Holocaust selfies?
http://www.jspace.com/news/disturbing-trend-worst-holocaust-selfies/
These people are stupid and naïve. But they aren’t a “disturbing trend.” And I am not outraged. How can I be if they are taking pictures in the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas? I mean, the place is strange and the history it references is horrible. Far less horrible, yet recently very annoying, is the ugly history about the making of this monument. A friend aptly commented that it “sprang out of a cesspool of revisionism and stupidity.” The story is not worth rehashing here. But now the monument exists and we as a people seem to take a lot of teenagers there on tours, so this issue of selfies taken there is not going away anytime soon.
But should I be outraged because this is a sacred space? Where in Germany can I take a sexy selfie without stepping on the Holocaust? There really is no place where that atrocity is not part of the landscape. You are welcome to go to a KZ to get a sense of what happened, but again, this is not the place where it happened. Try the new data on for size: 42,500 concentration camps, killing centers, ghettos and detention facilities in Europe from 1933 to 1945. You think you can find a place on the European continent not touched by that sort of architecture?[1] One monument that takes that dispersed nature of the atrocity seriously is the project of the Stolpersteine, stumbling blocks. It is interesting because it is local, viral, flexible and integrated into the everyday. That’s a memorial as a mnemonic tool and it works because it is at a human scale. There is nothing at a human scale about the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas. It is part of an “old school” memorialization: big and monolithic. Fine, you say, but genocide is not at a human scale, it’s often part of a machinery of death. Yes. So the monument that symbolizes aspects of this genocide should also possess these inhuman qualities.
And so that’s what we get: a sea of concrete coffin/boxes as far as the eye can see. You cannot easily grasp the size of the memorial’s space from the outside. So you feel compelled to walk inside it and soon the concrete blocks around you become more ominous and large and you soon lose your sense of orientation. You get deeper and the ground becomes uneven and you lose your balance. If you are with a group, you usually lose track of them in the labyrinth, too. These physical sensations are intentional of course, they are meant to simulate certain human experiences in the confusion and terror of genocide. And somehow real life is suspended and we aren’t supposed to do stupid things like take selfies. But because I don’t ever want to probably does not make me any more moral with regard to genocide than those who do.
And anyway, it’s bothersome to me that one thinks memorials like this one need to recreate the “feeling” of the Holocaust, as if this is even possible. Or that the spirits of the dead can be found in any random place, even one like this which has Stelen that look so much like graves that people walk gingerly through them as if they fear they are walking on the dead. If we take the desire to “recreate the feeling” of the Holocaust for teenagers who visit monuments to its most absurd end, aren’t we confronted with, I don’t know, making a theme park with a petting zoo with snakes for the little kids? A roller coaster with no windows that lasts for days in which you are very, very crowded by other people? I am going to stop here because this line of thinking gets ugly and irresponsible.
So no, I can’t be concerned with decorum at a monument. I am not sure I can even worry about decorum at a KZ anymore, not after last summer. Because it was then, at Buchenwald, that I discovered there’s a café on site that’s not all that bad. Of course I felt strange when I ate there. But human life goes on, including our mundane human need for food and the toilet. If I deny myself these things after four hours touring the concentration camp monument (with students), what have I accomplished, really? Not eating (and forcing one’s students not to eat) does nothing that reverses the hell of the concentration camp. And still I didn’t exactly feel morally correct doing it. I ate and ran back to the bus. If one of my students took a picture of me eating at the café at Buchenwald last summer, I hope the hashtag was #sheateandranbacktothebus cause that’s what I did.