
Mapping the UnapproachableAn Analysis of Digital Mappings of Traumatic Places in Europe
Memorial sites that commemorate the suffering caused by Nazi terror in Europe are often represented and conveyed through digital geomedia such as multimedia maps, augmented reality applications, or GPS-based audio walks. In my understanding of geomedia, I am following media studies professor Hedwig Wagner, who defines it as "global communication media with reconnection to concrete physical locations"1 (my translation). In the field of digital Holocaust Memory, various authors refer to the potentials of geomedia to reveal something that is otherwise invisible. Victoria Grace Walden, for example, proposes in her interpretation of the augmented museum reality application Oshpitzin,2 that mobile devices in this context may be "used as excavation tools that help us to reveal layers of the past that lie dormant, not made visible, or forgotten in today's physical environments."3 While I am convinced that geomedia indeed does have the potential to reveal invisible parts of the past, I think that a critical examination of its function within digital Holocaust memory—as representation of a place of trauma, and as a discourse—is a fruitful endeavor, one that I will follow in my article.
Traumatic Place, Memorial Site, Geomedia, Digital Map, Critical Cartography, Neutrality
Traumatic places (traumatische orte) are marked, according to Aleida Assmann, by "the impossibility of telling their stories" (my translation).4 A memory site is for her, in reference to Walter Benjamin, an auratic place where "the [End Page 273] unapproachable distance of the past can be experienced"5 (my translation). My thesis is that digital maps are used in the context of Holocaust memory as presumably neutral and objective representations of the concerned places of trauma. The presumed neutrality and objectivity would, in that case, be a maneuver to escape the dilemma of representation. As critical cartographers argue since the late 1980s, however, the pretended neutrality and objectivity of the map hide the actual (ideological) preconceptions that precede its production. In this article, I inquire about preconceptions that exist in the production of geomedia at memorial sites, and about the ways geomedia (co-)constitutes memory spaces and the national and international memorial narratives they are part of. Focusing on places in Europe that were affected in different ways by the Nazi terror, and today are marked by different forms of digital memorialization, I will elaborate on projects from four European countries: Austria, Germany, France, and Poland. My selection of projects is intended to illustrate the range of possibilities for using geomedia at memorial sites and the divergent contexts of national narrative that each project is embedded in.
The institutional and disciplinary backgrounds of geomedia projects at memorial sites are as diverse as their national contexts. The artistic, sociological, or historiographical background of the producers, and the context of a preformed state institution, are constitutional to the project. Thus, sites of former concentration camps will differ from those of places that are not yet marked as official memorial sites—as it is the case for geomedia projects that aim at drawing the attention to streets or buildings as forgotten places of trauma. In this review project, I compare sites that strongly diverge in their backgrounds, but are linked in their attempt to represent a place of trauma in the context of the Holocaust through the geodigital platform.
The specificity of digital geomedia is, as Hedwig Wagner says, that it is "technically independent from location but conveys location-dependent content"6 (my translation). It enables, for example, a virtual visit to the memorial site of a former concentration camp without being on site (see the following examples of Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Mauthausen Memorial), or it can be the reason to go to a certain street in Paris where one can listen through the mobile phone to the story of the arrest of seventeen Jewish men that happened there in 1941 (see the project Les Parisiens Racontent la Shoah [Parisians Recall The Shoah], analyzed later). When not on site, the distance from the traumatic place is in a way doubled, both through what Aleida Assmann termed [End Page 274] "the unapproachable distance of the past"7 (my translation), as well as through geographic distance.
The question for me is, if and how an approach to the unapproachable can be successful through geomedia and what role the presumed neutrality of this form of representation plays here. Furthermore, I want to take up the issue Wagner poses in her analysis of geomedia: "whether places can become relevant as digital data only"8 (my translation). Even if there seems to be the consensus that virtual tours of memorial sites cannot replace a visit on site,9 it is worth observing how the existence of a virtual visit affects the actual place and the relation of the visitors to it. In putting these questions up for discussion, this article aims to make the first steps toward a critical digital cartography of traumatic places.10
Neutrality in Mapping and Memory Culture
One point of departure for questioning the use of maps in digital representations of memory sites is current media and cultural studies reflections on the aesthetics of Holocaust memory. Eva Hohenberger and Angela Koch describe a seemingly uniform design model that prevails at memorial sites in Germany and Austria in particular. They call it the "aestheticizing rational model" (my translation).11 It is, so they say, "strongly oriented towards historiography, and strives for neutrality right down to the materials and colors."12 (my translation) This observation indicates the need for a critical examination of the memorial sites' designs (be it in the digital or the analog representation).
