Digital Holocaust Memory from the MarginsPractices, Places, and Narratives

ABSTRACT

In recent years, the "digital" is redefining Holocaust memory by facilitating the co-production of memory by a wide spectrum of new agents. While digital culture opens new horizons, it also poses new challenges for Holocaust memory, education, and commemoration. This introduction to the special section "Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins" provides a short review of the papers included in this section and a theoretical anchor for reconsidering the memory of the Holocaust from the margins—from the Global South, from digital platforms that are not considered "proper places," and from discourses and technologies into which the memory of the Holocaust has migrated. These, we argue, can shed new light on the relationship between digital media and memory of the Holocaust.

keywords

Holocaust Memory, Margins, Commemoration, Digital Media

In recent years, the "digital" is redefining Holocaust memory. Digital media facilitates the co-production of memory by a wide spectrum of new agents. Museums capitalize on new technologies in their permanent exhibits and educational activities.1 Augmented reality helps visitors to visualize the destroyed site of Bergen-Belsen;2 "Eva's Story" brings the experience of young Holocaust victims to the cellphones of millions of teenagers,3 while selfies at death sites summon up reactions of internet friends.4 More recently, as the COVID-19 pandemic spiraled worldwide, most Holocaust commemorations went digital, as social-distancing policies curtailed on-site, off-line activities.5 These examples [End Page 211] speak to the culture of "virtual Holocaust memory" that (re)defines how people engage with the Holocaust and its remembrance.6

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While digital culture opens new horizons, it also poses new challenges for Holocaust memory, education, and commemoration, challenges that have yet to be critically understood. For example, core questions regarding the digital divide are highly relevant to Holocaust-memory practices: What kinds of information or relations to the past are promoted or obscured through digital means? To what extent do practices of digitalization further or conceal strategic and power interests? Do Holocaust-memory narratives influence the use of digital technologies and surveillance and in what ways? Do digital technologies marginalize other practices of Holocaust memory, such as on-site visits or change the nature of education at memorial sites? How do more traditional gatekeepers react to these changes? Does digitalization silence survivors and older generations with limited digital skills or does it create new opportunities for testimony? Do events such as COVID-19 that privilege digital communication empower marginalized communities or exacerbate power differentials? What are the consequences of digitalization for Holocaust-memory institutions located in the Global South? Are we turning Holocaust commemoration and education into the privilege of more connected Western societies? If so, how does this impact the discourse on the globalization and democratization of Holocaust narratives?

This special section engages these questions to develop critical thinking on the digital culture of Holocaust memory. It is a product of a three-day conference, "Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins" organized by the Esther and Sidney Rabb Center for Holocaust and Revival Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel, with the support of the Bergida Family Foundation, and the Reina Perel Family Trust Fund, held in June 2021.7 The conference included the active participation of twenty-five researchers and practitioners from all over the world (i.e., Israel, US, UK, Austria, Ireland, and South Africa), as well as the attendance of more than 120 researchers worldwide. This special section is therefore a result of the fruitful interdisciplinary conversation between acknowledged and new understandings of Holocaust research.

The articles, based on the conference papers, address a variety of issues pertaining to the intersection of Holocaust memory, digital media, and marginalization. [End Page 212] The wide range of the six papers published here reflects the prolific growth and variety of publications and forums on digital Holocaust memory that have taken place over the past five years. The COVID-19 virus and the subsequent shift of many academic and commemorative activities to digital media lend further visibility to the centrality of the digital for any understanding of future Holocaust memory and its transmission.

