Trauma Theory

Can language and literature cure psychological trauma? If so, what forms do they (have to) take
in doing so? When does language hit the wall where the unspeakable mandates silence? And
where might literature come in as the rescuing hand by offering forms of expression which are
rooted in speech but transcend the merely spoken? This study confronts these issues through
the double lenses of Sebastian Barry’s oeuvre and the complex of dissociative disorders that
are at work both in his creative output and the ways in which he fictionalizes dark and traumatic
biographical data.
Re-negotiated in the process are the deconstructivist trauma paradigm that has come to
dominate trauma discourse in the humanities as well as the duality of Barry’s critical reception.
Barry is either being hailed as a rescuer of marginalized, ‘subaltern’ histories or admonished as
too radical a proponent of historical revisionism. A dissociative reading of literature’s
capabilities and limitations in addressing trauma and Barry’s literary mission to work-through
family trauma in his work moves the discourse beyond radical dualities towards a more
integrated understanding of posttraumatic literature.

The Macedonian filmmaker Milčo Mančevski is adamant that there is no such thing as Balkan cinema and he is not “a Balkan filmmaker”. He has repeatedly stated that his films are about people and not place, and insists that it is a fundamental mistake to read a film that is from somewhere as necessarily about somewhere. In this paper I argue, to the contrary, that Mančevski’s films are deeply rooted in a specific geopolitical space. Mančevski’s films range across genre, time and place, their experimental form disrupts narrative conventions and presents the past as discontinuous and open. The films engage in complicated and often indirect ways with our relationship to the past and how the past can be represented. Mančevski’s films, I contend, struggle with the “founding trauma” of national identity, that is to say, with the creation of the modern Macedonian state out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century and more recently the expulsion of the Slav...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity is frequently misunderstood as something like the death of God.  In fact, it comes closer to Emmanuel Levinas' view that we experience God in the presence of the suffering of the other person.

The Macedonian filmmaker Milčo Mančevski is adamant that there is no such thing as Balkan cinema and he is not " a Balkan filmmaker ". He has repeatedly stated that his films are about people and not place, and insists that it is a fundamental mistake to read a film that is from somewhere as necessarily about somewhere. In this paper I argue, to the contrary, that Mančevski's films are deeply rooted in a specific geopolitical space. Mančevski's films range across genre, time and place, their experimental form disrupts narrative conventions and presents the past as discontinuous and open. The films engage in complicated and often indirect ways with our relationship to the past and how the past can be represented. Mančevski's films, I contend, struggle with the " founding trauma " of national identity, that is to say, with the creation of the modern Macedonian state out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century and mor...

The goals of this naturalistic, cross-sectional study were to describe the patient, therapist, and therapeutic conditions of an international sample of dissociative disorder (DD) patients treated by community therapists and to determine if community treatment for DD appears to be as effective as treatment for chronic PTSD and conditions comorbid with DD. Analyses found that across both patient (N 280) and therapist (N 292) reports, patients in the later stages of treatment engaged in fewer self-injurious behaviors, had fewer hospitalizations, and showed higher levels of various measures of adaptive functioning (e.g., GAF) than those in the initial stage of treatment. Additionally, patients in the later stages of treatment reported lower symptoms of dissociation, posttraumatic stress disorder, and distress than patients in the initial stage of treatment. The effect sizes for Stage 5 versus Stage 1 differences in DD treatment were comparable to those published for chronic PTSD associa...

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF
-- TOC and book summary in downloadable .pdf] 
According to the poet Elias Canetti, "All the things one has forgotten / scream for help in dreams." To the ancient Egyptians they were prophecies, and in world folklore they have often marked visitations from the dead. For Freud they were expressions of "wish fulfillment," and for Jung, symbolic representations of mythical archetypes. Although there is still much disagreement about the significance and function of dreams, they seem to serve as a barometer of current mind and body states.

