“This is a truly impressive collection. It covers a wide range of forms taken by and questions posed about testimony in a thorough, illuminating and up-to-date way. The different chapters work together to offer readers a vital overview of the intersections of testimony and culture. In addition to the numerous theoretical insights, the handbook offers real practical help on how to engage with testimony in classrooms, museums and other public spaces, and the issues – not least the ethical ones – that need to be thought through in doing so.”

This Palgrave Handbook examines the ways in which researchers and practitioners theorise, analyse, produce and make use of testimony. It explores the full range of testimony in the public sphere, including perpetrator testimony, testimony presented through social media and virtual reality. A growing body of research shows how complex and multi-layered testimony can be, how much this complexity adds to our understanding of our past, and how creators and users of testimony have their own complex purposes. These advances indicate that many of our existing assumptions about testimony and models for working with it need to be revisited. The purpose of this Palgrave Handbook is to do just that by bringing together a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and practice-based perspectives.

Sara Jones is Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her previous books include Complicity, Censorship and Criticism: Negotiating Space in the GDR Literary Sphere (2011); The Media of Testimony: Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic (Palgrave, 2014); and Towards a Collaborative Memory: German Memory Work in a Transnational Context (2022). 

Roger Woods is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is co-editor of German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century (2010) and author of  Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics (Palgrave, 2007); Nation ohne Selbtbewußtsein (2001); and The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (Macmillan, 1996).