Holocaust memory and memory studies have always been intertwined. In the 20th century, Holocaust memory advocates and memory studies scholars shared enthusiasm for politics of regret. In the 21st century, they have to share the blame for allegedly fostering Euro-centrism.1 All along the way, the conceptual infrastructure of memory studies developed in large measure through scholarly analyses of emerging memories of the Final Solution. That applies first and foremost to concepts of transnational memory which are almost synonymous with Holocaust memory scholarship.2 The marriage made both empirical and ethical sense. Holocaust memory was one of the first fully-fledged transnational collective memories traveling around the Northern hemisphere in the form of attractive imagetexts and uniting publics from different countries in appreciation of similar media events. Moreover, Holocaust memory seemed to be an unequivocal mark of political progress, helping a formerly divided continent traverse the great distance from the depths of the world wars to peaceful and prosperous cooperation in the European Union. The transformation was particularly pronounced and tangible in (West) Germany where significant segments of society recalled the crimes of the Nazi period with sincere remorse and acknowledged the suffering of their former victims under the sign of Holocaust memory.3 Given such promising realignments, memory scholars quickly connected the dots. Negative heritage in the form of Holocaust memory appeared to be the perfect moral conduit for advancing a human rights agenda in the age of globalization. After a phase of catastrophic
In the meantime, we have left behind the optimism of cosmopolitan memory. It has become clear that a given society can cherish Holocaust memory and yet intentionally engage in serious human rights violation. Or, depending on one’s interpretation of us, Israeli and eu foreign policy, one could come to the even more depressing conclusion that the presence of a mature Holocaust memory regime enhances the risk for the illegitimate and unethical use of military force. So on second look it seems that the moral effects of official Holocaust memory are a rather complicated issue. First of all, official, state-sponsored Holocaust culture might increasingly look the same all across the West but has nevertheless had different memory effects in different national and institutional settings. In matters of Holocaust remembrance cultural homogeneity hides a considerable degree of political diversity. Second, official Holocaust memory only seems to have become an important moral force in societies in which transcultural Holocaust narratives and iconography became a key reference point of national self-identification. In some national settings official Holocaust memory thus temporarily assumed a truly self-critical profile; in others settings it has always been a force of national self-promotion. Third, as official Holocaust memory has become a more clearly transnationally and transculturally constituted collective memory, upheld by transnational institutions and transnational carrier groups such as academics and memory professionals, it seems to have lost some of its ability to serve as truly self-critical moral compass. Finally, while these emplotments of the history of Holocaust culture appear perfectly plausible they are difficult to prove because we have only limited insights in the reception of Holocaust culture over the course of the last four decades.
There are good reasons to assume, for instance, that the invention of popular Holocaust memory in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, accomplished with
Despite a general yearning for uplifting memories, self-critical strategies of collective remembrance can and have travelled widely. The combination of indigenous self-critical inquiries into shameful wwii collaboration and the export of the (West) German model of Holocaust education has resulted in phases of more or less self-critical memory in many Western European countries, including the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Norway and Austria.9 But as the transnationalization of Holocaust memory has transformed the Final Solution from a national into a transnational historical event and the task of remembrance from a German into a European obligation, culminating in the adoption of Holocaust memory as a quasi-official foundational eu memory and civic religion in Stockholm in 2000, Holocaust memory has lost a great deal of the self-critical edge it possessed in some settings.10 The new perception of the Holocaust as a European human rights catastrophe with lots of blame to go around ended decades of German exceptionalism. With the German model
Therefore, one should also not be surprised that institutionalized Holocaust memory never assumed much of a self-critical edge in communities spared the onus of perpetrator status or legacies of collaboration, as for example Israel and the us. When survivors of the Final Solution for the first time stepped into the public limelight, in the context of the Eichmann trial in Israel, the full extent of their suffering and lack of recognition of that suffering after wwii caused a temporary sense of self-doubt in Israeli society. But even in a diverse memory culture such as Israel’s, official Holocaust memory has been consistently and skilfully deployed as a political asset justifying the use of force and the violation of human rights.12 There is no indication, for example, that the civil religion of Holocaust memory enshrined at Yad Vashem helped Israelis understand the historical injustice of the Nakba and embrace policies of regret and restitution.13 In the same vein, the many public institutions of Holocaust memory in the us have complemented popular culture’s happy memories of wwii as the good war, rendering it all the more difficult for mainstream us society to imagine its soldiers in the role of perpetrators despite ample evidence to the contrary.14 Celebrating the liberators of World War ii seems to stand in the way of coming to terms with us war crimes past and present. In this context, one may also wonder about how precisely Holocaust memory and the memory of slavery intersect in us politics and culture. Has the rise of popular Holocaust memory, from the broadcast of the tv series Holocaust in 1978 to the inauguration of the Holocaust Memorial Museum (ushmm) in 1993, delayed
The comparison of Holocaust and slavery memories in the us illustrates the difference between self-reflexive and self-critical sites of memory. Collective memories are self-reflexive as a matter of course; they tend to explicitly address historical events from a given collective’s real or imagined past and imbed them in patterns of interpretation integrating past, present and future into meaningful story lines. The stories come in different flavours and hybrids. They might feature largely positively connoted events integrated into positive narrative trajectories, as for instance the events of the American revolution as part of an uplifting history of us democracy;16 negatively connoted events integrated into positive narrative trajectories, for example traditional recitations of Polish suffering as part of gratifying invocations of Polish resilience;17 or negatively connoted events integrated into stories expressing collective feelings of doubt and regret as during the first decade of Holocaust culture in West Germany. The last story type is most likely to produce self-critical sites of memory, posing probing questions about past failures and their ongoing relevance in an atmosphere of relative collective insecurity.18 Phases of cultural trauma offer opportunities to inquire into the causes of past crimes and address the all-important questions of if and how a given collective can prevent its members from becoming perpetrators (again). Self-critical memory deals with one’s own crimes, not the crimes of others and targets the centre of an ingroup’s symbolic sense of self. Self-critical memory pursues the question of what
If Holocaust memory can be resurrected as an emotionally and politically relevant fixture of future memory culture it would have to be in the guise of immersive, simulative and possibly also counterfactual digital memory. Gaming culture, social media networks and digitally empowered academic exchange are the kind of cultural environments where Holocaust culture might get a second lease on life as a transnationally shared, passionately pursued and possibly also self-critically inflected memory practice. A selective glance at digital Holocaust culture suggests, however, that the new media of collective remembrance are often embedded in traditional power structures and that the more innovative environments raise intriguing questions about the thematic boundaries and collective subject positions of Holocaust memory. While Holocaust allusions abound in cyberspace and established institutions of Holocaust memory make ample use of digital technologies, Holocaust memory has simply not yet arrived in the digital age – if we identify as one of the key attractions of digital culture its ability to offer users the experience of captivating historical narrative worlds combined with the compelling illusion of being able to inflect the narrative trajectories of these worlds according to their own
Gaming the Holocaust Paradigm?