In this volume, Deirdre Barrett brings together the study of dreams and the psychology of trauma. She has called on a distinguished group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers--among them Rosalind Cartwright, Robert J. Lifton, and Oliver Sacks--to consider how trauma shapes dreaming and what the dreaming mind might reveal about trauma. The book focuses on catastrophic events, such as combat, political torture, natural disasters, and rape. The lasting effects of childhood trauma, such as sexual abuse or severe burns, on personality formation, the nature of memories of early trauma, and the development of defenses related to amnesia and dissociation are all considered. The book also takes up trauma and adult dreams, including Vietnam veterans and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, rape victims, and firestorm survivors. Finally, this volume concludes with a look at the potential "traumas of normal life," such as divorce, bereavement, and life-threatening illness, and the role of dreams in working through normal grief and loss.

Taken together, these diverse perspectives illuminate the universal and the particular effects of traumatic experience. For physicians and clinicians, determining the etiology of nightmares offers valuable diagnostic and therapeutic insights for individual treatment. This book provides a way of juxtaposing the research in the separate fields of trauma and dreams, and learning from their discoveries.

Systems Theory provides a new and expanded way of understanding the psychology of trauma. Systems Theory helps us to see trauma as a nonlinear, holistic dynamic of life that can add to well-being as well as take away from it.

I am still working on this paper, and would love to have suggestions for improvement, as well as possible journals for publishing it!

Despite a stated commitment to cross-cultural solidarity, trauma theory—an area of cultural investigation that emerged out of the 'ethical turn' affecting the humanities in the 1990s—is marked by a Eurocentric, monocultural bias. This book takes issue with the tendency of the founding texts of the field to marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority groups, and to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity. Moreover, it questions the assumption that a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia is uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma, and criticizes the neglect of the connections between metropolitan and non-Western or minority traumas. Combining theoretical argument with literary case studies, Postcolonial Witnessing contends that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.

A true life story of facing war time conflict internally and externally to overcome extreme trauma, focusing on post lobotomy coping mechanisms and empowerment through reframing dynamics situations and sculpting the situation into your favor.

In Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about the deep association of media and trauma: media bear witness to the human failure to bear witness, making the traumatic technologically transmissible and reproducible.

Taking up a number of case studies--the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial; the videotaping of Holocaust testimonies; recent psychiatric debates about trauma through media following the 9/11 attacks; current controversy surrounding drone operators' post-trauma; and digital platforms of algorithmic-holographic witnessing and virtual reality exposure therapy for PTSD--Pinchevski demonstrates how the technological mediation of trauma feeds into the traumatic condition itself. The result is a novel understanding of media as constituting the material conditions for trauma to appear as something that cannot be fully approached and yet somehow must be.

While drawing on contemporary materialist media theory, especially the work of Friedrich Kittler and his followers, Pinchevski goes beyond the anti-humanistic tendency characterizing the materialist approach, discovering media as bearing out the human vulnerability epitomized in trauma, and finding therein a basis for moral concern in the face of violence and atrocity. Transmitted Wounds unfolds the ethical and political stakes involved in the technological transmission of mental wounds across clinical, literary, and cultural contexts.

Readers of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye classify the protagonist, Holden Caulfield as either a wealthy, pretentious sixteen-year-old who is viewed by his society as delinquent or a mentally troubled, socially awkward boy in desperate need of help. Since the novel’s publication, critics have argued whether Holden is a reliable or unreliable narrator and its readers have questioned his motives for telling this story. This essay will present Holden’s narration as both reliable and unreliable by focusing on the novel as a reflective piece written by a Holden who is receiving treatment for mental health issues. It will also showcase the mental health struggle of Holden Caulfield and help the reader gain insight into his decision-making process throughout the novel. Holden has experienced several traumatic moments in his life and with the use of trauma theory, this essay will illustrate Holden’s mental stability and demonstrate how Salinger presents an adolescent struggling with the grieving process, reliving his past, and a desire to protect the innocent. The reader will understand the choices Holden makes are not because of his recklessness, but because of his untreated mental condition and his unrealistic desire to change the world into a better place for children, especially his younger sister.