The lack of "self-reflexive memory culture" in transnational Holocaust memory has been addressed from the (media-)historians' perspective by Wulf Kansteiner.13 He criticizes the tendency of Holocaust memory institutions to avoid "political risk-taking" and thereby failing to "successfully pursue the political objective of genocide prevention."14 Could there be a connection between the interest in taking a political position that is as neutral as possible, a design that simulates objectivity and the use of mapping as a seemingly neutral representation of memory spaces?
The digital map and geomedia are objects of research in critical cartography. Since the late 1980s, this discipline has understood maps as power-knowledge complexes,15 based on a notion by Michel Foucault.16 J. Brian Harley located much of map power as operating behind a "mask of a seemingly neutral science."17 Following this insight, Jeremy Crampton explores not only the critical [End Page 275] questioning of the map medium, but also the possibilities of its critical use, for example as critical GIS18 (geographic information systems).19 With Crampton, I would like to examine the critical potential of maps in the context of Holocaust memory. I see three possible ways of implementing these ideas in the context of Holocaust memory. First, I think that making a forgotten place visible through geomedia and putting it out into the public with a digital initiative is in itself a critical act and can be seen as critical cartography. Second, there is the possibility for institutions to gain knowledge about the functioning of maps and geomedia—for example the hiding of preconceptions in production—and work on a critical form of geomedia in such a way that decisions from the production process become transparent. Last but not least, a proper critical digital cartography of traumatic places, which I aim to develop in my article, is something I consider to be a necessary process that all geomedia projects, in the context of Holocaust memory, would benefit from. This involves analyzing in detail the different steps of decision-making in processes of geomedia production in Holocaust memory, and thus offering the possibility for more informed and self-critical decisions.
Matthew Edney argues that critical cartographers miss important elements of the "complex belief system ideal of cartography"20 (emphasis in original) if they engage only with the maps themselves and not with the ideal behind them. He describes this "ideal" as an "interlocking and resilient web of mutually reinforcing preconceptions, each of which sustains basic convictions that seem to be common sense propositions about the nature of maps."21 I think that an analysis of the convictions underlying the use of maps in the context of Holocaust memory has the potential to raise consciousness for future mapping processes.
Similar to the hiding of preconceptions in and through the map, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun states an "invisibilization" of the material and structural conditions of computers through the visualization of software. She calls software an "ideology machine."22 This is insofar important for my endeavor, as I assume that the digital map hides two things: the presuppositions inherent in cartography and the conditions of the software associated with it, which is a specificity of digital geomedia. At this point, I would like to call to mind one of the questions asked in the call for papers for the Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins conference: "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?"23 [End Page 276] If the digital map hides its cartographic and digital preconceptions, does it mean that it also contributes to the hiding of unequal structures of center and margins within the culture of Holocaust memory? Or could geomedia as a form of critique challenge these structures?
Interconnectivity, Real and Virtual Space
One feature of the digital map is its interconnectivity. At memorial sites, maps are often interconnected with historical data, images, or a narration to be listened to. In this context, the issue of which information is shown and what effect it has in the context of the map must be made transparent. Wagner uses the study of satellite maps in geographic information systems to ask about the change that interconnectivity means for the power-knowledge complex map. What does this mean in the context of the digital mappings of memorial spaces? What are the specifics of the power-knowledge complex memorial map? Finally, Wagner mentions the concept of "imaginary geography, i.e., the conceptions of space, the constructions of national and international world views" that precede map production "as an instrument of politics"24 (my translation).
This "imaginary geography" is co-created through the individual use of geomedia. This concept is particularly relevant to my considerations, as places of memory are embedded in, and often instrumentalized for, a wide variety of national and international narratives. To be able to grasp geomedia as power-knowledge complex entangled with national and international narratives, I find Foucault's notion of the apparatus helpful. He understands it as: "thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid."25 I consider this definition as suitable for the complex of Holocaust memory that digital geomedia is a part of. In the following paragraphs, I will exemplify my ideas by means of concrete projects.
Microhistory—Paris
With the volume Pour une Microhistoire de la Shoah (Toward a Microhistory of the Shoah), Claire Zalc, et al. propose to look at "the history of the destruction of the Jews in Europe under the magnifying glass"26 (my translation) because, so [End Page 277] they write, an observation of this scale "produces specific knowledge effects"27 (my translation). The concept of microhistory is relevant for geomedia projects that use the medium of the map to represent the microhistory of a specific place (e.g., a street, a building, a quarter). This is the case of the project Les Parisiens Racontent la Shoah. The initiator of the project, the memory sociologist and historian Sarah Gensburger, recounts in five episodes the story of the persecution of Jews in Paris, France, between 1940 and 1944 through geolocalized documents from archives.
