Selfie Memorandum

There have been some delicte debates about the strange liaison between memorial sites and the common exercise of smartphone-selfies. Ariel Efraim Ashbels and Romm Lewkowicz for instance collected online a series of supposedly seductive profile pics for the gay dating-platform Grindr. You see muscular topless men posing within the Berlin-Shoah-Memorial’s field of stalae. Now this weekend, for the first time in those approximate ten years I live in the city, I visited Sachsenhausen, a concentration-camp about 40 minutes away from Berlin-Friedrichstraße, if you go by U-Bahn. The camp has a quite challenging history: It was not just a coordinating headquarter for all the big Nazi-camps all over Europe, but also a “Vorzeigelager”: In the late 30ies journalists from Sweden, England and other places were invited for supposedly comprehensive sight-seeing-tours. Later, after the fall of the Nazi-regime, the facilities were used by the Soviets, needless to say, with a different ideological and formal default: Sachsenhausen turned into Special Camp No. 7, a place to imprison Nazis and their supposed followers, kept up for about four more years since 1945. One of their famous inmates was Heinrich George, the former Tatort-star Götz George’s father. Walking up on the ramp beyond the gate (Arbeit Macht Frei) gave me goose bumps. I guess we generally tend to emotionally charge those places, and looking at it with a bit of self-critique, I’m asking myself if we do so in order to abide the idea, that we go back to normal in the moment we leave such sights. I was mostly alone on that field, yet surrounded by all sorts of international visitors groups. One of the barracks, which was used to anatomize dead bodies and later lay them out in two spacy cellar rooms in the same building made me feel nauseous and tired. Walking up from the cellar, I saw five girls in the age of like 20 posing next to the dissecting table, going into a huddle and holding up thumbs, one of them taking the inevitable pic, and whatever it was, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, I couldn’t resist to ask what the fuck they were doing there? The girls looked at me as if me myself was the anatomist and claimed that obviously they needed a proof they were here. Now I’m asking myself if I should have asked. I guess, cautious mysticism towards such places neither helps the people who died or the people that live and still have an interest to progress commemoration, nor does it help my own “coming to terms with”. It’s difficult for me to face this, but maybe the follow-up discussion of those girls’ Facebook-walls is even more fruitful concerning the Holocaust-memory than another publication in the reigns of people who claim to know. Anyway, thanks to Hadas, one of the friends who came with me that day, there’s some images of the place, which capture things no Smartphone would reach.

® Hadas Tapouchi