyewitness testimony takes. As the mediation of victim testimony in Gesicht zur Wand allows potentially disparate narratives to be brought together to make a coherent argument that might promote the interests of the wider remembering group, so in Alltag einer Behörde the accounts of individuals are brought together as a remembering community to make an argument that runs counter to the interests of its members.

Complementary and competing authenticities

The analysis of the mechanisms of authenticity in these two films highlights the political potential of the interaction between witness/indexical and experiential/affective modes of authenticity. Authenticity is constructed using not only originals or replicas, but also through evoking an emotional or bodily reaction in the viewer, blurring past and present and encouraging identification with the victim subject position. This, in turn, is likely to result in a specific appropriation of this past by those with no lived experience of the period, and offers the potential for a political response on the part of the viewer.

Perhaps it is not new to say that documentary film combines cognition with emotion. As Rosenstone observes: ‘like the dramatic film, the documentary wants you to feel and care deeply about the events and people of the past’ (2006: 74). However, the above analysis allows us to understand this in terms of constructing an experience of authenticity. In turn, this reveals the inherently interlinked and complementary nature of the two modes of the authentic. The witness authenticity of the objects, buildings and remembering individuals creates the potential for the emotional and experiential authenticity of the recipient of the memorial medium: they ascribe significance and offer an apparently direct link between past and present. However, witness authenticity is constructed in part by the viewer experiencing the artefacts and people as actually there, rather than mediated through the film, and as the past made present.

In the memory struggles of the present, complementary authenticities play an important role in one remembering group’s efforts to assert their voice over the competing authenticity of another. In the case of Gesicht zur Wand and Alltag einer Behörde, it is victims who harness the power of authenticity to authorise their narratives against those of the actors of state-sanctioned violence, and it would seem politically important that they are able to do so. Nonetheless, combining historical authenticity with emotion can risk oversimplification of the past. With reference to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), Heuer (2010) argues that Hirschbiegel’s film is a prominent example of the tendency in popular history to construct documentary authenticity by combining factually supported instruction with instruction via emotion. For Heuer (2010), this may promote an affective understanding of the past in the audience, but it also risks a passive response by offering ‘closed histories’ that remove the opportunity for reflection. In the case of the films discussed above, perhaps this is seen most clearly in the distancing of the viewer from the MfS officers’ narratives. It may seem politically desirable that their voices are discredited, and the subject position of the victim authenticated; however, if emotion outweighs cognition, the viewer is not given the opportunity to really engage with the perpetrator perspective, to understand how an individual might come to commit violence against their fellow citizens.

The analysis of the two films also highlights the importance of considering the impact of the medium on memory and testimony. All memory is mediated, be it by speech, written text, film, memorials or the new media (Erll, 2011). Close examination of individual media technologies can reveal the ways in which mediation determines not only how we remember, but also what we remember. The observation of mediated remembering communities demonstrates how the authenticity of first-person testimony, particularly testimony within a group, is harnessed in order to construct a similar kind of authenticity for media with a far broader circulation and the potential for a greater political impact. The comparison of Gesicht zur Wand and Alltag einer Behörde reveals that the particular form that mediation takes can both support and subvert the authenticity of eyewitness testimony in the service of authenticating the memorial artefact. Mediated or ‘staged’ remembering communities such as these are seen not only in documentary film, but also in written anthologies, museum exhibits (Jones, 2012a) and even internet discussion forums (Jones, 2012b). The proliferation of (re)mediated testimony in such a wide range of cultural forms confirms the centrality of this type of remembering in the media societies of the present. However, the ways in which these testimonies are embedded in the particular medium, and the power structures behind their production, determine both the meaning of these narratives in terms of understandings of the past, and their significance for the memory contests of the present.