Holocaust Education in Cyber Space?

In my lecture, I want to discuss how the testimonies from Steven Spielberg’s “Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Archive” challenge Holocaust Education in Germany on a didactical and educational level.

Videographed testimonies from survivors of the Shoah that are available online are perceived by recipients in a specific way. In order to describe this perception, Aleida Assmann and Juliane Brauer coined the term virtual meeting (“virtuelle Begegnung”). But does this “virtual meeting” work for the 21^st century digital natives, whom we have to teach about the Shoa?

I will not only refer to the situation we are already in right now but I will also discuss the future of ‘meeting’ survivors. The “New Dimensions in Testimony” Project by the USC Shoah Foundation aims at creating 3D interactive projections of survivors which will be able to react to questions by using voice recognition software. We will have a look at students’ reactions to these new technical possibilities.

Based on my research conducted in German schools, I will raise the question whether the use of digital testimonies (whether in 2D or 3D) works for all students of coming generations where no survivors are left to testify. From the data I collected, I will hint at some specific difficulties with students at lower secondary educational level, especially in ‘multicultural’/ diverse classrooms. For this purpose, I will provide evidence from qualitative data as well as from questionnaires and we will have a look at students’ products which learners produced when working with testimonies.