An Interview with Henry ‘Hank’ Greenspan

ABSTRACT

Kobi Kabalek interviews Henry (Hank) Greenspan about his sustained collaborations with Holocaust survivors, his questioning of conventional concepts in the field such as ‘testimony’ and ‘trauma,’ his convictions and strategies as a teacher, and his drive to embody some of what he has learned in playwriting and dramatic performance. Among other provocative assertions, Greenspan suggests that all work in Holocaust Studies is inevitably some version of our own testimony, even though we were not there. That is why scholars must also listen more deeply to each other, interpret collaboratively, and learn together.

KEYWORDS:

• Testimony
• Trauma
• Theatre
• Survivors
• Collaboration
• Shared authorship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Henry Greenspan, Sara R. Horowitz, Éva Kovács, Berel Lang, Dori Laub, Kenneth Waltzer and Annette Wieviorka, “Engaging Survivors: Assessing ‘Testimony’ and ‘Trauma’ as Foundational Concepts,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, vol. 28, no. 3 (2014): pp. 190–226.

2 Henry Krystal, “Trauma and Affects,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 33 (1978): pp. 81–116.

3 Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 70.

4 Krystal, “Trauma and Affects,” p. 81.

5 Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2010), p. xi.

6 Henry Greenspan, “The Humanities of Contingency: Interviewing and Teaching Beyond ‘Testimony’ with Holocaust Survivors,” The Oral History Review, vol. 46, no. 2 (2019): pp. 360–79.

7 Henry Greenspan, “Later Interviews as Counter-Narratives: Treblinka and the Ardent Lover,” The Oral History Review, blog post, May 1, 2015, http://blog.oup.com/authors/henry-greenspan/.

8 Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015).

9 Alessandro Portelli, They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

10 Hannah Pollin-Galay, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

11 Cf. Greenspan, On Listening, pp. 19–24.

12 William James, Pragmatism (New York: Longmans Green, 1907).

13 E.g., Erin Jessee and Sarah E. Jenkins, “Good Kings, Bloody Tyrants, and Everything In Between: Representations of the Monarchy in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” History in Africa, vol. 14 (2014): pp. 35–62; Anna Sheftel, “Talking and Not Talking about Violence: Challenges in Interviewing Survivors of Atrocity as Whole People,” The Oral History Review, vol. 45, no. 2 (2018): pp. 288–303.

14 Terrence Des Pres, The survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

15 Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

16 Elie Wiesel, “A Plea for Survivors,” in A Jew Today (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 167.

17 Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: Feminist Press, 2001), p. 94.

18 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, p. 33.

19 A full performance of REMNANTS from 2022 can be viewed at https://youtu.be/LVu8XhcMXjw.

20 Leon Wells, The Janowska Road (New York: Macmillan, 1963).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kobi Kabalek

Kobi Kabalek is Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies, Penn State University and a former editor of The Journal of Holocaust Research. His work focuses on historical perceptions, moral sentiments, and memory in film, literature, auto/biography, oral narratives, art, etc., in German, Israeli, and global Holocaust history. He currently explores marginalized and extreme phenomena in Holocaust testimonies, historical writing, and popular culture – with special attention to the role of fantasy, imagination, and horror and their impact on our understanding and depiction of the Holocaust. Recent articles include: ‘Between Nationalism and Internationalism: Robert Weltsch and the Colonial Dilemma in WWII Palestine’ (forthcoming in AJS Review); ‘Meaningful Work: Cultural Frameworks of Forced Labour in Accounts of Nazi Concentration Camp Inmates,’ German History 41:1 (2023) (with Ella Falldorf); ‘‘Other Germans’: Exceptions and Rules in the Memory of Rescuing Jews in Postwar Germany,’ Central European History 55:3 (2022).

Henry (Hank) Greenspan

Henry (Hank) Greenspan is an emeritus psychologist, oral historian, and playwright at the University of Michigan who has been interviewing, writing about, and teaching about Holocaust survivors since the 1970s. Rather than obtaining a one-time testimony, Greenspan pursued multiple interviews with the same survivors over weeks, months, and – with a few survivors – decades. Sustained conversation led to what one survivor called ‘learning together’ – a process of deepening exploration and collaborative interpretation. Greenspan’s approach and its yield is most fully described in On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony.

Among his plays, REMNANTS is also based on Greenspan’s fifty years of sustained conversations with survivors. The piece was first produced for radio and distributed on National Public Radio (NPR) in the U.S. As a stage play, REMNANTS has been performed at more than 300 venues worldwide. Greenspan’s most recent play, ‘Death / Play, or the Mad Jester of the Warsaw Ghetto,’ dramatizes the perspective of those who did not survive – and knew they wouldn’t.