Throughout his career, Klaus Mueller has examined how personal testimony shapes historical understanding and collective memory, focusing on individuals whose experiences were long marginalized or excluded from public narratives.
A central thread in Mueller’s work is the collection and interpretation of individual life stories, whether through interviews, oral histories, memoirs, or biographies. He has conducted oral history interviews with gay survivors of Nazi persecution for museum collections and independent film productions. At a time when the experiences of gay victims remained largely absent from Holocaust remembrance, this work helped preserve voices that might otherwise have been lost. Similar patterns of invisibility have appeared in other interviews Mueller conducted: with gay men and lesbian women who participated in resistance movements or experienced emigration, with global LGBT human rights defenders, or with survivors of contemporary atrocities.
Across museums, films, research projects, and international programs, he has used individual narratives as a means of understanding marginalization, historical violence, and resilience. Rooted in oral history practice, this approach has informed his work across Holocaust documentation, LGBT history, human rights, emigration and genocide prevention.
For Mueller, testimony is not only a historical source but also a form of recognition. Whether recorded for an archive, incorporated into an exhibition, explored in a film, documented in research or discussed in a classroom, life stories can illuminate larger histories in ways that statistics, perpetrator records, and institutional accounts alone cannot. The power of personal testimony lies in its ability to connect us to the past and shape collective memory.
Mueller has also written and taught about the responsibilities of the interviewer. Being invited into someone’s life story requires deep listening and creating a space of trust. What matters is often not only what is said, but how memories are recalled, what remains difficult to express, and which experiences individuals themselves consider most significant.
Selected Interviews and Oral History Projects
The projects below illustrate different dimensions of this engagement with testimony and life narratives:
- Interviews with gay survivors of Nazi persecution for museum collections and documentary films
- Interviews on the role of gay men and lesbian women in resistance movements during the Nazi era
- Interviews with LGBT human rights defenders from different regions of the world, including on questions of family and faith
- Testimony-based research and documentary film on survivors of contemporary atrocities
- Writing and teaching on the responsibilities and ethics of interviewing
- Exploring the role of testimonies in shaping gay history and advancing equality from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century through academic research, filmmaking, and public scholarship