Interview with Karen Jungblut

2.1 Could you say More About this German-Specific Historical Impact, and Perhaps How it Affected you in Choosing this Career Path?

I grew up in Germany in a German, non-Jewish family, and although at home we rarely spoke about the Holocaust, I grew up knowing about it from everywhere around me. I had a certain exposure to it growing up in the 1960s and 70s, although generally not from my family. The topic did come up in some moments at home, once because at a younger age we accidentally found Mein Kampf in my grandmother’s cupboard and also because I had two grandfathers who had fought in the Second World War: one on the Eastern front and the other on the Western. A more direct, personal impact on me was that I was named after a character in a film that my mom saw when she was pregnant. The film is called Exodus, which is based on the novel by Leon Uris. My aunt gave me this book when I was about 10 or 11 years old and I loved it; the story shook me at an impressionable age.

I also had a friend, with whom we wanted to learn Hebrew. I was ready to go to a Kibbutz, and basically had a typical young German reaction at that time. As young adults, we didn’t want to be part of the perpetrator side but wanted to identify more with the victims to whom it was done. We felt that we needed to counter what had happened, do something about it – or maybe not be associated with the horrible history on the perpetrator side, in a way escape that association. Yet none of this was conscious, it was an emotional reaction that found fertile ground in my teenage years. Later, I had the chance to take part in an exchange program with Israelis. We travelled for three weeks in Germany including my first time at a concentration camp, we went to Dachau. We all had these pivotal moments where we had to sit and talk about our common history, sitting on opposite sides (literally), which was difficult, and right after these meetings, we mingled again to discuss at which bar we were to meet up next. I look back to this experience not only with fondness, it had a deep impact on me. We even had a forty-year reunion a few years back; it was pretty unbelievable that many of the Israelis came to Germany to meet us back in our old hometown. Subconsciously, I am sure these early experiences shaped some of my decisions later; but honestly, it was also something that happened peu à peu. I had not planned to work for the United Nations or the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, these career opportunities just came up and I went for them. Now, looking back, I am pretty sure that some of these decisions were shaped unconsciously by these early and somewhat significant experiences.

2.2 And What Were the Pivotal Moments from your Studies that Shaped your Choices?

At the Freie Universität, I attended a course on the postwar trials of Nazi criminals taught by two prosecutors, one from former East Germany and one from West Germany along with a historian. That course made me clearly realize what I want to study further. So I wrote about the historical and political regulations and processes of the deportation of German Jewry, including a local history of my home area for my Diploma thesis, which had a more practical outlook compared to the Master’s thesis. My research included witness testimonies from postwar trials and prosecution files; and to get my hands on them, I had to create a lot of pressure on the state level in Hesse, on a local prosecution office, and even on others in libraries and state archives to show me those documents that would allow me to see what I thought I needed to get to the whole story. That was the turning point, when I wanted to stay involved with the study of the Holocaust or just generally the Holocaust field. It was the 1990s, I understood how little was done, especially with a focus on witness and survivor testimony – at least in Germany. By the time I finished my thesis, the Shoah Foundation started to do interviews in Europe, and after speaking with my advisor Wolfgang Scheffler, I decided to apply in 1995. Scheffler was the professor at Freie Universität who was teaching the course on postwar trials with Helga Grabitz and Günther Wieland, the prosecutors from West and East Germany respectively. Helga Grabitz was incredible, she was this small woman, a chain-smoker, and just as tough as they come. She was a woman who studied law and became a prosecutor in 1950s–60s in Germany, surrounded not only mainly by men, but her professors were all those legal minds before 1945 in Germany… From what and how I remembered it, she got basically shoehorned into handling Nazi trials and Nazi criminals, something that nobody else had wanted to do in the field, so they just gave it to the young “woman prosecutor”. But she believed in the importance of trials and fully embraced it, worked on lots of trials, and it became her career. She spent her career trying German Nazi perpetrators – not an easy job by any means, and certainly not one in postwar Germany. For example, she was the prosecutor of the trial in Hamburg against the men of the Police Battalion that Christopher Browning based his research on in Ordinary Men. She was persistent and resilient, and I simply adored her. Both she and Wolfgang Scheffler had a huge impact on me.