Two of the papers in this collection—"Holocaust Education and Human Rights Advocacy on TikTok" by Paul Morrow and Katie Schreyer, and "Youthful Platform Commemoration: TikTok as a Frontier for Holocaust Education and Memory" by Tom Divon and Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann—deal with Tik-Tok, an interactive platform for communicating user-generated short videos, combined with music and text. Morrow and Schreyer provide a useful typology of Holocaust-related TikToks, including the controversial Holocaust Challenge Point-of-Views (POV's), in which young people positioned themselves as Holocaust survivors or victims narrating stories from heaven in the first person. The authors encourage Holocaust museums and institutions not to dismiss TikToks as inevitably banalizing the Holocaust, but to become proactive, going online to post rebuttals of Holocaust deniers or distorters, and experimenting with TikTok as a means of creating empathy for victims. They encourage the engagement of viewers, even through small acts such as extending one's arms, singing along, and posting, in order to create a sense of solidarity and to get them involved in human rights advocacy.

Divon and Ebbrecht-Hartmann document the dialogue between a 97-year-old survivor-witness and her great-grandson as an example of how TikTok may increase awareness and make testimony more approachable to users of a younger generation to the extent of making them co-creators in a process of remediating past memories. They show the potential of TikTok and other social media to increase awareness of the Holocaust. At the same time, they encourage Holocaust institutions to use the platform's reach and aesthetics to engage with young users, and combat hate speech, Holocaust denial, and content promoting Holocaust trivialization.

In "Practices and Challenges in Digital Holocaust and Genocide Education: The Case Study of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC)," by Catherine Boyd, Daniella Hovsha, and Mduduzi Ntuli; "Curating is Believing: Digital Art Exhibition and Holocaust Memory," by Noga Stiassny; and "Mapping the Unapproachable: An Analysis of Digital Mappings of Traumatic [End Page 213] Places in Europe" by Leo Dressel, the authors deal with the interface of digital media and existing places of memory: Holocaust museums, art exhibitions, residences of prewar Jews, and scenes of Holocaust crimes. A common question in these papers is: Do digital means extend the reach of more traditional locations or create new barriers of access?

Boyd, Hovsha and Ntuli consider the advantages and disadvantages of the shift from the (then closed) Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre to digital broadcasts during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, selective access to digital media traced the hierarchy between those who possessed cellphones and broad-band internet access and those who did not. On the other hand, the internet-maintained contact with aged survivors who could no longer meet in person enabled the Centre to reach audiences in countries far afield who could never afford to come to the Centre in Johannesburg. Furthermore, the images and artifacts in its permanent exhibition could be made more accessible online by focusing on the stories behind the artifacts, stories that might typically be overlooked in a guided tour. The authors foresaw the increased use of hybrid online/in person methods in the Centre in the years to come.

Stiassny shows how digital technologies extend the reach of art exhibits on the Holocaust to the classroom. Digital media facilitates the uploading of private archives, and make the processes, curatorial decisions, architectural and socio-historical contexts that underlie exhibits more transparent. Rather than fetishize auratic objects, the new technologies inform younger publics better and make them more aware of reflexive questions underlying art as a representation of the truth of the Holocaust. This is done by providing greater accessibility to fragile or rare objects (as well as textual materials and images from distant exhibits), promoting greater interactivity with objects and the stories they narrate, and encouraging interactive creative writing.

Dressel focuses on geomedia mapping applications, used both by Holocaust institutions to provide information and guidance at institutionalized Holocaust sites, as well as in unmarked places in cities and towns where events related to the Holocaust or National Socialism took place. While recognizing the contribution of digital maps in making more information easily accessible, she encourages a critical digital cartography that would reveal the common-sense properties of the nature of maps, as well as those involved in the transfer of maps to digital formats. Among the parameters that should be made visible, she mentions: the explicit mention of map authors' names; the choices and intuitions [End Page 214] that underlie map designers' decisions of which places to mark; the role of these (pre-)Holocaust sites within the cityscape of the time; and the existing memory forms at the site or institution marked. The article demonstrates how the discourse of digital cartography can enrich our understanding of the role of place-experience of Holocaust sites in a digital age.