The ritual has been played out on a number of occasions in recent years: somebody greedily, provocatively or courageously develops a Holocaust themed video game and is promptly pressured to abandon the project. In 2010, a group of Wolfenstein 3D modders, led by a young Israeli, developed a technologically crude Auschwitz revenge game loosely based on the 1944 uprising of members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando who succeeded in killing three ss-guards and setting fire to one crematorium.20 The game that the group worked on for over three years featured Nazi violence in the camp and then turned the tables on the torturers and had players in the role of Jewish inmates go on a killing spree of the Nazi camp personnel from a first-person-shooter perspective.21 The response came quickly after the release of a pilot.22 Representatives of the Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League rejected the project because ‘the Holocaust should be off-limits for video games’.23 Citing negative media attention and attendant emotional stress, the group cancelled the game
A New York City indie programmer has had a similar experience with a very different kind of video game project. Since 2008, Luc Bernard has worked on Imagination is the only Escape, which is set in Nazi-occupied Paris and depicts the suffering of Jews from the perspective of a young Jewish boy. The game blends history and fantasy in an effort to produce visually and narratively sophisticated historical fiction about the Shoah and has received much advance praise from game critics. Nevertheless, Bernard could not find distribution venues and most recently also failed in his efforts to raise capital through a crowdsourcing initiative.26 For a video game designer it is clearly a bad career move to invest creative efforts and many months at the screen in crafting a Holocaust-themed virtual game environment. The situation is vaguely reminiscent of Holocaust scholarship in the 1960s when the few scholars trying to write the history of the Final Solution struggled with similar prejudices.27 Today, even big players in the huge and influential video game industry are only carefully inching closer to the taboo subject matter of Holocaust gaming. In this vein, the powerful Wolfenstein franchise, now owned by Bethesda Softworks, stepped into a fictitious Nazi concentration camp in its successful 2014 release of Wolfenstein: The New Order. In the counterfactual game set in the 1960s after the Nazis have won wwii, Wolfenstein hero Blazkowicz infiltrates a Nazi camp to liberate a brilliant Jewish scientist. The short episode features provocative images including a female camp commander holding a
Critics and gamers have identified a number of reasons for the Holocaust gaming taboo. Mainstream games with attractive graphics are expensive and therefore game developers tend to copy and fine-tune previously successful formats rather than launching radically new aesthetics and content matter. Moreover, a lot of fast-paced, action-oriented video game violence thrives on simple plot structures that seem to preclude the kind of complex narrative explanations scholars use to account for events like the Final Solution. Finally, the gaming industry lacks auteur figures such as Lanzmann, Spielberg or Tarantino who can more easily transgress limits of historical taste. Consequently, as Jeff Hayton has pointed out, ‘medium, genre, and economics all work as inhibiting factors steering video games away from a sustained engagement with Nazism and the Holocaust.’29 Last but not least, some of the key players of the Holocaust memory establishment cannot imagine how they could successfully transfer their didactic and political mission into simulative and interactive ludic digital environments and have therefore concluded that video games and their brand of genocide/human rights education are simply incompatible with each other.
Reservations about the compatibility of the medium video game with serious historical subject matter are not limited to Holocaust themes; they also exist with regard to other topics including 9/1130 and slavery.31 At the same time, video games have conquered the historical imagination of many players
The disconnect between a burgeoning historical gaming culture one the one hand and the lack of state-of-the-art Holocaust gaming on the other hand turns video games into an important cultural arena illustrating par excellence Andrew Hoskins’ perceptive remarks about the bifurcation of memory culture in an age of digitization. Hoskins identifies a clear division of ‘two media/memory cultures: one formalized, institutionalized, regimented (including online); the other more emergent, confrontational, yet fragmented.’ Obviously, both spheres of social memory are closely intertwined and influence each other with the second, more fluid and emergent culture featuring a ‘virality that undermines attempts to sanitise history.’38 For Hoskins the ‘immediacy, mobility, flexibility and interactivity’ of the new emergent memory is the result of digital hyperconnectivity and particularly pronounced in social networks and file sharing platforms.39 Due to its scale and speed the new memory problematizes the relationship between the hitherto stable cultural constructs of ‘past’ and ‘present,’ raises anxieties about people’s ability to actively shape social memory, and prompts a rush to judgment that disrupts time-tested rituals for containing and forgetting potentially unsettling pasts. The gaming industry, focused on a few particularly profitable markets and dominated by two dozen companies, clearly belongs to the regimented memory culture. In the world of Tencent, Sony and Microsoft, the formal regimes of oblivion and containment, translated into effective processes of self-censorship, are clearly (still) functioning. That raises intriguing questions about digital Holocaust memory in the more fluid and flexible cultural digital contexts of social media and academia.
Digital Holocaust Education: From the Pedestrian to the Radically Multi-directional
Given the prominence of the education theme in Holocaust memory it is not surprising that websites of applicable institutions abound with teaching guidelines, online courses and lessons plans adapted to all kinds of curricular contexts. The uk’s Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (hmdt) takes, for instance, great pride in ‘offering a huge range of resources to educators’ although the charity’s line-up of teaching tools would be best characterized as numerous rather than diverse.45 The overarching theme of Holocaust Memorial Day 2016 was ‘Don’t stand by’ and with that catchy title hmdt invited students and teachers to become creative and craft films, launch social media campaigns or plan a hmd event in support of all sorts of deserving causes, ranging from genocide education to battling sexism and lgbt prejudice.46 But previous year’s proudly mentioned initiatives and especially the hmdt teaching resources released in support of the ‘Don’t stand by’ theme focus quite narrowly on Holocaust history, encouraging students, for instance, to draw up a character map of a British Holocaust hero, contemplating a number of survivor testimonies or celebrating resistance activities during the Holocaust.47 In addition, the teaching
There are exceptions – some problematic, others truly innovative. Yad Vashem’s website features, for instance, an interactive learning environment that describes ‘the ghettos during the Holocaust from the children’s perspective, and attempts to present this complex experience in a way that is accessible to children.’50 One might object to the naïve drawings and small scale of the visual learning environment. Yet the platform does present a wealth of visual and historical information in an accessible albeit only rudimentary interactive format. Nevertheless, as a lot of Holocaust products for young audiences, ‘Children in the Ghetto’ amounts to a strange type of Holocaust denial; the tool repeatedly identifies hunger as a serious problem in the ghettos but refrains from spelling out the consequences or detailing any other problems faced by the ghetto population.51 There are excellent reasons for such reticence. As Yad Vashem points out: ‘The unsupervised exposure to Holocaust history at a young age may induce trauma in children and could possibly trigger strategies of distanciation and even feelings of resentment towards the topic.’52 The word of warning contains
A second exception is the pathbreaking IWitness initiative of the usc Shoah Foundation. The project is truly remarkable because it hands over editorial power over cultural memory to teachers and high school students, teaching them basic film editing skills and providing them with extensive access to the Shoah Foundation’s archive of Holocaust testimonies. The students are furthermore encouraged to enter their films in the yearly IWitness Video competition. The winning entries of 2016 powerfully demonstrate that the students, giving the choice, are ready to leave behind the history of the Holocaust. Time and again, the films take a short clip from survivor testimony out of its historical context and use it as a jumping off point to engage with pressing present-day concerns such as poverty, homelessness, mental illness, animal rights, self-help and human solidarity.53 In this way, Holocaust memory becomes a tangential concern subject to powerful multi-directional forces of reframing and forgetting.54 The results of the IWitness digital film initiative are not Holocaust memory as we know it and they also do not (yet) amount to fully emergent connective memories. They represent an interesting hybrid: broadcast memories produced by members of a post-broadcast generation. The results indicate that, in an appropriate communicative-didactive setting, handing over interpretive power to transhuman memory amateurs should give less cause for ethical concern than, for example, encouraging designated memory experts to craft Holocaust curricula for young children.
