WAYS INTO TESTIMONY
Becoming_Document in the Stolperstein Film PROTOKOLLIERT, BENUTZT, VERGESSEN
TALKS
SYNOPSIS
This winter I am teaching at the University of Salzburg. On 3 November I was a guest in the master’s seminar Analyse von Bild- und AV-Inhalten (Analysis of Visual and Audiovisual Content), led by Assoc. Prof. Sascha Trültzsch-Wijnen. My lecture was a workshop report on a documentary for which I served as artistic director — a look inside its making, and the questions that making forced into the open.
The film, Protokolliert, benutzt, vergessen (2025) by Lea Büttner and Carolin Körber, was made in one of my seminars at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, within the Stolpersteine film series — documentaries built around the brass memorial stones set into pavements across Europe for the victims of National Socialism. It concerns the forced prostitution of women in the Buchenwald concentration camp — a history that left almost no images, and whose witnesses can no longer be reached.
How does a documentary find its way to a testimony like that? The talk followed the film’s own answer. Where there was no image, the filmmakers drew one, in white outlines — an animation that marks what is missing rather than filling it in. An archived interview, held in an oral-history collection, was given a voice by a narrator. A barracks of the same construction stood in for a place that no longer exists.
Around these decisions I set a single concept: Dokument_werden, becoming-document. Something becomes a document not once and for all, but in the media practices that take it up — recorded, filed, curated, condensed, passed on. The underscore marks the gaps along that path. And it names a difficulty the film cannot resolve: the women whose testimony is given a voice and a face had no say in how it would be used. To make a testimony accessible is already to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.