2.3 How did you Translate all these Experiences and Mentorship into your Profession and Career?

For me, the Shoah Foundation has become almost like a family, and the “work” – it’s not a job, it’s a mission. The Shoah Foundation has a work mission and I have a life mission, which are somewhat aligned. For me it’s to listen to the stories of survivors and witnesses, support them in telling their stories for generations to come, and thus to do something in bettering this world – to put it simply and plainly. It was a privilege that I had the chance to lead the efforts of cataloguing and indexing more than 50,000 testimonies that were conducted in over 50 countries and in over 40 different languages, while working with an incredible international team. Indexing ensured that these important stories would be searchable, allowing educators and scholars to engage with them. Being part of that effort was in itself a life-changing experience. It was very difficult and very challenging on so many levels, and yet incredibly inspiring. I have learned more about the world, humanity, people, and processes that I could ever imagine. When the Shoah Foundation became a part of the University of Southern California in January 2006, after finishing the indexing, the next task was to create a connection between the VHA and academia, which was a challenging role to take on.

2.4 Was it Difficult? Why?

Yes, and at first, I was so naïve to think otherwise. At that time academia was in general very critical of our approach because we were doing something new, something different, and not necessarily following traditional oral history methodologies, nor traditional cataloguing. First of all, we were located on the backlot of Universal Studios, which is not the usual playground for academia. We had to overcome several criticisms, including claims that the archive is actually “Hollywood” based on where we were located, or that we were these “young kids” on a backlot from Universal Studios, and so on.

What is more, we were processing the interviews without transcriptions at first, which we actually were not able to do at the time for so many reasons, such as funding. It would have been an immensely bigger and a longer job to get it all done, to have about 100,000 hours of testimony in over 40 different languages transcribed and indexed all at the same time. Eventually, we managed to have these 50,000 testimonies indexed and catalogued in a way that nobody else had done before: searchable through moments in a testimony. This was also, I believe, only possible outside of an academic institution. That is not to say we did not employ methodological and academic rigor in our efforts. Yehuda Bauer helped me in this respect, he reviewed our approach and encouraged us to keep on going because he could see the thinking behind it. We constantly had to keep in mind and make sure that what we do has the required rigor, guidelines, consistency, and methodology, while operating on a budget, working with people who listened to every testimony from beginning to end, analyzing the content to determine which keywords to use, and getting it all done within a reasonable number of years. Which we did achieve by the end of 2005, before we moved to USC.

And then, I naively thought that academia would come right away, professors, teachers, educators would want to use it because there is so much human history, local history, and global history in this archive. But it wasn’t that way. I was just too close to it to understand why they would not see the potential of the archive from the beginning. It was not one of those “you build it and everyone will come and see” type of experience. It took quite some effort for academia to begin to show real interest. The way I see it is that being outside of academia is exactly what made it possible to create this archive and this indexing methodology, but it needed someone from within academia to ensure acceptance of it. I think the fact that I didn’t have a PhD made it harder for me to get scholars to take me seriously and connect with my work. I just could not understand the reluctance, the challenge academics saw when approaching the archive, so I was the wrong person for the job at that point. I see that now very clearly.

Another difficulty was overcoming the medium of video testimony, scholars knew how to read text but reading video testimonies was completely new in Holocaust research. This difficulty was also due to the profession being used to relying on written material more than the spoken word, which I just find a bit ironic because for us, as humans, the first way of communication is oral. So there were all of these opinions that made up the initial reluctancy, but then, we began to find ways to bring academia to the archive and the archive to academia. This is thanks to finding a home at the University of Southern California.