It will be interesting to follow the careers of the holograms. If their developers and the protagonists of digital memory studies read contemporary culture correctly the holograms could become exoskeletal media stars. But it is also possible that the figure of the survivor, in its new digital disguise, does not attain the same media success that its analogue predecessor enjoyed on the tv
Facebook Broadcasting: ‘Never again without Memory’
The tension between regimented and emergent digital memories, i.e., between institutional authorial control and the consumers’ desire to engage with history on their own terms and according to their own narrative/aesthetic preferences is even more pronounced on the social media front. In August 2016, the ushmm took the Olympic Games in Brazil as an opportunity to enlighten its
The ushmm pr officers had more luck with an entry on 11 August, deploring the suffering of civilians in the besieged city of Aleppo, Syria. Carefully chosen phrasing (‘these crimes could amount to genocide’) were combined with a well edited, heart-wrenching video clip showing pictures of a hospitalized five-year old boy, a victim of a Syrian government attack, who later died of his injuries.60 The clip was viewed 158,525 times and with 1,105 shares proved to be the most successful entry of the month. The 145 lively comments are particularly intriguing, documenting multi-directional memory in action as commentators addressed the important questions of who is to be blamed for and what is to be done about the war crimes in Syria. Many users voiced massive frustration with government variously highlighting the failure of local and regional
The successful entry about Syria raises interesting questions about the relevance of historical precedent in political communication and the role of Holocaust institutions in shaping communicative memory. The subscribers of the ushmm feed and their Facebook friends probably share a relatively strong interest in history, but the explicit historical references included in the comments deal with the very recent past; only two commentators create analogies to wwii history. The Nazi past does not appear to resonate strongly with ushmm followers trying to make sense of the war in Syria. Moreover and more important for our purposes, having successfully triggered a debate, the ushmm stays completely silent during subsequent discussions. Throughout the month of August 2016, ushmm only once responded to a commentator providing specific historical information. Otherwise it stayed above the Facebook flow and fray even when specifically prompted by its Facebook friends to respond or take a position.65 That passivity seems to reflect the general policy of the ushmm and other Holocaust institutions whose staff members prefer
Put into more abstract terms, the Facebook feed of the ushmm is the place where the carefully balanced, politically correct cosmopolitan Holocaust memory comes in direct, dysfunctional contact with the kinds of antagonistic and agonistic memories that pervade everyday life.67 In response to the Aleppo post, some subscribers yelled at each other in an antagonistic mode, a few engaged with each other’s diverging opinions in a relatively respectful agonistic fashion, and often the entries simply coexisted in cyberspace without any discernable explicit communicative link. But none of the contributions managed to penetrate the communication barrier between the institution’s settled, objectifying cultural memory of genocide and the users more fluid, emergent and opinionated exchange reflecting more or less firmly held positions and prejudices. The communication strategy of the ushmm makes perfect sense. Like their professional colleagues across the globe in the business of Holocaust memory, the managers at the ushmm are heavily dependent on government subsidies and private philanthropy. They have a lot to lose and nothing to gain by politicizing their activities, because negative press coverage would alienate sponsors, endanger their business model and jeopardize the value of their brands.
But the purposeful depolitization of genocide memory has important negative consequences. In light of the ushmm’s actual communication patterns the mission of official Holocaust memory ‘never again genocide’ is misleading. The multifold activities of the harbingers of official memory reflect communicative aims and practices that are best summarized as ‘never again Holocaust/
YouTube, Twitter and Genocide Prevention Efforts in an Academic Bubble
The ushmm’s leadership appears to be very aware of the disconnect between genocide memory and genocide prevention and dedicates some of its resources to engage politicians and academics in genocide prevention outreach. Unfortunately, these efforts do not seem to accomplish the desired results. The ushmm has, for example, recently enlarged and re-calibrated its Center for the Prevention of Genocide in order ‘to make the prevention of genocide a core priority for leaders and academics around the world through its multi-pronged program of research, education, and public outreach’.69 On 19 May, 2016 the new centre staged a high-profile one-day event in pursuit of these lofty goals which was ambitiously entitled Partners in Prevention: A Global Forum on Ending Genocide and featured an impressive line-up of politicians, policy experts, ngo
The tweets inadvertently highlight a perfectly normal yet troublesome divide. For academics and assorted experts, discussions about genocides past and present provide a memory comfort zone (‘I so enjoy working with these two’). Through meetings and connected outreach coverage they validate each other’s work in an atmosphere of competitive respect and sombre performances attesting to their caring disposition and intellectual control of the subject matter. At the same time that they are crafting self-affirmative memory aesthetics they are often quite critical of other, popular strategies of genocide aesthetization. The lack of self-reflexivity is nicely illustrated by Holocaust research initiatives in the thriving and rapidly expanding transcultural terrain of the digital humanities. In 2014, after several years of path-breaking research, a team of scholars published a volume entitled Geographies of the Holocaust, marking the arrival of the spatial turn in Holocaust studies.73 With the help of relatively large quantitative data sets, they raised and answered intriguing questions about the ghettoization process, the mass murder of civilians in occupied Eastern Europe, the arrest of Jews in wartime Italy and the expansion of the ss camp system in general and Auschwitz in particular. But in their
From Electronic to Digital Media Reception Studies?
