With Simona Mitroiu, a memory studies scholar with whom I co-edited an issue of Parallax (‘Holocaust Narratives in the Post-Testimonial Era’, 2023), I conceived a term that defines our age: the post-testimonial.
In order to convey knowledge of past events whose witnesses are no longer with us and to adapt existing remembering practices to postmillennial generations, we need to address the contemporary audience’s more acute need of participatory strategies in commemorations of past event. We referred mainly to how Holocaust narratives continue after the demise of actual survivors, a perspective which other scholars had addressed with other concepts: ‘post-witness era’ (Diana I. Popescu and Tanja Schult in Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era, 2015) and ‘after testimony’ (Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman and James Phelan in After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, 2012).

With the notion of the post-testimonial, we place more emphasis on testimony than on witnessing, since we believe that in our age, ‘the witness inevitably fades in favor of the testimony’ (Cristian Ciocan, ‘Witnessing as an Existential Phenomenon’, 2023). Hence, the trajectory of witnessing in the post-testimonial era shifts from memoirs, diaries, Holocaust literature, surviving objects and natural elements to other, newer and emergent media. While memoirs of the former victims can only be re-edited, writers, museums curators, visual artists continue producing literature that still archives real memories. Media can store memories beyond the lives of victims.

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