Fetischisierung als posttraumatisches Syndrom Marx hat Begriffe wie Fetisch, Mystifikation, Phantasma usw. offenbar bewusst verwendet, um das falsche Bewusstsein zu charakterisieren, das die kapitalistischen Verhältnisse durch ihr praktisches Funktionieren produzieren. Das mag zunächst überraschend erscheinen, da die erwähnten Begriffe gewöhnlich verwendet werden, um "primitive" Gesellschaften zu charakterisieren. Offenbar gibt es für Marx' Entscheidung zwei Gründe. Zum Einen als Hinweis darauf, dass die kapitalistische Gesellschaft nur scheinbar auf einer rationalen Grundlage beruht, zum Anderenäußerst treffendim Hinblick auf die Tatsache, dass die Menschen die Verhältnisse, die sie selbst ständig produzieren und reproduzieren, zu unumstößlichen herrschenden Mächten hochstilisieren. Die in dieser Fetischanbetung befangenen gesellschaftlichen Menschen 2 erkennen sich als frei, während und dadurch dass sie sich dieser Macht unterwerfen. Dieses falsche Bewusstseindas also zugleich ein falsches Sein istist wie ein Krebs, der durch den Kapitalismus produziert wird. Das bedeutet, dass es die gesellschaftlichen Individuen selbst sindauch die Arbeiter, auch als "Klasse für sich"!die den Krebs ständig reproduzieren, so dass er schließlich so stark werden kann, dass perspektivisch die Gesellschaft als Ganzes zugrunde geht.

In 1816 a violent literary quarrel engulfed Bourbon Restoration Italy. On one side the Romantics wanted an opening up of Italian culture towards Europe, and on the other the Classicists favoured an inward-looking Italy, based on its Greco-Roman roots. Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), a young poet and philosopher, wrote a Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry in 1818, aiming to contribute to the debate from a new perspective; it was finally published in 1906. This study provides the first complete English translation of the Discourse by Gabrielle Sims and Fabio A Camilletti. It is placed in context and its potential impact on contemporary Restoration Italy is assessed. Camilletti argues that the Classicist/Romanticist clash can be seen as the aftermath of the political, social and cultural trauma caused by the Napoleonic Wars.

The increasing visibility of climate change and scientists’ alarming warnings about it are taking a toll on people’s mental well-being. This essay surveys the culturally resonant repertoire of new coinages that have emerged in recent years to name and communicate environmentally induced distress. It pays particular attention to the concept of pre-traumatic stress disorder, which has become the focus of a small but important body of humanistic scholarschip calling for an expanded trauma theory that would be future- as well as past-oriented. Noting trauma theory’s persistent human-centredness, the essay goes on to consider attempts that are being made to reconceptualize trauma in non-anthropocentric terms and to acknowledge the interconnectedness and entanglement of human and non-human traumas. It ends by predicting that cultural trauma research, which has so far shown relatively little interest in environmental issues in general and climate change in particular, will engage more fully with our dire environmental predicament in the years ahead.

This introduction unpacks some of the many complex connections between trauma, comics, and documentary form. It begins by theorising trauma as a ‘sticky’ concept that troubles disciplinary boundaries, before suggesting that comics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991) have played a significant role in the active production—rather than simply reflection or reification—of cultural and academic conceptions of trauma. It then turns to a critical overview of Caruthian and other hegemonic models of trauma, combining this with brief outlines of each of the book’s chapters to show how they seek to unsettle a dominant ‘trauma paradigm’, or to divert away from a recognised ‘trauma aesthetic’. In its final section, the introduction emphasises the important contributions made by efforts to decolonise trauma studies, exploring how several of this book’s contributors are informed by and continuing this important work, especially through their reevaluation of the figure of the witness. The introduction concludes by drawing out and reiterating the book’s overarching contention: that comics are a generative force at the core of trauma itself, moulding and melding it into new shapes that might provide new models for working it through in the future.

From: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030379971

This thesis argues that due to the unique affordances of their medium, video games have the potential to work with psychological trauma in ways that more “traditional” trauma-literary media such as books or films cannot. After comparing how inter(re)activity, empathy, and perpetration function across game and trauma theory, I perform a series of case studies of video games in order to explain how each works with trauma. These include Dear Esther, Papers, Please, The Baron, Spec Ops: The Line, Limbo, and The Walking Dead.

