“The Holocaust in the 21st Century: Digital Anxiety, transnational cosmopolitanism, and never again genocide without memory.” by Wulf Kansteiner

In this chapter of Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (2017) edited by Andrew Hoskins, historian Wulf Kansteiner tracks the growth of practices relating to digital memories of the Holocaust in relation to established memorial practices in Europe, drawing on examples from Germany and Poland. Of interest to Kansteiner is the difficulty of the video game industry, a huge market with a prominent role in the historical imagination of players, to make a meaningful contribution to Holocaust memory. On the one hand major franchises like Call of Duty and Wolfenstein make WWII games that avoid serious confrontation with the Holocaust, and on the other the more critically interesting games of smaller independent studios struggle to see the light of day.

Kansteiner locates the pressures that hold us in this “untenable” (112) situation both from within and without the gaming industry: Games are expensive to make and developers tend to fine-tune past successes rather than take risks, the fast pace of action games thriving “on simple plot structures that seem to preclude the kind of complex narrative explanations scholars use to account for events” (112). Further, “the gaming industry lacks auteur figures like Claude Lanzmann, Steven Spielberg, or Quentin Tarantino who can more easily transgress limits of historical taste” (112). But also, there is reluctance from within the establishment of Holocaust memory which has been slow to incorporate digital methods and remediations. The consequences are twofold. First, video games’ “extraordinary didactic potential remains untapped” (113), particularly in the medium’s ability to convey complicity to players (the article contains a wealth of resources on the relationship between video games and complicity). Secondly, there is an emergence of what media scholar Andrew Hoskins has postulated as “bifurcation of memory culture in an age of digitization” (113): Two memory cultures emerge, with corporate major game studios “formalized, institutionalized [and] regimented” while academic culture appears “emergent, confrontational, yet fragmented” in comparison (113).

The chapter speaks to how the European Holocaust memory establishment has, through various episodes and events, proven to be reluctant to incorporate digital forms of memorialization, including selfies, digital archives, interactive electronic museum exhibits, online broadcasting, augmented reality apps and social media. Simultaneously there have been various calls in this field to find ways to represent and share Holocaust memories in a consistent way and one that will not “trigger strategies of distanciation and even feelings of resentment towards the topic” (121). It is in the light of this need that Kansteiner ultimately locates the value of Holocaust memory embracing video games: “[to] 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 passive bystanders of the Holocaust of the 1940s and the relatively passive consumers of official Holocaust culture of the last four decades, a culture that taught consumers the virtues of remembering the victims (never again genocide w/h memory) but provided little meaningful guidance in preventing large-scale victimization in the first place (never again genocide).”

Author of this entry: Alie Tacq

Kansteiner, Wulf. “The Holocaust in the 21st Century: Digital Anxiety, Transnational Cosmopolitanism, and Never Again Genocide without Memory.” In Digital Memory Studies. Routledge, 2017.