Digital culture of remembrance

Conversations with living contemporary witnesses are an integral part of educational work in the field of Holocaust education in Bavaria. When Holocaust witnesses and learners meet, it is less about acquiring or repeating declarative knowledge through the oral accounts of the eyewitnesses. Rather, historical knowledge should be expanded to include personal and emotional components by understanding the subjective experience of the historical event and its immediate and long-term human impact from an individual perspective [1]. This examination of oral, synchronous conversations and the autobiographical narrative can lead to a broadening of the listener’s perspective in the area of historical learning. In addition, the subsequent question and answer sessions offer pupils the opportunity to ask the eyewitnesses questions that are of concern to them and which may have remained unanswered in the school and extracurricular discussion of the Holocaust.

Interviews with living contemporary witnesses will no longer be possible in the foreseeable future, which is why it is necessary to look for alternative ways of making the memories of survivors accessible to future generations in contemporary media formats even after their death [2]. It is also important to preserve the interactive element that comes to the fore in conversations with contemporary witnesses, especially in the question-and-answer interaction. Digital media allow these eyewitness interviews to be imitated, at least to some extent.

Between 2018 and 2020, the Munich project LediZ (Learning with Digital Testimonies) developed three interactive digital testimonies from survivors Eva Umlauf, Zilli Schmidt and Abba Naor. In contrast to simply watching videotaped eyewitness accounts, the interactive testimonies allow users to ask questions to the digital likeness of the survivor by voice input and receive a suitable video clip (if available) in response. These videos are taken from a videotaped interview conducted in advance, in which the survivors answered around 1000 questions on various topics and stages of their lives [3]. When producing the testimonies, the developers made sure that the answers were not generated from the video material in the subsequent digital interaction, but were retained unchanged. The assignment of suitable answers to the questions asked takes place within a few seconds with the help of automated speech recognition and processing. Answers incorrectly assigned by the system can be corrected retrospectively and the accuracy of the AI-supported system used can be continuously improved. This digital question-and-answer format can break through the linearity of the narrative, as is the case with traditional videotaped eyewitness accounts, for example, and questioners can decide for themselves which biographical section or personal aspect they would like to learn more about. However, it is also possible (and useful) to first listen to the eyewitnesses’ stories as a longer, coherent narrative. The use of interactive digital testimonies can therefore be based on the two-part process of analog eyewitness interviews [4].

The current project at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with contemporary witness Ernst Otto Krakenberger, whose memories are to be made accessible to users in the form of a chat interaction, represents a further possibility for the digital indexing of survivors’ accounts. A special feature of this project is that the answers are not sent to the questioner as a text message as in a traditional chat interaction, but are output in audio format as in voice messages. This preserves paraverbal information (such as intonation, laughter and sighs), which could only be realized in a more distanced and sometimes cheesy way (for example, through the use of emojis) in a purely verbal response in text form. From a scientific perspective, this form of memory medium is also interesting because it can provide information on whether the interaction – and in particular the questions – changes in comparison to the interaction with the interactive digital testimonies, in which the survivors’ likenesses are permanently visible.

The virtual reality application “Eva Umlauf – her testimony”, finalized in 2023, takes a different approach, allowing a look at the meta-level of testimony. For this medium, Holocaust survivor Eva Umlauf was recorded volumetrically as she recounted various episodes from her life. These photorealistic 3D recordings were embedded together with other media content (photographs, excerpts from earlier video interviews, references to the autobiography) in three-dimensionally modeled environments. The result is a virtual reality experience in which learners can engage with the long-lasting effects of the Holocaust and the decades-long development of testimony and its media framing and design through a combination of biographical and historical information. It is not possible to ask questions here. Instead, users can move through the media space of experience by discovering, selecting and comparing.

Comparability with analogue phenomena

In particular, the interactive digital testimonies of the two contemporary witnesses Eva Umlauf and Abba Naor are based on conversations with living witnesses, such as those that take place or have taken place at schools or memorial sites. This process begins with an autobiographical account by the survivor about their life before, during and after the Holocaust. Afterwards, the audience can talk to the survivor and ask individual questions.

One advantage of using interactive digital testimonies can be that learners can ask questions anonymously and in a private environment without them being able to be traced back to them as a person. Furthermore, the questioners do not have to fear that they will upset or offend the eyewitness with their questions, which can lead to a freer form of interaction and open up opportunities to ask questions that would not be possible in a real-life encounter.

In contrast to the analog interviews with contemporary witnesses, the answer options of the digital testimonies are limited, as their answers originate from (videotaped) interviews and are played back in unchanged form in response to a corresponding question. On the one hand, this is intended to ensure the credibility of the content conveyed by the media; on the other hand, the answers played back are always linked to the point in time at which the interview was conducted. These forms of testimony can therefore no longer provide answers to questions about later historical events, such as the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. It also shows that learners are often dependent on a moderator to clarify the questions when interacting with these media forms – also due to a lack of historical knowledge. The answers, which cannot be adapted to the individual age and knowledge level of the person asking the question, may also need to be contextualized by an accompanying person. Like the recorded questions, the media are also relatively rigid in their design and can only be adapted to media changes and the media and interaction habits of users to a limited extent.

Although the interactive digital testimonies are based on analog eyewitness interviews, they are not intended as a substitute for them, but rather as part of a larger media network around the autobiography of the respective Holocaust survivor.

Social relevance

As time goes by and family members no longer have a connection to the Holocaust and the Second World War, it is important to find new and contemporary ways to make the personal experiences of contemporary witnesses accessible to learners in a media-appropriate form. Comparatively new media formats such as interactive digital 3D testimonies and chatbots allow pupils to ask individual questions and thus find a personal approach to the topic and expand their existing knowledge. In addition, these media forms should always be seen as part of a media network and can therefore serve as a starting point for engaging with other media (books, films, etc.) in this network, which in the case of the VR experience is already inherent in the medium itself. Dealing with and remembering the Holocaust should sensitize learners to the consequences that exclusion and discrimination can have. Furthermore, pupils should be encouraged to actively stand up against discrimination in the analog and digital world as responsible citizens. Both are fundamental educational goals. In order to support teachers and educators in this task, a free handout has been developed that contains numerous suggestions and recommendations for the use of the digital media described here and others [5].

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