A Shakespearean comedy is an unexpected place to find trauma, yet Twelfth Night’s conflict arises from the way Viola and Olivia suspend themselves within the living memory of their losses. Olivia vows to weep the same “eye-offending brine” (1.1.29) as the earliest days of her grief, demonstrating her inability to affectively remove herself beyond the original moment of trauma. Dan Brayton observes that “finding a future spouse is contingent on Olivia’s own willingness to put herself into circulation on the marriage market” (144); my paper will show how Olivia’s brining is the opposite of circulation. Likewise, Malvolio’s description of Cesario as “in standing water between boy and man” (1.5.153) serves as important parallel to Olivia’s suspension within the “brine” of her tears. The image of “standing water” suggests that, suspended between the outwardly castrated male and the sexually mature female, Viola disguises herself as a eunuch in order to remove herself from “circulation”. Both women render themselves sexually unavailable rather than facing their morbid fear that “what’s to come is still unsure” (2.3.47). This fear, however, prevents them from performing their conventional social roles: preparing for reproductive futures while their bodies are still young and fertile. This paper will consider how Twelfth Night challenges the traditional comic structure when the female characters serve as their own blocking figures.

Emblematic for the modernist mindset, Virginia Woolf questions the knowability of ourselves and other minds throughout her novels such as Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). Anticipating cognitive narratology, Woolf does not only employ a variation of the stream of consciousness-technique in order to delve into the minds of her characters. Woolf’s characters themselves also attempt to read the minds of other characters by Theory of Mind (ToM). As a specific strand of philosophy of mind, the phenomenon of ToM has been studied interdisciplinarily among, for instance, philosophers, cognitive scientists, developmental psychologists and literary scholars since the 1990s (cf. Herman 31, 34).

When modernist scepticism peaked with World War I, previous conceptions regarding issues of identity, society and language were shattered (cf. Levenson 4-5). Karen DeMeester even terms modernist fiction as “a literature of trauma” (649). With Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway and Rhoda in The Waves, Woolf constructs two fictional characters that epitomise the traumatised subject in post-World War I society. Whereas Rhoda represents the fragmented self of modernity, the war veteran Smith suffers from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Their attempts to come to terms with their mental disorders and the world they live in fail, which eventually leads to their committal of suicide.

With regard to ToM, the question arises whether mental disorders affect Rhoda’s and Septimus’s mind-reading capability. If dysfunctional characters suffer from a dysfunctional ToM, they potentially lack the ability to mentally connect to their community. Yet, ToM is not a unilateral process. Rhoda’s and Septimus’s potential incapability of communicating themselves complicates any understanding on behalf of their communities as well. Therefore, it must also be examined whether the ToM of their companions can gain access into their minds in turn. Suicide for Rhoda and Septimus, Woolf suggests, seems to be the only way out of a repudiating society that lacks empathy. As the title-character Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway construes, “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate,” (156) what could neither be expressed nor understood. Accordingly, it will be investigated whether mental disorders result in a dysfunctional mind-reading capability by close-reading the instances of ToM between Rhoda, Septimus and their respective communities.
In order to analyse and interpret the performance of ToM of dysfunctional characters, this paper undertakes a twofold approach by merging cognitive narratology and psychoanalytical trauma theory.

Trauma is often seen as an event that blocks the victim's expressive capacities. It leaves people speechless, manifesting itself in various symptoms and post-traumatic disorders. Yet, it also generates a stream of narratives-textual, visual, or oral.

This course explores this dual nature of trauma: trauma as a tool of repression and silencing, and trauma as a prerequisite for a "talking cure." We will see how traumatic events are worked through storytelling-by creating narratives of loss, suffering, and displacement.

The course combines two types of texts: 1) key theoretical works on trauma, witnessing, and testimony, and 2) artistic representation of trauma, loss, and grief. Throughout the semester, we will be building close connections between these two types of traumatic representations.