The study of Holocaust culture, including the present essay, has always channelled wide-ranging assumptions about the use of memory culture, assumptions shared by many qualitative analyses in the field of memory studies. Countless research projects advance on the reasonably sounding premise that the content and structure of the memory products under discussion correlate with the communication experiences surrounding those products. That assumption is problematic because we simply do not possess or have not extensively analysed reception data that would exhaustingly document
The limits of audience studies are all the more frustrating since Holocaust culture began with an undisputed feat of media reception studies. When the nbc tv series Holocaust was broadcast on us prime time in April 1978 to public acclaim, more than 30 countries followed suit and laid the foundation to the type of transnational Holocaust memory with which we are familiar today. In Germany, the decision to purchase and broadcast the series was widely discussed for months before the series hit the screen in January 1979. The unusual public deliberations about public tv scheduling decisions gave German media and media scholars plenty of advance warning. As a result, viewers experienced an unprecedented wave of contextualizing media coverage of the
Unfortunately, the path-breaking research strategies of 1979 remained an isolated effort. Media scholars interested in gauging the relevance of mass media programming for the development of collective memories have to content themselves with the type of reception data that public television networks generate as a matter of course and have generally no access to the archives of private networks. As a result, tv’s important contributions to the task of public remembrance have to be guesstimated on the basis of quantitative ratings, a historically dwindling number of professional reviews, a handful of inconsistently selected and archived viewer responses and the occasional case study conducted by researchers in the networks or their academic peers. Under those circumstances memory scholars have a tough time reconstructing communication processes initiated and reflected by tv. More specifically, they are largely prevented from documenting multidirectional use of historical tv coverage and forced to resort to the kind of unsophisticated interpretation of mass media data often encountered in the field of memory studies. Time and again, the narrative worlds of extraordinary media events are taken to reflect dominant trends of collective remembrance without proper attention paid to television seriality and routines, complex transnational and multi-media interactions, as well as actual reception processes.82
Conclusion
Holocaust culture was invented in the era of analogue media. It is a creature of photography, film, radio, television, architecture and conventional museum aesthetics and was fully developed before the rise of digital culture. When Schindler’s List was released in 1993 and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington d.c. opened its doors in the same year, personal mobile phones and PlayStation did not exist. Despite its long analogue history, the cosmopolitan Holocaust memory of the new millennium is synonymous with digital technology. On a few occasions, Holocaust culture has even produced path-breaking digital advances as in the case of the Shoah Foundation’s database of 53,000 survivor testimonies which are turned into superior research and teaching tools through highly innovative search engines.86 But the rigid interpretive frame and carefully moderated distribution systems of cosmopolitan Holocaust memory render it incompatible with central elements of our digitized everyday life. Official Holocaust memory is professionally managed for the purpose of safeguarding the mission and long-term interests of the respective memory institution. In its current format, official Holocaust culture
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (ihra), founded in Stockholm in 2000, has nicely summarized reservations about social media shared by many Holocaust educators and Holocaust memory managers. As the ihra explicated in its 2014 guidelines for the use of social media in Holocaust education: ‘Trends such as Holocaust denial, diminishment and trivialization are rampant on the Internet and using social media has the potential to introduce these topics to students and give them unwarranted prominence.’ Moreover, ‘social media is typically seen as platform for entertainment – the purview of pop culture, not learning and intellectual debate.’88 It is not clear from the document to what extent the ihra shares these reservations. In my view, the authors of the guidelines fail to point out that the online presence of Holocaust denial should not be equated with its popularity. There is a significant degree of Holocaust-denial-phobia in Holocaust culture, some of it instrumentalized for fund-raising purposes. The distanciation from Holocaust entertainment contains a similarly disingenuous element. All Holocaust and ns-history learning sites, including Yad Vashem, Auschwitz, Buchenwald or the ushmm have great, more or less intentionally crafted thanatouristic entertainment potential – otherwise they would not be as popular as they are.
The problems lie elsewhere and should be more clearly and honestly addressed. Cosmopolitan Holocaust memory and emergent digital Holocaust culture (to the degree that the latter exists) represent different, competing types
For related reasons, official Holocaust memory keeps a careful distance from the captivating virtual environment of video game culture, observing somewhat helplessly from the sidelines the rise of a paradigm of popular entertainment that threatens its business model and allegedly also its ethical raison d’etre. Video games facilitate a new quality of absorbing, shared immersion in narrative cultural worlds, including realistically shaped historical worlds, based on rapid multi-sensory input, ludic pleasure and a significant degree of narrative and especially spatial control. It is now technologically completely realistic to recreate virtually Nazi society according to our (scholarly) ideas of how that society functioned. Or, to put a finer point to it, we can bring to virtual, interactive life our interpretations of the extreme social universe of Auschwitz and/or any of the 42,500 other Nazi camps that covered the continent of Europe.89 The virtual camp scenario constitutes a central representational taboo of contemporary Holocaust culture. That taboo has a lot to do with taste, power and the history of Holocaust memory – and it represents perfectly legitimate concerns about the political and ethical purposes that could possibly be served by breathing a second, virtual life into the hell that was Auschwitz. Most likely, these concerns do not represent any absolute limits of representation but reflect the limits of our present-day didactic-ludic imagination. We simply do
While we might not yet be able to design a good Auschwitz game, that problem does not apply to other didactically valuable, ludically viable, and historically realistic Nazi game ideas. What would be wrong with designing the virtual world of Nazi-occupied Poland, France, the Netherlands or Denmark, having players assume the perspectives of Jews caught in the maelstrom, seeking out the few existing loopholes to safety and learning in the process that the vast majority of Jews were increasingly faced with choiceless choices and no hope for rescue? Such a game should be at least as capable of inducing empathy with the victims as the Holocaust movies of past decades which are probably becoming increasingly ineffective as a didactic tool for younger audiences steeped in digital culture. And why stop there? Why not work on a spin-off Aleppo 2016 game which follows the trial and tribulations of Syrian refugees on their way to Europe as the try to escape from Assad, rebel troops, Isis and Russian air strikes and try to overcome global disinterest and prejudice in very much the same way as German Jewry in the summer of 1939. If scripted intelligently such an Aleppo-game would go a long way to expose the depravity of Europe’s political elite of 2016 as they tried to shed their Geneva Convention, un Human Rights Charter and eu Convention on Human Rights obligations.90 In fact, it is difficult to imagine any video game about the topic that would be in such poor taste as the ‘game’ that said politicians have been playing with the
Simulative interactive narrative worlds exploring past and present crimes against humanity could also offer new, decidedly self-critical perspectives on perpetrator and bystander biographies. Digital game formats seem to be very well suited to have players experience in their own virtual life the slippery slope of the conformism, prejudice and fanaticism that precede genocide. In this fashion, genocide gaming could assume a self-critical quality and teach players, reflecting on their own virtual ethical failures and virtual crimes, how to recognize and counteract the early warning signs of radicalization and indifference. Since gaming with its extraordinary immersive potential offers the ambivalent (and for ‘analoguers’ very troublesome) experience of being simultaneously inside and outside a given simulative world, a Holocaust game could help overcome a didactic impasse that cosmopolitan Holocaust culture has thus far never been able to solve: it could complicate and possibly undermine the troublesome structural parallels between the passive bystanders of the Holocaust of the 1940s and the relative passive consumers of official Holocaust culture of the last four decades, a culture that has taught consumers the virtues of remembering the victims (never again genocide w/h memory) but provided little meaningful guidance in self-critically engaging with legacies of perpetration and preventing large scale victimization (never again genocide). Given the high stakes involved, the first realistic, fully immersive, interactive and simulative Holocaust game should be developed at the centre of our Holocaust culture, for instance, through a collaboration between the Shoah Foundation, ushmm, Yad Vashem, the Gedenkstättennetzwerk, the Museum of Tolerance and other interested parties. The task is too important and too expensive and has too great a didactic potential to be left exclusively to commercial enterprises or freelance outfits.