Each episode focuses on one building or street in Paris where a certain event took place and the individuals who were concerned by it. On the sound level, the voices of Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses are included. On the visual level, archive material is shown following the storyline of the narration. In the introduction, Gensburger explains the concept as a story of proximity where "daily life and great historic events are intertwined."28 The project uses a map to indicate the relevant buildings within the city of Paris, and in addition, the geolocalized documents shown on the images of the buildings work, in a way, like a map. In this example, digital mapping is not used to represent a birds-eyeview but instead creates a kind of intimacy between the user and the space.
In my opinion this example succeeds in making the unapproachable past more approachable. Through the digital device and the narrative voices, the geolocalized documents and the place are connected and represent a strong sense of "it happened here." As I said earlier, the critical potential of such a project lies in drawing the attention to a space that, unlike memorials at former concentration camps, is not yet a predefined memory site. It is the digital reference that marks this site as a memorial site. To contextualize this project in the memory narrative that it is embedded in would mean asking about the role Paris—as a place where deportations were taking place—has in the institutionalized French Holocaust memory.
Artistic Approaches and Invisible Virtual Marks: Memory Loops, Munich
The city of Munich, Germany, that was central to the National Socialist Movement, forms a very different context that officially began to deal with its past only as of 2015 with the founding of the Documentation Centre as an institution of "remembrance documenting and addressing the crimes of the Nazi [End Page 278] dictatorship and their origins."29 Munich's official monument for the victims of the Holocaust is the virtual mapping project Memory Loops. It was created by the media artist Michaela Melián in 2010.
The heart of the project is the Munich online map drawn by the artist where 300 circles create links to audio files that can be listened to online. 175 files are available in English. The audio tracks contain music composed by the artist—based on samples of Jewish musicians from the Nazi era—and documents of victims and witnesses in Munich under Nazism.30 The stories read by actors, similar to Les Parisiens Racontent la Shoah, evoke scenes of everyday violence at the places where they happened. The virtual map thus transforms many places in the city into memory spaces rather than marking one spot by a monument. Within Munich there are sixty-one signs referring to the project and the relevant audio file that can also be heard by dialing a telephone number. The signs are visual orientation guides to indicate the existence of a memorial that can be activated but is in itself invisible.
In her article about the project, Renate Heilmeier from the news magazine Deutsche Welle mentions that Melián's main reason for making a virtual memory site was that she thinks young people spend more time on the internet than in the "actual" public space.31 As becomes apparent in the English version of the article (available on the project website) in its initial phase of development, the project was greeted not only with benevolent but also critical voices. The content of the controversial discussions is a discourse that is part of the apparatus the project is embedded in and should be included in further analysis. Memory Loops leads me to raise the question of the critical potential of an artistic approach in the mapping of memorial sites.
Visibly, Melián very consciously chose her methods of display in the different media forms that appear in the installation. Regarding the map itself, it is striking that she chose to draw it herself instead of using a predefined map from platforms like Google Maps (or alternatively Open Street Map) that are very common in other digital mapping projects. On the sound level, there were also choices made that seem unusual: for example, the use of young voices to remind the listeners of the age witnesses were when they experienced the stories. Last but not least, the (in this case artistic) perspective of the creator of the project is intrinsic to the choices of places, documents, and stories that are told and displayed on the map.
A map that is drawn by hand with assigned authorship is less likely to be [End Page 279] seen as objective; yet we are not informed as to why certain places on it are highlighted, and why certain stories are chosen to be told over others and in which way. The map portrays a certain objectivity that makes it easy to forget that these are choices that were made and are not predefined by history itself. In future analysis, I propose conducting interviews with the producers of geomedia and analyzing them as another form of discourse that is part of the contextual apparatus. These interviews could help to clarify the intentions behind the choices made in the production process, and thus clarify the meaning that geomedia has for the producers as a tool of representation.
