Authenticity and the Once and Future Self: "Dancing Auschwitz," Collective Memory and New Media

People strive to authentically express themselves, but few face this struggle, as contemporary Germans and Jews do, against the ever-present past of the Holocaust. In summer 2010, controversy erupted over “Dancing Auschwitz,” a YouTube video of a Jewish family dancing at various Holocaust remembrance sites. This novel joyful expression defied the often lugubrious traditional narrative of remembrance. Some feared it trivialized one of the world’s greatest tragedies and undermined the cultural awareness sparked by more traditional remembrances. The video, part of a triptych by a Jewish Australian artist and her Holocaust survivor father, raised questions of narrative authority and of the social media generation’s capacity to sustain Holocaust remembrance. More importantly it provides an opportunity to examine remembrance in terms of contemporary identity using social media. In order to explore how people make meaning online, particularly by socially constructing remembrance and collective identities, the study looks at a single iteration of the “Dancing Auschwitz” triptych subsequent to the original January 2010 post. Using an interpretive discourse analysis, the author analyzed 2,121 comments across the four YouTube pages. Despite some concerns for respecting historical identities, people ultimately construct and evaluate remembrance through its relationship to and/or representation of contemporary identities. Traditional remembrance is passive and overly reliant on well-worn narratives that impede agency and infringe on the self-determination of identity construction for Opfer and Täter descendents. Germans in particular respond in one of two unhealthy ways to guilt and shame of their collective identity: pushing those emotions to excess or resisting them vigorously, thus stoking resentment. The inheritors of the Opfer and Täter identities implemented three forms of remediation: role switching, redefinition, and disassociation. The author concludes that /Virtual memorials can enhance the remembrance experience by cultivating fluid, interactive and creative spaces that encourage high degrees of participation, collaboration and self-expression. Thus, they can open new avenues of communication and expression that allow participants, especially Germans and Jews, to remediate their identities. Despite the obstacles (e.g. destructive identity forces, commercial culture, and temporalities of social media trends), technology ultimately aids humanity’s deep-seated desire to remember.