This thesis investigates what trauma theory would look like if it were more attuned to the creaturely residues of trauma. Through theorizing Freudian trauma theory and showing how its humanist focus is taken on by literary scholars, the thesis examines how the traditional approach of trauma that focuses on language and narrative could move towards a more affective and embodied approach that finds its origin in animal studies and its theorization of concepts like the creaturely, the open, vulnerability, woundedness, suffering and care. Through a close reading of three literary works by J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace, Life and Times of Michael K and Slow Man) the thesis argues that, whereas traditional trauma theory focuses on trauma as a construct of anthropological difference, it is also possible to approach trauma in a non humanist and anti-anthropocentric manner by means of body-based relations of caring for oneself and fellow creatures

Female revolutionaries suffered various traumas – including sexual trauma – during Ireland’s revolutionary period (1916–1923). This chapter draws on files from the Military Service Pensions Collection, personal accounts and literary narratives in order to consider the various medical treatments prescribed to women for 'exhausted nerves' in the early decades of the Irish Free State. Contemporary understandings of what is now recognized as PTSD were strongly informed by gender ideologies, and women’s mental welfare was routinely connected to the female reproductive system. In contrast to men’s treatment, which aimed to swiftly return the patient to the warzone or workforce, "nervous" female revolutionaries were frequently recommended prolonged 'rest' treatments which emphasized domestication and re-feminization. These costly therapies reflect the social privilege of many female republicans. Women lacking such familial or financial supports, however, could find themselves committed to the country’s overcrowded mental institutions, while a significant number of female revolutionaries emigrated for medical reasons.

חן מרקס - למה דברים רעים קורים לאנשים טובים - מסע בעקבות התשובות שהעניקה התרבות היהודית.
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יצא לאור בהוצאת ידיעות ספרים, מרץ 2022.

לרכישה בקישור
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Chen (Chaim Natan) Marx
Why Bad Things Happen to Good People
A Journey Through the Jewish Culture

Despite a stated commitment to cross-cultural solidarity, trauma theory—an area of cultural investigation that emerged out of the “ethical turn” affecting the humanities in the 1990s—is marked by a Eurocentric, monocultural bias. In this chapter, I take issue with the tendency of the founding texts of the field to marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority groups, to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity, and to favour or even prescribe a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma. I contend that the suffering engendered by colonialism and its aftermath needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, and in its own terms if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. I illustrate this argument—developed at greater length in my book Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)—with a case study of a literary text that seems to me to call for a more inclusive, materialist, and politicized form of trauma theory. Published in 2010 to great critical acclaim, Aminatta Forna’s novel The Memory of Love examines how survivors of the Sierra Leone Civil War cope with the physical and psychological scars of those years. One of its protagonists is a British psychologist specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder who is volunteering with the stretched mental health services in Freetown in 2001, and who brings familiar Western ideas to the problems of the local population that he has been parachuted in to help solve. The novel is marked by a profound ambivalence about the applicability and viability of Western treatment methods in post-Civil War Sierra Leone. While there is a measure of closure for some characters, The Memory of Love—a fine example of literary realism—also awakens its readers to the chronic, ongoing suffering endured in silence by whole swathes of the population, in the face of which narrative therapy is an inadequate response. Thus, Forna’s novel can be seen to pose a challenge to trauma theory to remove its Eurocentric blinkers—a challenge, I argue, that the field would be well advised to embrace.

National data of children's exposure to traumatic experiences are alarming. Research asserts the interconnectedness between experiencing childhood trauma (CT) or adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and developing substance use disorders (SUDs) in later adulthood. Trauma definition and contemporary trauma theory (CTT) provide the foundation for trauma informed care (TIC) in social work practice with co-occurring trauma and SUDs. TIC re-conceptualizes SUDs as a mechanism to cope with the effects of trauma. Coping and resilience are relevant factors to the ramifications of CT on SUDs, and are the manifestation of key TIC principles. Integrating TIC practices aimed at enhancing coping and resilience into treatment for co-occurring trauma and SUDs is needed in order to negate the devastating impact of trauma and propel recovery. Conclusions and implications to social work practice are discussed.

