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Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, in their "The Witness in the Archive: Holocaust/Memory Studies "u argue that Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah added a new idiom to the discourse on the Holocaust, which is witness testimony. Please discuss this new idiom. Your answer should take into account the three important aspects of memory and transmission that Hirsch and Spitzer highlighted following Shoshana Felmana's views. Finally, your answer should also discuss the mode of truth/truthfulness that the new conception of witnessing engenders.

In Hirsch and Spitzer's article (2009) the endeavor to understand the utility of witness testimony as it contributes to the archive of memory, specifically of the Holocaust. They find witness testimony to be both quite useful, but at the same time problematic or at least not wholly unreliable. The authors contend that there is a place for witness testimony in memory studies because testimony is a form of memory. Memories of catastrophe and tragedy cannot fully be recorded or documented with words or print. They argue that at …the heart of Memory Studies…a concentration on the figure of the embodied witness, on trauma and transmission, and on the complex relationship between enunciation, listening, and truth. (Page 152)

Witness testimony is a form of memory that encompasses each aspect of that complex relationship. Testimony and listening or recording (which they argue later is a form of listening) contribute to the collective memory and history of the event in a meaningful and productive manner. In this way, one could argue Hirsch and Spitzer value the use and application of phenomenology as part of the archive regulated to the Holocaust, or any other historic event.

Hirsch and Spitzer identify...

They initially describe the purpose of witness testimony as filling a gap in institutional representations of memory. They write:
Witness testimony locates the possibility of grasping the Holocaust in 'the slippage between law and art' -- between the closure brought by legal judgment, and the open-ended immediacy and presence preserved in a work of art. (Page 152)

Among forms of art that express or otherwise commemorate the event, as besides any legislation that comes as a result of the event, there is room for more information. There is a space for the lived, human experience of the event. Witness testimony is a form of information. Witness testimony represents an aspect of memory studies that is valid and important. It also represents aspects of the event that cannot be expressed in words. In fact, this aspect of the witness testimony idiom because a point upon which they spend a great deal of the article examining.

Lack of words or the inefficiency of words to express memory is a significant aspect of witness testimony for Hirsch and Spitzer.

In these moments, [when] the oral witness goes mute…Our attention is riveted on the muteness and bodily affect. Such concentrated attention to the deep memory lodged in the body and to the unspoken and unspeakable dimensions of traumatic recall, can however, give rise to a troubling implication: that silence and muteness are more telling and forceful than verbal narratives. Muteness and the mute witness have thus acquired the status of the 'true' and 'complete'… (Page 158-159)

There is a part of listening to witness testimony that includes listening to when there are no words and to include the silence as a part of the testimony. The authors…