In their article, "Media Coverage of COVID-19 Mobile Phone Surveillance as a Non-Commemorative Site of Nazi Germany and Holocaust Remembrance," Aya Yadlin and Avi Marciano demonstrate how emotional Israeli Holocaust discourse impacted public discussion of electronic surveillance during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Comparisons with Nazi Germany were voiced by opponents of surveillance, sometimes without explicit mention of the Nazi period events or protagonists. The events of the pandemic demonstrated how omnipresent Holocaust images are in Israeli collective memory. By focusing on a case of non-commemorative and non-intentional collective memory, the research demonstrates how, through a new traumatic event (COVID-19), certain vernacular discourses of the Holocaust enter mainstream media for the first time.

This collection of articles charts the contemporary turning point in history. Pierre Nora's conceptualization of "lieux de mémoire" (sites of memory) occurred at a moment in France when the possibility of embodying of memory in specific historical sites was cast in doubt.8 With the digital turn, the physical site of memory has turned into a website, the passing away of the last survivors points to the growing disembodiment of memory, while site-specific commemorations are going online, thus becoming global events. Yet in the global world there is still a Global North and a Global South where the gaps in media accessibility and media literacy are the fruit of a colonial heritage. Thinking about the memory of the Holocaust from the margins—from the Global South, from digital platforms that are not considered "proper places," and from discourses and technologies into which the memory of the Holocaust has migrated—can shed new light on the relationship between digital media and memory of the Holocaust. Nora wrote of what he understood as a change in memory, a break from the forms in which memory was produced and enacted. Today, we face yet another challenge in the ways the memory of the Holocaust is being produced, reproduced, and circulated. This challenge calls for a new vocabulary to understand it, and the papers in this special section contribute to this emerging vocabulary. [End Page 215]

Roni Mikel-Arieli

Roni Mikel-Arieli is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel, where she is working on a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft, "From the Era of the Witness to Digital Remembrance: New Media, Holocaust Sites and Changing Memory Practices." Her research lies at the intersection of Holocaust and genocide studies, memory studies, and digital media. ronim@post.bgu.ac.il

Norma Musih

Norma Musih is a researcher of visual culture and digital media that works at the intersection of political theory, communication and cultural studies focusing on political imagination and algorithmic culture. Musih is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she studies futuristic works from the Middle East and their complex interrelations with colonial modernity and the Anthropocene. norma.musih@mail.huji.ac.il

Jackie Feldman

Jackie Feldman is a full professor of anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and head of the Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies. His research interests are pilgrimage and tourism, anthropology of religion, Holocaust memory, ethnographic writing, heritagization and comparative study of museums. His current research project, funded by the Deutache Forschungsgesellschaft is "From the Era of the Witness to Digital Remembrance: New Media, Holocaust Sites and Changing Memory Practices." jfeldman@bgu.ac.il

Notes

1. Lital Henig, and Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, "Witnessing Eva Stories: Media witnessing and self-inscription in social media memory," New Media & Society, (October 2020) https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820963805 ; Victoria Grace Walden, "What is 'virtual Holocaust memory?'" Memory Studies, (November 2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698019888712; Elisa Miles, "Holocaust Exhibitions On-Line: An Exploration of the Use and Potential of Virtual Space in British and American Museum Websites," Holocaust Studies 10, no. 2 (2015): 79–99.

2. Laura Serra Oliva, Anna Mura, Alberto Betella, Daniel Pacheco, Ebrique Martinez, and Paul Verschure, "Recovering the history of Bergen Belsen using an interactive 3D reconstruction in a mixed reality space the role of pre-knowledge on memory recollection," 2015 Digital Heritage, pp. 163–165, doi:10.1109/DigitalHeritage.2015.7413860.

3. Noam Tirosh, "Understanding @eva.stories: Holocaust Memory in the Instagram Era" Jewish Film & New Media 8, no. 2 (2020): 217–225; Lital Henig and Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, "Witnessing Eva Stories" New Media & Society, 24(1), 202–226. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820963805.

