New Ecologies of Holocaust Memory? Hypermediation, Overrepresentation, Discursivation

IN A SURVEY COMMISSIONED on the occasion of 2018 Holocaust Memorial Day, the Jewish Claims Conference found substantial gaps in Holocaust knowledge among the adult US population. The subgroup with the least knowledge comprises so-called millennials, that is, people in their early twenties and thirties, among whom 66 percent did not know what Auschwitz was. The situation appears no different in the former perpetrator societies, as has been shown for both Germany and Austria. Interestingly, 89 percent of those consulted in the 2018 study say that they have “definitely heard about the Holocaust”; while the knowledge of historical details is thus shrinking, the influence of the Holocaust as a cultural icon and reference point seems undiminished. This suggestion is confirmed by the abundance of Holocaust analogies, comparisons, and images in contemporary culture, which range from frequent Nazi comparisons in the political arena to Holocaust allusions in the context of a number of hotly contested yet widely disparate issues such as animal rights, abortion rights, climate change, or migrants’ rights.

This paradoxical mélange of an abundance of images, analogies, and references, on the one hand, and a dwindling factual knowledge of the events, on the other hand, might well be typical of Holocaust memory in the new millennium. The time period since 2000, marked by the dying out of the eyewitness and survivor generation, the hypermediated dynamics of the internet age, and the increasing globalization of memory cultures, has brought about major shifts in Holocaust remembrance and representation that both connect to and differ from earlier, postunification discourses. Some of these changes are mostly quantitative, such as the disappearance of the survivor and eyewitness generation that marks the transition from embodied forms of Holocaust remembrance, based on firsthand accounts, face-to-face encounters, and intrafamilial transmission, to an increasingly mediatized, institutionalized, and globalized cultural memory of the events. As Kirstin Frieden has pointed out, the media and other institutions of cultural memory play a crucial role in this process: “Durch den Wegfall von persönlichen, familiären Tradierungen und einer zugleich nicht unwesentlichen zeitlichen und emotionalen Distanz zu den historischen Ereignissen werden die kulturellen Medien und ihre Deutungen diskursbestimmend.”