In my view, the examples of digital Holocaust culture cited above do not yet demonstrate conclusively that today’s gamers, social media users and their technological devices represent a fundamentally different memory species than their electronic forbearers. At the same time, the examples indicate that the users of digital culture put a premium on becoming the narrators of their own memories and escaping the relatively narrow thematic confines of established Holocaust memory, a multi-directional desire they might share with generations of film and television consumers who simply did not have similar cultural agency.
While we are still busy trying to figure out the dynamics of mediatized human collective memories, post-human collective memory is already thriving, for example in the form of self-reflexive ai robotics. Robots are intelligent to
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Eyerman Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Fearn Andy, “HMDT Eteach: A new interactive, multimedia resource to support educators in teaching effectively about the Holocaust and subsequent genocides,” (paper presented at the BAHS Conference 2016, UCL, 20 July, 2016).
Fogu Claudio. “A ‘Spatial Turn’ in Holocaust Studies?” In Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 218–239.
“For Educators,” Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, http://hmd.org.uk/content/for-educators. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
Frazier Kai M., Twitter post, 24 May, 2016, https://twitter.com/hashtag/preventgenocide. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
Frei Norbert. “Zum erneuten Dienstjubiläum der ‘Achtundsechziger’: Generation Sündenstolz,” Neue Züricher Zeitung, 3 August, 2008.
Friedländer Saul. Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.
Garde-Hansen Joanne, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading, eds., Save As … Digital Memory.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Gold Riva. “Designers Pull Plug on Auschwitz Death Camp Revolt Video Game.” Haartz.com, 26 December, 2010. Accessed 21 October, 2016. http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/designers-pull-plug-on-auschwitz-death-camp-revolt-video-game-1.333022.
Goldberg Amos and Haim Hazan, eds., Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age. New York: Berghahn, 2015.
Gray Michael. Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education. New York: Palgrave, 2014.
Hansen-Glucklich Jennifer. Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation.New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014.
Harrigan Pat, Matthew Kirschenbaum and James Dunnigan, eds., Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
Hayton Jeff. “Beyond Good and Evil: Nazis and the Supernatural in Video Games.” In Revisiting the “Nazi Occult:” Histories, Realities, Legacies, edited by Monica Black and Eric Kurlander. Rochester: Camden House: 2015. 248–269.
Hilberg Raul. The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian.Ivan Dee, 1996.
“HMD 2016: Lesson Plan: Didn’t Stand By,” http://hmd.org.uk/education/hmd-2016-lesson-plan-didnt-stand. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
Hoskins Andrew. “Digital Network Memory,” in Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamic of Cultural Memory, edited by Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. 91–106.
Hoskins Andrew. “The Right to be Forgotten in Post-Scarcity,” in , The Ethics of Memory in a Digital Age: Interrogating the Right to be forgotten, edited by Alessia Ghezzi et al.. New York: PalgraveMacmillian, 2014. 50–64.
Hoskins Andrew. “The Restless Past: An Introduction to Digital Memory and Media,” in Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins. New York: Routledge, forthcoming.
Hume Janice. Popular Memory and the American Revolution.New York: Routledge, 2014.
Huntemann Nina and Matthew Payne, eds., Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. New York: Routledge, 2010.
“Imagination Is The Only Escape.” Indiegogo.com. Accessed 21 October, 2016. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/imagination-is-the-only-escape#/.
“International School for Holocaust Studies: Learning Environments.” Yad Vashem. http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/learning_environments/index.asp. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
“Interview with Anne Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Paul Jaskot.” In Probing the Ethics, edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. 240–256.
“IWitness Video Challenge: Top Videos by Groups – 2016.” University of Southern California. http://iwitness.usc.edu/SFI/IWitnessChallenge/Winners.aspx?y=2016 Accessed 22 October, 2016.
Jinks Rebecca. Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Justin Clark. “Counting Body like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drum,” Gamespot, November 17, 2014. Accessed 25 January, 2017. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/this-war-of-mine-review/1900-6415963/.
Kaiser Wolfram. “Limits of Cultural Engineering: Actors and Narratives in the European Parliament’s House of European History Project,” Journal of Common Market Studies 55/3 (2017), 518–534.
Kansteiner Wulf. In Pursuit of German Television: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006.
Kansteiner Wulf. “Macht, Authentizität und die Verlockungen der Normalität: Aufstieg und Abschied der NS-Zeitzeugen in den Geschichtsdokumentationen des ZDF.” In Die Geburt der Zeitzeugen nach 1945, edited by Martin Sabrow and Norbert Frei. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013. 320–353.
Kansteiner Wulf and Todd Presner. “Introduction: The Field of Holocaust Studies and the Emergence of Global Holocaust Culture,” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 1–42.
Kappell Matthew and Andrew Elliott, eds., Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Kempshall Chris. The First World War in Computer Games.New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014.
Kline Daniel, ed., Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages. London: Routledge 2014.
Knowles Anne, Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2014.
“KZ Manager.” Wikipedia, last updated 21 October, 2016. Accessed 21 October, 2016. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/KZ_Manager.
Lentin Ronit. Co-Memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Levy Daniel and Nathan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
Lichtblau Eric. “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking”, New York Times, 1 March, 2013. Accessed 23 October, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=1.
“Life Stories,” http://hmd.org.uk/resources/life-stories. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
Loh Christian, Yanyan Sheng and Dirk Ilfenthaler. “Serious Games Analytics: Theoretical Framework.” in Serious Games Analytics: Methodologies for Performance Measurement, Assessment, and Improvement, edited by Christian Loh, Yanyan Sheng and Dirk Ifenthaler. Cham: Springer, 2015. 3–29.
Luke K. “WWII Games: Where is the Holocaust.” Critical Gamer, 17 January, 2011. Accessed 21 October, 2016. http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2011/01/17/wwii-games-where-is-the-holocaust/.
McWherto Michael. “Concentration Camp Game Was Meant To Be Fun.” Kotaku, 10 December, 2010. Accessed 21 October, 2016. http://kotaku.com/5711317/concentration-camp-game-was-meant-to-be-fun.
Meyers Oren, Eyal Zandberg and Motti Neiger, eds., Communicating Awe: Media Memory and Holocaust Commemoration. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014.
Moses Dirk. “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century:’ Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Genocide.” In Colonialism and Genocide, edited by Dirk Moses and Dan Stone. Routledge: New York, 2007. 148–180.
“Museum Announces $20 Million Gift to Name the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide.” USHMM, 19 February, 2015. Accessed 22 October, 2016. https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/museum-announces-20-million-gift-to-name-the-simon-skjodt-center-for-the-pr.
“New Dimension in Testimony – USCICT and SFI Classroom Concept.” 8 February, 2013. Accessed 24 October, 2016. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnF630tCiEk.
Niven Bill. “German Victimhood Discourse in Comparative Perspective,” in Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe, edited by Eric Langenbacher, Bill Niven and Ruth Wittlinger. New York: Berghahn, 2012. 180–194.