4. Kate Douglas, "Youth, trauma and memorialization: The selfie as witnessing," Memory Studies 13, no. 4 (August 2020): 384–99. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1750698017714838; Jackie Feldman and Norma Musih. "Selfies in Auschwitz: Popular and Contested Representations in a Digital Generation," Memory Studies. 16.2 (2023): 403–420. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/17506980221101111; Jackie Feldman and Norma Musih, "Israeli Memory of the Shoah in a Digital Age: Is it Still "Collective?" Die Zukunft der Erinnerung: Perspektiven des Gedenkens an Nationalsozialismus und Shoah, (The Future of Remembrance: Perspectives of Memory of National Socialism and the Shoah), (2021) Christian Wiese and Stefan Vogt, eds., Berlin: De Gruyter, 177–192.

5. Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, "Commemorating from a Distance: The Digital Transformation of Holocaust Memory in Times of COVID-19" Media, Culture & Society 43, no. 6 (September 2021): 1095–1112 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720983276.

6. Victoria Grace Walden, "What is 'virtual Holocaust memory'?" Memory Studies, 15, no. (2022): 621–633.

7. The conference's organizing team included Jackie Feldman, Noam Tirosh, Roni Mikel-Arieli, and Norma Musih.

8. French historian Pierre Nora coined the concept "site of memory" to refer to any location, place, or object embedded with historical meaning in popular collective memory as a monument, an event, or a museum. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," Representations, 26 (1989): 7–24.

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Footnotes

  1. 1. Lital Henig, and Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, "Witnessing Eva Stories: Media witnessing and self-inscription in social media memory," New Media & Society, (October 2020) https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820963805 ; Victoria Grace Walden, "What is 'virtual Holocaust memory?'" Memory Studies, (November 2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698019888712; Elisa Miles, "Holocaust Exhibitions On-Line: An Exploration of the Use and Potential of Virtual Space in British and American Museum Websites," Holocaust Studies 10, no. 2 (2015): 79–99.

  2. 2. Laura Serra Oliva, Anna Mura, Alberto Betella, Daniel Pacheco, Ebrique Martinez, and Paul Verschure, "Recovering the history of Bergen Belsen using an interactive 3D reconstruction in a mixed reality space the role of pre-knowledge on memory recollection," 2015 Digital Heritage, pp. 163–165, doi:10.1109/DigitalHeritage.2015.7413860.

  3. 3. Noam Tirosh, "Understanding @eva.stories: Holocaust Memory in the Instagram Era" Jewish Film & New Media 8, no. 2 (2020): 217–225; Lital Henig and Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, "Witnessing Eva Stories" New Media & Society, 24(1), 202–226. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820963805.

  4. 4. Kate Douglas, "Youth, trauma and memorialization: The selfie as witnessing," Memory Studies 13, no. 4 (August 2020): 384–99. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1750698017714838; Jackie Feldman and Norma Musih. "Selfies in Auschwitz: Popular and Contested Representations in a Digital Generation," Memory Studies. 16.2 (2023): 403–420. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/17506980221101111; Jackie Feldman and Norma Musih, "Israeli Memory of the Shoah in a Digital Age: Is it Still "Collective?" Die Zukunft der Erinnerung: Perspektiven des Gedenkens an Nationalsozialismus und Shoah, (The Future of Remembrance: Perspectives of Memory of National Socialism and the Shoah), (2021) Christian Wiese and Stefan Vogt, eds., Berlin: De Gruyter, 177–192.

  5. 5. Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, "Commemorating from a Distance: The Digital Transformation of Holocaust Memory in Times of COVID-19" Media, Culture & Society 43, no. 6 (September 2021): 1095–1112 https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720983276.

  6. 6. Victoria Grace Walden, "What is 'virtual Holocaust memory'?" Memory Studies, 15, no. (2022): 621–633.

  7. 7. The conference's organizing team included Jackie Feldman, Noam Tirosh, Roni Mikel-Arieli, and Norma Musih.

  8. 8. French historian Pierre Nora coined the concept "site of memory" to refer to any location, place, or object embedded with historical meaning in popular collective memory as a monument, an event, or a museum. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," Representations, 26 (1989): 7–24.