Virtual Tours—Mauthausen-Gusen, Auschwitz-Birkenau
The digital mappings of memorial sites at former death camps differ from the already mentioned mapping projects in their use and purpose, as well as in the process of their making. In this context, maps are often used to enable virtual tours, for a visit to the site without being on site, or also as on-site support for individual visits. In the cases I am analyzing, the digital maps are embedded in already existing infrastructures of state funded institutions. The digital offers also represent, to some extent, the institutions themselves. They range from an aerial image in which selected points are furnished with additional information, to tours that simulate three-dimensional space through spherical panoramic images or augmented reality applications.
On the website of the Mauthausen Memorial, one can find virtual tours of the memorial in Mauthausen, Austria, and, since recently—Gusen, Austria. The virtual tour is an aerial image with points of interest that are marked by different colors. The four colors mark stations of the audio guide, infrastructure (i.e., parking, toilets, etc.), monuments or specific places with historical relevance. In this case we should again inquire why certain points were chosen to be highlighted. Compared to the previously analyzed projects, in this example authorship—meaning who is responsible for the decisions made in the production process of the project—cannot be traced back to individuals without further research as the site identifies the institution as its author. Here, the dilemma of the seemingly objective map comes into play.
Nonetheless, the virtual tours at the Mauthausen Memorial are powerful tools to uncover knowledge that otherwise would be not accessible to visitors. This is especially relevant for the newly developed virtual tour in Gusen, as many [End Page 280] parts of the former camp there were covered up by a residential area in the 1950s and are private property. Only recently did the Republic of Austria decide to buy parts of the property to enlarge the memorial.32 Any analysis of the digital geomedia project as discourse would include an analysis of decisions like this one, made by the institution at the same time as the project was developed as part of the context of this digital initiative.
In 2014, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Poland) developed a virtual tour of the former camps Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and the former "Die Rampe" in Kassel, Germany, that can be accessed online. It is based on spherical panoramic photographs of the places in the style of Google Maps Street View mode. For orientation, one can switch to a drawn aerial view of the site with colored points that highlight places of interest. It becomes obvious that this tool was made for a virtual visit from a distance and not to accompany a visit on site as it aims at simulating the place in the most realistic way, which is something a visitor who is already on site would not need. I am wondering whether the project is regarded by the creators as a possible substitute for an onsite visit. In a commentary published on the website lernen-aus-der-geschichte.de ("learning from history"33) the author underlines the various potentials the project can have in the pedagogical context but does not think that it can replace a visit to the site.
Following up on the main question of how the digital maps co-constitute a real space, how does the existence of such a virtual online tour affect the place on site? Particularly concerning on the site of Auschwitz, it is questionable if such a project can succeed in making this specific place of trauma more approachable, as Linda Ferchland puts it, Auschwitz is already "mystified" in the exhibition design on site.34 Like the other projects, this one too must be analyzed in the context of the national memory narrative it is embedded in and the institutions' decisions must be made transparent in the analysis. In the end, the analysis of geomedia itself as discourse, as well as the analysis of the discourses that surround it, will prove useful for the development of a critical digital cartography of traumatic places in Europe.
Conclusion
My examples have roughly traced two cases of the constitution of memory space through digital maps: Spaces that are revealed as places of trauma through [End Page 281] digital mapping projects and spaces that already are established memorial sites, in which the digital map is used to represent the space and institution there and offer information for visitors. In my opinion, the lack of transparent authorship of digital maps in the context of state institutions supports the problematic idea of an objective map. If the author of the map is invisible, and if there is no effort put into questioning geomedia as a seemingly objective representation of space (in the sense of critical cartography), then map-like media will continue to hide the preconceptions and conditions of its production process. Nonetheless, the digital map retains its potential to reveal historical meaning and enable memory practice on site. In all of the cases mentioned above, the question of how the digital map affects the relationship to the actual space and what position it holds in the constitution of national and international memory narratives remains unanswered. I believe that such an analysis is a necessary step in the development of a (self-) critical approach to geomedia production in digital Holocaust memory.
Leo Dressel studied Fine Arts and Cinema at Bordeaux University in Bordeaux, France, and Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, as well as in the Time-based Media Master at Kunstuniversität in Linz, Austria. They are currently enrolled in the philosophical doctorate program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, and working as research assistant at the Mauthausen Memorial. leo.dressel@mauthausen-memorial.org, leo.dressel@ufg.at
Notes
1. Hedwig Wagner, "Die Performanz der digitalen Karte," (The performance of the digital map) in KartenWissen. Territoriale Räume zwischen Bild und Diagramm (Map Knowledge. Territorial spaces between image and diagram) ed. Stephan Günzel, and Lars Nowak, (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2012), 463.
