I In the spring of 1960, Mossad was in Buenos Aires planning the abduction of Adolf Eichmann, when it heard that Josef Mengele was in town. The agents running the operation didn’t want to jeopardise it by taking on another target: Eichmann was captured and Mengele slipped away; his remains were exhumed in 1985, following the discovery of his grave in Brazil. In Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics , Eyal Weizman and Thomas Keenan claim that Eichmann’s capture and subsequent trial inaugurates the ‘era of the witness’, in which giving testimony against the excesses of state power becomes a central feature of political life. In contrast, the analysis of Mengele’s skull, carried out in the 1980s, heralds the rise of a political emphasis on material objects and their forensic analysis. As the figure of the witness loses authority in the twenty-first century, it is forensics — in architecture as much as in archaeology — that will increasingly take centre stage, legally and politically. It is not man that will testify, but his ruins. II At Eichmann’s trial, the testimony of survivors was valourised not just as evidence, but for its own sake. In the aftermath of a Nazi regime that didn’t just attempt to destroy the Jewish people, but also to destroy any evidence of the destruction, the very existence of survivors’ testimonies was itself politically important. Over the second half of the twentieth century, witnessing became one of the central modes of ethical life. Organisations such as Helsinki Watch — now more recognisable as Human Rights Watch — saw it as their moral duty to denounce the excesses of state power by invoking human dignity. Initially, the reports published by these organisations were designed to accuse and shame, creating public anger and mobilising political actors from outside the traditional spheres of institutional politics. With the beginning of the 1990s, however, human rights organisations began gaining visibility, as ‘the international community’ — that motley crew — began to search for new justifications in which to house post cold war foreign policy. Witnesses began to testify at ad hoc international tribunals — for former Yugoslavia from 1993, for Rwanda from 1994 — and their testimonies were recruited as justifications for military and humanitarian interventions. Witnessing was no longer an ethical end, but increasingly the prelude to political action. III These days I spend hours going through the material coming out of Syria. Competing claims and endless YouTube videos. Everyone is a (potential) witness, even if what is witnessed is unclear. The witness of the second half of the twentieth century was marked by a distance: someone survived, and brought back testimony. This distance is gone; the witness doesn’t live to tell the tale—he tweets it immediately. The figure of the witness is now pluralised and immediate, and its sanctity eroded. An era in which the witness was valourised as a subject (for taking the risk; for surviving) has turned into an age in which the witness is nothing more that his subject position. The line between propaganda and witnessing is today incredibly hard to draw. IV From December 2008 to January 2009, Operation Cast Lead destroyed around 15,000 buildings in Gaza, and killed approximately 1,400 Palestinians. The UN report on the Israeli
notebook | experts and witnesses by joshua craze
forensics crime traces surveillance analysis
Is a building a witness?
Mengele’s body is exhumed from a cemetery just outside Sao Paulo. The still is from television footage shown in Mengele’s Skul l, a film directed by Kerstin Schroedinger, and authored by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman.
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Before the Court:Adolf Eichmann hears the charges against him.The image is from Eyal Sivan’s fascinating film, The Specialist - Portrait of a Modern Crimina l.
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