2.5 Once Academia Became a Partner, What was Next?

I moved to thinking about how to bring in testimonies and collections of other experiences that are not the Holocaust, other genocidal crimes, crimes against humanity, mass atrocity crimes. This step wasn’t taken overnight; it was years of conversations, mostly internally at first, defining who we were as the Shoah Foundation. We had already done interviews with other victim groups of Nazi persecution, such as the Roma and Sinti or political prisoners, but the main archive was with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Organizations that were dealing with topics of other hate-based crimes, genocides, and crimes against humanity had often been visiting us, wanting to know how we were operating to help them do what they wanted to do with these different experiences. So we have always been aware that what we were doing seems to inspire others. We also benefited from experiences of the many other great organizations who conducted interviews with Holocaust survivors for years before we even began in 1994. But we were doing it in a particular way, with a specific geographic volume that set us apart. Part of the motivation to tell the story was also educational for many survivors and one central theme for the Shoah Foundation’s mission was that it’s not only a repository, but an archive that can become an educational tool. Survivors came forward because they wanted to leave something for their families behind, to speak because many of their families couldn’t speak after being murdered, many felt obligated to do it for them, and to make sure people understand what happened, and learn from it so it won’t happen again.

We know that “Never Again” can become just a quote that doesn’t mean anything unless we really do something about it. And, clearly, genocides have not stopped after the Holocaust. The Holocaust is a genocide; if we want to better understand genocides, understand how we as human beings are able to commit this act, understand how these acts develop – as Marian Turski said “Auschwitz did not fall from the sky” – and do something about them, then we need to listen and hear from those who experienced genocides, so we can teach this knowledge with them. Within Holocaust studies, every genocide was seen as its own event, there weren’t any bridges, any connections, which I, at that point, saw as a disservice to us – our humanity – because the more we speak about the Holocaust as unique in our human history, the less we might see warnings of it happening again. For me at the time, just as Yehuda Bauer shifted his description from uniqueness to calling it unprecedented, it also provided a path to teach and learn about other genocides in the same space. It is possible to do it ethically, morally, responsibly without relativizing and without comparing suffering, but comparing political and historical situations to understand how we can make sure that it doesn’t get repeated, and so we find ways to intervene sooner than later. Education plays a very important role here.

It became a part of my responsibility in 2008 to develop a Collections program that included testimonies of other genocides with an adequate approach and methodology for their integration into the Visual History Archive. I had to create partnerships, identify organizations to turn to, and to understand how to basically regard the term ‘genocide’, which was somewhat a debated concept. I worked, for example, with partners in Rwanda, Cambodia, Guatemala, China, and on means of integrating testimonies from Armenian genocide survivors. A bit more recently, I worked with a local team to document the recollections from survivors of the Rohingya genocide in the refugee camps around Cox Bazar in Bangladesh.

2.6 How did your Attention go Back to Germany?

Everything seemed very tense in Germany, conversations seemed very restrictive. When working with Holocaust survivor testimonies and other genocide testimonies in the US, I often heard that in Germany the same conversations couldn’t be held. It is not really clear to me why – well it is, and it isn’t. My thoughts about this are still in a way developing and it is also a very personal quest in some sense. So here it goes: I carried for many years that feeling of “guilt” that some in my generation in Germany felt, and one that was never unpacked, dissected, or discussed. When I began to address it, struggle with it, I was asking myself, “What is this guilt really about?”, this feeling of guilt by “association”, so to speak. In some ways, the drive that kept me going was influenced by that guilt but I pushed it deep down. What I wanted to understand was always how my grandparents, human beings whom I had loved and spent much time with in my childhood and growing up, were capable of being part of a genocidal regime. Yet still, acting out of a sense of guilt seemed like a wrong motivation, it did not sit right with me. I kind of felt ashamed and worried that if my motivation to work in the field of the Holocaust is based on this so-called “German collective guilt” then I don’t truly believe that what I am doing will make a difference or even make sense. It felt to me like I am a fraud working in this field. There was a moment, and I cannot really say when or what ultimately triggered it, when I said to myself, “I know I wasn’t even alive when everything happened, so what is my guilty feeling and being ashamed of being German all about?”. I found my answer in the feeling of responsibility, to make sure that we remember, and more importantly that we learn from it and do something about it. This realization became my core being, in a sense. I transformed this feeling into responsibility and I started to feel different and more relaxed about being German.