This article examines the social and psychological function of the " Scar " metaphor during the immediate post-Mao period. We propose that the widely employed scar metaphor, which was first created in the Scar literature movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, enabled Chinese readers to " work through " the blend of psychological and ideological disquietude that lingered after the Cultural Revolution. We will first clarify how the scar metaphor facilitated this process of " working through, " using as an example Lu Xinhua's " The Scar " (Shanghen). We will then describe how the scar metaphor became dispersed throughout Chinese popular culture and enabled a broad spectrum of Chinese readers to participate in a similar process. At both levels of analysis, we will argue that the scar metaphor simultaneously provided a literary space for working through personal trauma—and through closely related anxieties about the ideological transition from Mao to Deng.

Thucydides’ detailed description of the Athenian plague, which is estimated to have killed from a quarter to a third of Athens’ population and led to the breakdown of several social norms, has been approached from a variety of scholarly perspectives, yet its potential as a trauma narrative is still under-explored.
Drawing on comparative evidence from the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, such as Katherine Anne Porter’s fictionalized account Pale Horse, Pale Rider, this thesis examines the emotive and commemorative functions of Thucydides’ plague episode through the lens of trauma theory. By combining elements of personal narrative, literature, and historiography, Thucydides rendered the story of the Athenian plague into an aesthetic representation and thus provides a collective memorialization of the forgotten victims. I suggest that his vivid description (ἐνάργεια) of the immense suffering enabled his readers to empathetically engage with the traumatic event and thus work through their own trauma.

This article approaches science fiction using the strategically powerful perspectives of Trauma Studies and the posthuman in conjunction with Foucault’s notion of biopower, paying special attention to the deep investment of these discourses in notions of embodiment and agency. In order to do so, I will consider Octavia Butler’s 1984 short story “Bloodchild” (Hugo and Nebula Awards) and James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)’s 1973 novella “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (Hugo Award). Both stories explore dystopian futures—in their focus on coercive extraterrestrials and life on an inhospitable planet, on the one hand, and on oppressive consumer culture and corporate technoscience, on the other—and point back to our posthuman present through metaphoric characters that illustrate and invite comment upon the articulation of power and the construction of the embodied posthuman. The main issue at play in the two stories, I will contend, is the identification of biopower with the traumatic appropriation of the human body and the articulation of posthuman forms of resistance to it.

Contemporary British theatre is a crucial avenue for staging trauma as theatre provides both the potential of emotional identification and critical perspective. By making use of the unique possibilities of embodied performance, theatre allows for a safe space in which traumatic suffering can be reconfigured. Drawing on the notion of Roger Luckhurst's 'traumaculture, ' this paper interrogates the extent to which contemporary British playwright Laura Wade's one-act play, Colder Than Here (2005), situates current traumatic experiences within social and cultural contexts. This paper deals with terminal disease increases, familial dysfunction, and ecological degradation as traumatic experiences that permeate daily existence. Therefore, by bringing into the spotlight the contemporary definition of trauma and traumaculture, this paper aims at exploring how Colder Than Here reflects multifaceted engagements with traumatic cultural experiences onstage with a focus on a middle-class English family.

This filmed representation of the Holocaust dares its viewers to experience, as secondary witnesses, atrocities committed by the Nazis in Poland. The story, which we assume to be recounted by survivors of the Holocaust and represented by a film crew, takes us back to the past in a futile attempt, on both the survivors' and our part, to understand what could not be understood at the time it happened: thus, we attempt to share with them the experience of trauma, that ―confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge and thus continually returns, in its exactness, at a later time.‖ 1 The film establishes what Shoshana Felman calls, referring to post-Holocaust testimonial literature, an ―alignment between witnesses‖; 2 Spielberg's film is yet another form of testimonial narrative (audiovisual but lacking a full historical context, except for a few on-screen titles) which ―aligns‖ the survivors, who have come to be known as the ―Schindler Jews,‖ and their descendants, on the one hand, and Spielberg's cameraman (comparable to an internalized narrator), Spielberg the film director (an external, omniscient narrator), and the film-theater audience, on the other. We are all turned into witnesses in the same process and at the same time in which the real witnesses, the survivors, testify to the horror of the Holocaust.