Ochman Ewa. Post-Communist Poland: Contested Pasts and Future Identities.New York: Routledge, 2013.
Olick Jeffrey. The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Parikka Jussi. A Geology of Media.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
“Partners in Prevention: A Global Forum on Ending Genocide.” USHMM. Accessed 22 October, 2016. https://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/speakers-and-events/all-speakers-and-events/partners-in-prevention-a-global-forum-on-ending-genocide.
Plygon. “The New Order shows you the horror of concentration camps from the first person.” YouTube, 19 May, 2014. Accessed 21 October, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbQ3H6lEWDE.
Pogacar Martin. Media Archeologies, Micro-Archives and Story-Telling: Re-Presencing the Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Presner Todd. “The Ethics of the Algorism: Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.” In Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 175–202.
Ritterfeld Ute, Michael Cody, Peter Vorderer, eds., Serious Games: Mechanisms and Effects.New York: Routledge, 2009.
Robertson Adi. “The virtual reality 9/11 experience is bad, but not for the reasons you’d expect.” The Verge, 30 October, 2015. Accessed 21 October, 2016. http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/30/9642790/virtual-reality-9-11-experience-empathy.
Rogers Richard. Digital Methods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.
Rothberg Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009.
Rothe Ann. Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others. New Brunswick, 2011.
Rüsen Jörn. Historik: Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft.Cologne: Böhlau, 2013.
Rutten Ellen, Julie Fedor and Vera Zvereva, eds., Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Rössler Patrick, ed., The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects. Walden: Wiley, 2017.
Shandler Jeffrey. While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Sierp Aline. History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity: Unifying Divisions.New York: Routledge, 2014.
“Slave Trade Video Game Edited After Backlash.” Huffington post, 3 September, 2015. Accessed 21 October, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/slave-trade-game-edited-following-backlash_us_55e8489be4b0b7a9633bdc73.
“Sonderkommando Revolt Wolfenstein 3D mod.” Last updated 13 December, 2010, http://www.moddb.com/mods/sonderkommando-revolt. Accessed 21 October, 2016.
Stauber Roni, ed., Collaboration with the Nazis: Public Discourse after the Holocaust. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Stuart Sophia. “How Natural Language Tech, Holograms Are Preserving Holocaust Testimony.” pcmag.com, 8 April, 2016. Accessed 24 October, 2016. http://www.pcmag.com/article/343452/how-natural-language-tech-holograms-are-preserving-holocaus.
Takashi Dean. “Brenda Romero’s Train board game will make you ponder.” venturebeat.com, 11 May, 2013. Accessed 21 October, 2016. http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/11/brenda-romero-train-board-game-holocaust/.
“Teaching Resources.” Holocaust Educational Trust, http://www.het.org.uk/teaching-pack. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
“Teacher Resources: Educating Hearts and Minds.” Museum of Tolerance, http://www.museumoftolerance.com/site/c.tmL6KfNVLtH/b.5052463/k.AE91/Teacher_Resources.htm. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
“The International School for Holocaust Studies: Education Materials.” Yad Vashem http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/index.asp. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
“UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria: ISIS is committing genocide against the Yazidis.” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 16 June, 2016. Accessed 22 October, 2016. http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=20113&LangID=E.
“UN: Yezidi ‘genocide has occurred and is ongoing’.” Rudaw, 16 June, 2016. Accessed 22 October, 2016. http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/16062016.
Unterman Phoebe. Through Eva’s Eyes. Kansas City: Landmark, 2009.
“Using Social Media in Holocaust Education.” International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, April 2014. Accessed 22 October, 2016. https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/media-room/stories/new-social-media-guidelines.
USHMM’s Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/holocaustmuseum/. Accessed 23 August, 2016.
Veruggio Gianmarco, Fiorella Operto and George Bekey, “Roboethics: Social and Ethical Implications.” In Handbook of Robotics, edited by Bruno Siciliano and Oussam Khatib. Berlin: Springer, 2016. 2135–2160.
Waddell Kaveh. “A Video Game That Lets You Torture Iraqi Prisoners.” theatlantic.com, 1 August, 2016. Accessed 21 October, 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/a-video-game-that-lets-you-torture-iraqi-prisoners/493379/.
Weller Katrin et al.. Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang, 2013.
Wilke Claus. “Die Fernsehserie ‘Holocaust’ als Medienereignis,” Zeitgeschichte-online, March 2004, http://www.zeitgeschichteonline.de/md=FSHolocaust-Wilke.
Winnerling Tobias and Florian Kerschbaumer, eds., Early Modernity and Video Games.Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014.
Worcman Karen and Joanne Garde-Hansen. Social Memory Technology: Theory, Practice, Action.New York: Routledge, 2016.
Yahil Leni. The Holocaust.New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
Zertal Idith. Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Dirk Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century:’ Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Genocide,” in Colonialism and Genocide, edited by Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (Routledge: New York, 2007), 148–180.
Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, “Introduction,” in Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, edited by Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney (Berlin: DeGryuter, 2014), 1–25, 10.
Jeffrey Olick, The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); see also Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan (eds.), Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age (New York: Berghahn, 2015).
Jeffrey Alexander, “The Social Construction of Moral Universals,” in Alexander et al., Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–101.
On the concept of Cultural Trauma see Jeffrey Alexander, Cultural Trauma: A Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).
For the concept of empathic unsettlement see Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
See for example Norbert Frei’s polemic comments about the student movement’s collective memory in Germany, “Zum erneuten Dienstjubiläum der ‘Achtundsechziger’: Generation Sündenstolz,” Neue Züricher Zeitung, 3/8/2008.
Roni Stauber (ed.), Collaboration with the Nazis: Public Discourse after the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Aline Sierp, History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity: Unifying Divisions (New York: Routledge, 2014), 123–136.
Bill Niven, “German Victimhood Discourse in Comparative Perspective,” in Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe, edited by Eric Langenbacher, Bill Niven and Ruth Wittlinger (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 180–194, 185.
Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Ronit Lentin, Co-Memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 28; see also Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014).
John Bodnar, The “Good War” in American Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 221.
Tonya Bolden, How to Build a Museum: Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (New York: Viking, 2016); for the memory of slavery in the us see also Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Ewa Ochman, Post-Communist Poland: Contested Pasts and Future Identities (New York: Routledge, 2013).
See in this context Jörn Rüsen’s typology of historical narration and especially his concept of critical narration, Rüsen, Historik: Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft (Cologne: Böhlau, 2013), 213.
Wolfram Kaiser, “Limits of Cultural Engineering: Actors and Narratives in the European Parliament’s House of European History Project,” Journal of Common Market Studies 55/3 (2017), 518–534.
The uprising has been subject to various retellings; see the measured words in Nicholas Chare/Dominic Williams, Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls at Auschwitz (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 6–7; and compare, for instance, to Leni Yahil, The Holocaust (New York: Oxford up, 1990), 486.
Michael McWherto, “Concentration Camp Game Was Meant To Be Fun,” Kotaku, 10 December, 2010, http://kotaku.com/5711317/concentration-camp-game-was-meant-to-be-fun. Accessed 21 October, 2016.