So I moved back to Germany for various reasons, while I held on to this personal “epiphany”. I am now very interested in understanding if, and if yes, why students today still feel guilty or ashamed. I don’t see it as a fertile ground, even if this guilt can sometimes bring a positive impact. There is this kind way of talking about Nazis when we are actually talking about Germans, I feel that the word “Nazi” has become a way of distancing ourselves and of truly understanding what Germans were responsible for. How do we talk about our past in a way that it doesn’t breed guilt but rather becomes a source for learning? This is in particular important question for those voices that either clearly show no knowledge of the Holocaust (or distorted views). For instance, today when some young people don’t know anything about the Holocaust anymore, or when there are voices that express a sense of being tired of hearing about it. Both of these seemingly extreme points of views (and I think both sentiments are more common than we think) are a result of our failed ‘remembrance culture’. This may begin to change, but from what I gathered, remembrance is not approached in an emotional way at memorial sites in Germany and the majority doesn’t know how to deal with it, therefore remembering lacks a sense of complexity, context, and reflection. I think that bringing testimony into the German psyche is an important step to overcome this. This could be done through our own family stories and testimonies: What did we hear from our own grandparents? How do different family histories from different geographies and countries fit into learning about Germans’ responsibility for the Holocaust?

Another facet, I notice, in German memory culture today is that the Holocaust and other genocides appear to have a wall between each other. Even if there might be some spaces where the wall is thinner, it seems that it is still taboo to have other genocides in the same conversation with the Holocaust. I’d like to better understand why, and maybe find a way to help further these conversations and build bridges. I also want people to understand that the Holocaust did not happen overnight, there was German West Africa and there was the Herero and Nama genocide. Perpetrators are connected and events may have connections, so we have to be able to discuss, unpack, and understand the wider implications of genocides.

Another reason why I see that change is needed in Germany, is because the postwar memory culture to me has completely failed. I realized this when I moved back in 2017, when Felix Klein took the position of the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism. 75 years after the Holocaust, in Germany, the country that clearly committed the genocide, is not denying it, apologized for it, now needs somebody who deals with antisemitism… in Germany, again? On a federal level? The interpretation is then that whatever has been done in the past 75 years, did not fulfill its task. This doesn’t compute for me, especially because Germany tends to be idealized as the country having confronted its history.

3.1 How are the Interactive Interviews Technically Different from the Narrative Ones?

The interactive interviewing process takes about a week long, wherein approximately 800–1500 questions are asked based on the person’s biography and prior research. We had lots of focus groups, we asked survivors and those accompanying the survivors what the students are asking when they go to classrooms, we asked experts in the field, especially educators, and compiled all of it to create the so-called common denominator questions next to the person-specific questionnaire. At first, I didn’t think it was possible nor recommendable to interview a survivor for an entire week in such depth but then we worked with a survivor who wanted to do it, and we managed to do it. We continued thinking together with survivors and this is how we created the methodology together to make it ethically and morally safe for them. Now, over 10 years after this project started, I think of the interactive testimony more as a curated interview experience, more geared towards students and visitors of museums to have the ability to find out about a more personal history from the individual directly. These interviews are not just installations that are placed somewhere randomly, there has to be context and program around it, whether it be online or onsite in a museum.

Student feedback includes not only a higher degree of emotional connection through this way of learning about the Holocaust but shows that they can take their time to think, they are less afraid to ask their questions, and their own curiosity gets much more triggered. By the way, there is no systematic study up until today about what students want to know regarding the Holocaust, how these questions change over time, whether the political climate and the familial surroundings impact their curiosity, or whether it depends on the personality. I think this project created a treasure-trove because it is incredible to see what different questions are being raised in the English language in the US, Australia, in South Africa, or in England, now in Germany, or in Russia; there is all kinds of potential for research.

While for us, older generations, the element of technology is still bothersome in this new format, it isn’t for young students who ask their phones questions every day. And, this is not what is really important here, it is the authenticity that they know that they are talking to a person who was actually interviewed, that nothing was changed in the recording, and they are not talking to an avatar. Technology is just a means to bring students into this field and continue to preserve the voices of people who actually went through the Holocaust. If technology is used in proper context and with authenticity, it is a safe means of education, also in the future, both in the field of Holocaust studies and of other genocides. Survivor testimonies remain a core in the field because without it, you lose the human aspect of what happened.