2. A Guide to the Jewish History of Oświęcim. http://app.oshpitzin.pl/ (Accessed October 8, 2021).
3. Victoria Grace Walden, Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 188.
4. Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Memory spaces. Forms and transformations of cultural memory) (München: Beck, 1999), 329.
5. Ibid, 338.
6. Wagner, "Die Performanz der digitalen Karte," 463.
7. Assmann, Erinnerungsräume, 338.
8. Wagner, "Die Performanz der digitalen Karte," 462.
9. Anonymous, "Panorama-Auschwitz. Virtuelle Führung durch das Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager," December 17, 2014. http://lernen-aus-der-geschichte.de/Lernen-und-Lehren/content/12172 (Accessed July 9, 2021)
10. Anonymous, "Panorama-Auschwitz. Virtuelle Führung durch das Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager," (Panorama Auschwitz. Virtual tour of the concentration and extermination camp) December 17, 2014. http://lernen-aus-der-geschichte.de/Lernen-und-Lehren/content/12172 (Accessed July 9, 2021).
11. Eva Hohenberger, and Angela Koch, Grau in Grau. Ästhetisch-politische Praktiken der Erinnerungskultur (Grey in grey. Aesthetic-political practices of the culture of remembrance) (Berlin: Metropol, 2019), 11.
12. Ibid.
13. Wulf Kantsteiner, "Transnational Holocaust Memory, Digital Culture and the End of Reception Studies," in The Twentieth Century in European Memory. Transcultural Mediation and Reception, ed. Tea Sindbæk Andersen, and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, 305–343. (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2017), 307, doi10.1163/9789004352353_014.
14. Ibid, 333.
15. J. Brian Harley, "Deconstructing the Map," in Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, Vol. 26 no. 2, October 1989. https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/E635-7827-1757-9T53 (Accessed October 1, 2021)
16. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–79, trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
17. Ibid, 7.
18. Jeremy W. Crampton, Mapping. A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS (West-Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 39.
19. Geographic information systems are technological tools made to analyze spatial and geographic data.
20. Matthew H. Edney, Cartography. The Ideal and its History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 1f.
21. Ibid, 4.
22. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge (Massachusetts: Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005), 296, https://direct.mit.edu/grey/article/doi/10.1162/1526381043320741/10837/On-Software-or-the-Persistence-of-Visual-Knowledge (Accessed November 5, 2021)
23. "Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins: Practices, Places, and Narratives," Online International Conference | June 1–3, 2021, Esther and Sidney Rabb Center for Holocaust and Revival Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. The cfp is available here: https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/humsos/rabb/Pages/conference.aspx.
24. Wagner, "Die Performanz der digitalen Karte," 465.
25. Michel Foucault, "The confession of the flesh." in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, 194–228. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194.
26. Claire Zalc; Tal Bruttmann; Ivan Ermakoff; Nicolas Mariot, Pour une Microhistoire de la Shoah (Paris: Seuil, 2012), 12.
27. Ibid.
28. Sarah Gensburger, "Les Parisiens Racontent la Shoah," It Happened Here. https://happened-here.com/seasons/parisians-tell-shoah (Accessed July 28, 2021).
29. "About Us" Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, https://www.ns-dokuzentrum-muenchen.de/en/home/ (Accessed October 9, 2021).
30. Michaela Melián, "Memory Loops," https://www.memoryloops.net/#/ (Accessed July 28, 2021).
31. Renate Heilmeier, "Virtuelles Denkmal für Nazi-Opfer in München," (Virtual memorial for Nazi victims in Munich) in Deutsche Welle, October 5, 2010, https://www.dw.com/de/virtuelles-denkmal-f%C3%BCr-nazi-opfer-in-m%C3%BCnchen/a-6080600 (Accessed July 28, 2021) (English version in the Press Archive of the project's website: https://www.memoryloops.net/#/about).
32. Bogdan Brkić, "The Austrian Government Acquires the Site of the Former Concentration Camp at Gusen." Metropole, May 19, 2021. https://metropole.at/government-acquires-the-former-concentration-camp-gusen/ (Accessed July 28, 2021).
33. Anonymous, "Panorama Auschwitz."
34. Linda Ferchland, "Auschwitz: Plädoyer für die Entmystifizierung eines Un-Ortes" (Auschwitz: A plea for the demystification of a non-place) Orte der Shoah in Polen. Gedenkstätten zwischen Mahnmal und Museum (Places of the Shoah in Poland. Memorials between a memorial and a museum), ed. Jörg Ganzenmüller, and Raphael Utz, 219–241. (Köln, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, 2016).