See the pilot and additional screen shots: “Sonderkommando Revolt Wolfenstein 3D mod,” last updated 13 December, 2010, http://www.moddb.com/mods/sonderkommando-revolt. Accessed 21 October, 2016.
Brian Crecente, “Anti-Defamation League Slams ‘Fun’ Holocaust Video Game as Horrific and Inappropriate,” Kotaku, 11 December, 2010, http://kotaku.com/5712163/anti-defamation-league-slams-fun-holocaust-video-game-as-horrific-and-inappropriate, Accessed 21 October, 2016.
Riva Gold, “Designers Pull Plug on Auschwitz Death Camp Revolt Video Game,” Haartz.com, 26 December, 2010; http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/designers-pull-plug-on-auschwitz-death-camp-revolt-video-game-1.333022. Accessed 21 October, 2016.
In 2009 the adl, for instance, praised Inglourious Basterds as “an allegory about good and evil and the no-holds barred efforts to defeat the evil personified by Hitler, his henchmen and his Nazi regime. If only it were true,” “adl Statement on Quentin Tarrantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’,” archive adl.org, 18 August, 2009, http://archive.adl.org/presrele/holna_52/5585_52.html#.V852dBR0U6U. Accessed 21 October, 2016; for a scholarly assessments of the movie’s transgressive accomplishments see Robert Dassanowsky (ed.), Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metacinema (New York: Continuum, 2012).
“Imagination Is The Only Escape,” Indiegogo.com, https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/imagination-is-the-only-escape#/. Accessed 21 October, 2016.
Plygon, “The New Order shows you the horror of concentration camps from the first person,” YouTube, 19 May 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = DbQ3H6lEWDE. Accessed 21 October, 2016.
Jeff Hayton, “Beyond Good and Evil: Nazis and the Supernatural in Video Games,” in Monica Black/Eric Kurlander (eds.), Revisiting the “Nazi Occult:” Histories, Realities, Legacies (Rochester: Camden House: 2015), 248–269.
Consider for instance the 9/11 virtual reality reenactment 08:46 based on a student project: DarkWolfLetsPlay, “08:46/9/11 Terrorist Attack Oculus Rift Game,” youtube, 19 October, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = vd2_j8dsOsM. Accessed 21 October, 2016; and see the helpful review by Adi Robertson, “The virtual reality 9/11 experience is bad, but not for the reasons you’d expect,” The Verge, 30 October, 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/30/9642790/virtual-reality-9-11-experience-empathy. Accessed 21 October, 2016.
“Slave Trade Video Game Edited After Backlash,” Huffington post, 3 September, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/slave-trade-game-edited-following-backlash_us_55e8489be4b0b7a9633bdc73. Accessed 21 October, 2015.
Matthew Kappell/Andrew Elliott (eds.), Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); see also Daniel Kline (ed.), Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages (London: Routledge 2014); Chris Kempshall, The First World War in Computer Games (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014); Tobias Winnerling and Florian Kerschbaumer (eds.), Early Modernity and Video Games (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014); and Nina Huntemann and Matthew Payne (eds.), Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (New York: Routledge, 2010).
For a definition and historical overview of serious gaming see Christian Loh, Yanyan Sheng and Dirk Ilfenthaler, “Serious Games Analytics: Theoretical Framework,” in Serious Games Analytics: Methodologies for Performance Measurement, Assessment, and Improvement, edited by Christian S. Loh, Yanyan Sheng and Dirk Ifenthaler (Cham: Springer, 2015), 3–29; see also Ralf Dörner, Stefan Göbel, Wolfgang Effelsberg and Josef Wiemers (eds.), Serious Games: Foundations, Concepts and Practice (Cham: Springer, 2016); and Ute Ritterfeld, Michael Cody, Peter Vorderer (eds.), Serious Games: Mechanisms and Effects (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Eric Day, “Why We Don’t Have a Holocaust Video Game and Why We Desperately Need One,” overmental.com, 5 May, 2014, http://overmental.com/content/why-we-dont-have-a-holocaust-video-game-and-why-we-desperately-need-one-1303; Luke K, “wwii Games: Where is the Holocaust,” Critical Gamer, http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2011/01/17/wwii-games-where-is-the-holocaust/. Accessed 21 October, 2016.
“KZ Manager,” Wikipedia, last updated 21 October, 2016, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/KZ_Manager. Accessed 21 October, 2016.
Video game designer Brenda Romero cited in Kaveh Waddell, “A Video Game That Lets You Torture Iraqi Prisoners,” theatlantic.com, 1 August, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/a-video-game-that-lets-you-torture-iraqi-prisoners/493379/. Accessed 21 October, 2016. Romero is also the designer of the Holocaust board game Train: Dean Takashi, “Brenda Romero’s Train board game will make you ponder,” venturebeat.com, 11 May, 2013, http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/11/brenda-romero-train-board-game-holocaust/. Accessed 21 October, 2016; on agency in war games see Pat Harrigan, Matthew Kirschenbaum and James Dunnigan (eds.), Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2016).
Adam Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016).
Andrew Hoskins, “The Right to be Forgotten in Post-Scarcity,” in, The Ethics of Memory in a Digital Age: Interrogating the Right to be forgotten, edited by Alessia Ghezzi et al. (New York: PalgraveMacmillian, 2014), 50–64, 60; see also Andrew Hoskins, “Digital Network Memory,” in Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamic of Cultural Memory, edited by Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), , 91–106.
Hoskins, “The Right to be Forgotten,” 55; see also José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Karen Worcman and Joanne Garde-Hansen, Social Memory Technology: Theory, Practice, Action (New York: Routledge, 2016), esp. 46–49; Ellen Rutten, Julie Fedor and Vera Zvereva (eds.), Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading (eds.), Save As … Digital Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Andrew Hoskins, “The Restless Past: An Introduction to Digital Memory and Media,” in Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
Martin Pogacar, Media Archeologies, Micro-Archives and Story-Telling: Re-Presencing the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
“For Educators,” Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, http://hmd.org.uk/content/for-educators. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
“Don’t Stand By: Holocaust Memorial Day 2016: What You Can Do,” http://hmd.org.uk/sites/default/files/HMD_files/dont_stand_by_-_final.pdf. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
“Don’t Stand By: Holocaust Memorial Day 2016: Lesson Activity: British Heroes of the Holocaust,” http://hmd.org.uk/sites/default/files/british_heroes_of_the_holocaust_resource.pdf. Accessed 22 October, 2016; “hmd 2016: Lesson Plan: Didn’t Stand By,” http://hmd.org.uk/education/hmd-2016-lesson-plan-didnt-stand. Accessed 22 October, 2016; “Life Stories,” http://hmd.org.uk/resources/life-stories. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
hmdt is currently developing a fully interactive digital teaching tool called hmdt Eteach, but a presentation of the pilot at the bahs Conference in July 2016 did not reveal a particularly dynamic or innovative platform. Andy Fearn, “hmdt Eteach: A new interactive, multimedia resource to support educators in teaching effectively about the Holocaust and subsequent genocides,” bahs Conference 2016, ucl 7/20/2016.
