A key characteristic of Oral History interviews since their beginning in the 1970s was the active involvement of historians in their creation. Today, however, many researchers use archived interviews conducted by others, often decades ago. This requires the consultation of accompanying materials such as interview guidelines, questionnaires and reports to gain insight into the conditions under which the interviews originated. However, tacit knowledge is not easily replaced with documentation and sometimes there is not much documentation available. Whilst this shift and its implications with regard to research on Nazism and the Holocaust have been noticed by some scholars, a suitable method for the secondary analysis of Oral History interviews for historical and cultural studies has yet to be developed.
This paper will discuss the question which parameters for such secondary analysis of OH interviews are needed. These include a critical understanding of the methods and contexts of creating, processing and archiving of each interview. The encounters between interviewers and interviewees during the recording of the main U.S. collections – the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive at the University of Southern California (VHA), the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University (FVA) and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (USHMM) – as well as testimonies featured in the largest Oral History project on one single Nazi concentration camp, the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project (MSDP), were also shaped by the particular purposes, specialisations and curatorial preferences of the collecting institutions.
Different OH projects used different methods and pursued different objectives which were largely determined by political and institutional contexts. Changing interview methods like autobiographical life-story interviews vs interviews yielding to generate historical facts or open narrative interviews vs question-answer oriented interrogations effectuate different narrative results as does the interviewing of ‘experienced’ or ‘non-experienced’ speakers.
The paper will present recent findings and problems faced regarding the handling of a collection of the 850 interviews of MSDP.