Abstract
Born at the dawn of "the age of technological reproducibility" (Benjamin 2008/1936), oral history (OH) has become one of the important procedures to connect personal stories with larger historical events, while also undergoing recent transformations due to the "digital revolution" (Thomson 2007). One of the results of the digitalization of OH in the last two decades is the simultaneous accessibility of several interviews conducted with the same narrator, yet under altered circumstances.
This paper offers a methodological framework for a systematic analysis of such repeated OH narrative tellings, focusing on the Holocaust as one of the most morally significant and extensively documented events in the field of OH. By way of a case study, comparing several pairs of interviews mostly from the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, we have identified two main types of narrative variation.
They entail the details of form and content in different iterations of the "same" life story. First, structural variation points to similarities and differences in the way components of the life story are sequentially ordered and linked.
Second, discursive variation regards the ways each narrative component is locally produced (linguistically and multimodally) in the course of the interview. We also consider how the two types mutually correspond and affect each other.
Developed further on these grounds, our approach opens novel avenues for analysing OH and reflecting upon life storying in the condition of digital "(de-)contextualization" (Pagenstecher 2018).