Hirsekorn, Ute, and Sue Vice. “Perpetrator Testimony”

Hirsekorn and Vice’s chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture entitled ‘Perpetrator Testimony’ provides a detailed overview of the debates and issues surrounding the use of this term. Their summary of the state of the art in Perpetrator Studies evaluates the terminology used in the field, in addition to outlining its history and its more recent theoretical advancements, all while emphasizing the risks of and the necessity for engaging with perpetrator testimony. In covering both the more canonical works and approaches to studying these testimonial accounts – including Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Levi’s The Grey Zone (1986), and Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992) – as well as their later reformulations – namely in The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies (2020) – the authors situate their own arguments about the type of reflexivity needed to open ‘the door to knowledge’ which the testimonies ‘invite’ the reader to (581). 

Most pertinently, Hirsekorn and Vice intervene in the prevailing conceptualizations and valuations of perpetrator testimony as either a historical source to be cross-checked or as strictly a testifier’s act of address toward an audience. They argue that, beyond Browning’s four-question model for establishing the veracity of perpetrators’ claims (interrogating self-interest, vividness of memory, possibility, probability), and beyond the oft-emphasized testifier-audience relationship (predicated on truth, trust, authority), perpetrator testimony may prompt the uncomfortable but vital processes of self-reflection in the audience. It is precisely in the reader, listener, or viewer’s ability to concurrently recognize the humanity of the perpetrator and be critical of their actions – to access their ‘internal truth’ without themselves internalizing it – that the value of these testimonies lies. Limiting the scope of what might be a ‘perpetrator testimony’ to ‘testimonial utterance,’ that is the varied (re)mediations of perpetrators’ words, the authors find numerous examples to support their argument. They take for instance the report-like memoir of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß (1951) not as a piece which testifies to the author’s remorse, but as a testimonial work which elucidates the perpetrator’s “unwillingness to disclose the fullness of their participation in a crime” (573). Moreover, the confession in Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow (1991) uttered by the novel’s protagonist, a former Nazi doctor, is read by the authors as an “ethical wish-fulfilment;” this ‘plea for redemption’ they nonetheless see as adjacent to the “affective or bodily testimony of contrition” evident in the 2018 trial of Johann R. where the accused “accessory to mass murder at Stutthof” shed tears (577). To elicit this type of knowledge from the aforementioned testimonies, Hirsekorn and Vice remind the reader of the importance of one’s own capacity to ask questions such as “How and in which contexts could I perpetrate violence?” 

“Perpetrator Testimony” thus reevaluates the uses of and the different forms in which perpetrators’ testimonial utterances take place, elaborating on Perpetrator Studies’ past methodological confines while also demonstrating how they may be addressed. However, apart from the authors’ discussion of ‘perpetrator documentary film’ where Fernando Canet’s work on the topic is reviewed and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) are analyzed, the chapter is almost exclusively concerned with examples of German testimonial accounts, be they Nazi- or Stasi-affiliated. Although a greater effort could have been made to incorporate different perpetration contexts despite the field’s focus on the Holocaust, Hirsekorn and Vice’s comprehensive survey presents itself as a valuable guide for literary, film, and scholars of culture interested in the ethics and aesthetics of perpetrator testimony. 

Author of this entry: Dušan Janković.

Hirsekorn, Ute, and Sue Vice. ‘Perpetrator Testimony’. In The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture, edited by Sara Jones and Roger Woods, 567–95. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2023.