“Teaching Resources”, Holocaust Educational Trust, http://www.het.org.uk/teaching-pack. Accessed 22 October, 2016; “The International School for Holocaust Studies: Education Materials,” Yad Vashem http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/index.asp. Accessed 22 October, 2016; “Teacher Resources: Educating Hearts and Minds,” Museum of Tolerance, http://www.museumoftolerance.com/site/c.tmL6KfNVLtH/b.5052463/k.AE91/Teacher_Resources.htm. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
“International School for Holocaust Studies: Learning Environments,” Yad Vashem, http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/learning_environments/index.asp. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
For children’s books with similar problems see, for instance, Phoebe Eloise Unterman, Through Eva’s Eyes (Kansas City: Landmark, 2009).
In October 2016, only the German version of the online game worked. Here the words of warning in the original German: “Die unbeaufsichtigte Beschäftigung mit dem Holocaust in einem jungen Alter kann zu einem Trauma bei Kindern führen, sowie zu Distanziertheit und in manchen Fällen sogar zu einem Gefühl der Feindseligkeit im Zusammenhang mit dem Thema,” see “Die Internetseite ‘Kinder im Ghetto:’ Kommentare für Lehrer,” Yad Vashem, http://ghetto.galim.org.il/ger/about/lessons.html. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
“IWitness Video Challenge: Top Videos by Groups – 2016,” University of Southern California, http://iwitness.usc.edu/SFI/IWitnessChallenge/Winners.aspx?y = 2016. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
On the concept of multi-directional memory see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford up, 2009).
For a video demonstration see itc Graphics Lab’s “New Dimension in Testimony – usc ict and sfi Classroom Concept,” 8 February, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = AnF630tCiEk. Accessed 24 October, 2016; see also Sophia Stuart, “How Natural Language Tech, Holograms Are Preserving Holocaust Testimony,” pcmag.com, 8 April, 2016, http://www.pcmag.com/article/343452/how-natural-language-tech-holograms-are-preserving-holocaus. Accessed 24 October, 2016.
Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Oren Meyers, Eyal Zandberg and Motti Neiger (eds.), Communicating Awe: Media Memory and Holocaust Commemoration (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014); and, more critically, Ann Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others (New Brunswick, 2011).
Wulf Kansteiner, “Macht, Authentizität und die Verlockungen der Normalität: Aufstieg und Abschied der NS-Zeitzeugen in den Geschichtsdokumentationen des ZDF,” in Die Geburt der Zeitzeugen nach 1945, edited by Martin Sabrow and Norbert Frei (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 320–353.
In June 2016 the un officially determined that Isis is committing genocide against the Yazidis: “un Commission of Inquiry on Syria: isis is committing genocide against the Yazidis,” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 16 June, 2016, http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID = 20113&LangID = E. Accessed 22 October, 2016; see also “un: Yezidi ‘genocide has occurred and is ongoing,’” Rudaw, 16 June, 2016, http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/16062016. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
ushmm’s Facebook page, 2 August, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/holocaustmuseum/. Accessed 23 August, 2016.
ushmm’s Facebook page, 11 August, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/holocaustmuseum/. Accessed 23 August, 2016.
Dennis Howard on ushmm’s Facebook page, 20 August, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/holocaustmuseum/. Accessed 23 August, 2016.
Overwatch Blizzard on ushmm’s Facebook page, 22 August, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/holocaustmuseum/. Accessed 23 August, 2016.
Dan Gunner on ushmm’s Facebook page, 20 August, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/holocaustmuseum/. Accessed 23 August, 2016.
Dylan H. Brown on ushmm’s Facebook page, 21 August, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/holocaustmuseum/. Accessed 23 August, 2016.
Ron Van Cleef: “Yes, this is terrible, but I am curious if the ushmm has condemned the us bombings of civilians in Syria, Afghanistan and other places?” on ushmm’s Facebook page, 11 August, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/holocaustmuseum/. Accessed 23 August, 2016.
Butch Allen Seals on ushmm’s Facebook page, 26 August, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/holocaustmuseum/. Accessed 23 August, 2016.
On the evolution of Holocaust culture see for instance Rebecca Jinks, Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); and Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner, “Introduction: The Field of Holocaust Studies and the Emergence of Global Holocaust Culture,” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–42.
“Museum Announces $20 Million Gift to Name the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide,” ushmm, 19 February, 2015, https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/museum-announces-20-million-gift-to-name-the-simon-skjodt-center-for-the-pr. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
“Partners in Prevention: A Global Forum on Ending Genocide,” ushmm, https://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/speakers-and-events/all-speakers-and-events/partners-in-prevention-a-global-forum-on-ending-genocide. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
That number had increased to 14 by October 2016, ushmm, “Bridging the Warning-to-Response Gap,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDNshd6yOns&feature=youtu.be. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
Kai M. Frazier, Twitter post, 24 May, 2016, https://twitter.com/hashtag/preventgenocide. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole & Alberto Giordano (eds.), Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana up, 2014).
Claudio Fogu, “A ‘Spatial Turn’ in Holocaust Studies?” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2016), 218–239; see also “Interview with Anne Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Paul Jaskot,” in in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2016), 240–256.
Saul Friedländer, Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009).
Jerome Bourdon and Cecile Meadel (eds.), Television Audiences Across the World: Deconstructing the Ratings Machine (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014).
See for example Patrick Rössler (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects (Walden: Wiley, 2017).
Adrian Athique, Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).
Claus Wilke, “Die Fernsehserie ‘Holocaust’ als Medienereignis,” Zeitgeschichte-online, March 2004, <http://www.zeitgeschichteonline.de/md=FSHolocaust-Wilke>.
Yitzhak Ahrens et al., Das Lehrstück “Holocaust:” Zur Wirkungsgeschichte eines Medienereignisses (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1982).
Just as guilty as everybody else in this regard: Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Television: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens, oh: Ohio University Press, 2006).
Todd Presner, “The Ethics of the Algorism: Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive,” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2016), 175–202.
See the interesting historicization of virtual reality cultures in Melanie Chan, Virtual Reality: Representations in Contemporary Media (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
“Using Social Media in Holocaust Education,” International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, April 2014, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/media-room/stories/new-social-media-guidelines. Accessed 22 October, 2016.
Eric Lichtblau, “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking”, New York Times, 1 March, 2013, accessed 23 October, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?src = me&ref = general&_r = 1.
In fact, a successful and ethically valuable game that follows the suggested trajectory already exists. That war of mine released by a Polish developer in 2014 lets players experience the struggle for survival of a group of civilians in a fictional besieged Eastern European city. Loosely based on the 1992–96 siege of Sarajewo the game goes a long way in creating empathy with war victims, see Clark, Justin. 2014. “Counting Body like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drum,” Gamespot, November 17, 2014. Accessed 25 January, 2017, https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/this-war-of-mine-review/1900-6415963/.