Commemorating from a distance: the digital transformation of Holocaust memory in times of COVID-19

Abstract

The severe restrictions on public life in many countries following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic specifically affected Holocaust memorials and museums in all parts of the world, especially in Europe and in Israel. These measures posed a significant challenge, because contemporary forms of Holocaust commemoration are particularly based on the personal experience of presence at museums and historical sites. In contrast to the experience of distancing in face of the COVID-19 pandemic, establishing the presence of the past is thus a crucial element of contemporary Holocaust commemoration. This article explores the relationship between presence and absence, proximity and distance, guided commemoration and online engagement by critically analyzing digital activities of Holocaust memorials and museums in response to the pandemic. It argues that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Holocaust memorials began experimenting with the potential of social media for Holocaust memory. These experiments finally accepted the ongoing generational change and reacted to significant previous shifts in media consumption that were already affecting Holocaust commemoration.

Remembering COVID-19: memory, crisis, and social media

“…Hoskins, 2011; Huyssen, 2000) and the term “connective memory” offered to describe real-time and instantaneous messaging between peers, groups, and social media networks. As digital-memory culture transitions toward social media (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020), researchers show how “new media technologies. .…”

“…To this extent, digital archives such as Picturing Lockdown portray the history of a collective through the work done by institutional mnemonic actors. In contrast, on Instagram, the users themselves become “agents of (social media) memory” (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020: 3) through their photographs and curatorship work via their labeling. Moreover, the multitude hashtags used on Instagram as keywords for categorization and labeling – besides increasing exposure to as large an audience as possible (Manovich, 2016) – point to the fluidity and unboundedness of the present and in so doing demonstrate a completely different framing of the crisis.…”

Laughing to forget or to remember? Anne Frank memes and mediatization of Holocaust memory

“…Such trivialization – or ‘banalization’ (Misztal, 2008) – of painful memories not only challenges the canonical narratives of mass atrocities, but also can potentially reinforce existing discriminatory practices by stimulating stigmatization of the Other (Droumpouki, 2013). These concerns become particularly pronounced considering the acceleration of translation of the analog commemoration models into the digital ones following the COVID pandemic (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2021) that leads to the past being increasingly interacted with in environments, which are less controlled by the memory institutions.…”

Transforming the Doctoral Defence: Remote-Access Technologies and Social Space

“…This created new pathways into our private lives by transforming private and even intimate domestic spaces into focal sites of work and sociality (Hardley and Richardson, 2021). The pandemic turned endeavours as variable as commemorating (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2021), teaching (Grandinetti, 2021), caring (Gunasekeran et al, 2021) and experiencing new places with locals (Norum and Polson, 2021) into something to be partaken from a distance via online platforms, video streams and teleconferencing.…”