Virtual Holocaust Memory

The Holocaust was the defining cataclysm of modernity. Now, more than three quarters of a century later, the immersive, interactive technologies of the digital age are dramatically refashioning our memory of that genocide. Virtual Holocaust Memory offers the first comprehensive account of a unique historical juncture, as twenty-first century digital culture meets the edge of living Holocaust memory. The book considers a range of projects that are being developed by museums, archives, businesses, and educational organizations in the USA and Europe, including interactive video testimony, Virtual Reality films, Augmented Reality apps, museum installations, and online exhibitions. Drawing on an original conceptual framework that incorporates connective memory, palimpsestic testimony, and a notion of 'truthfulness' first applied to testimonial writing by the survivor Charlotte Delbo, this groundbreaking book argues that the value of virtual Holocaust memory--that is to say its truthfulness--will ultimately come to rest on the connections that it establishes across a complex set of subject positions. These range from 'new bystanders', who encounter Holocaust memory from a position of relative safety, to the traumatized victims whose extreme physical and psychological experiences made communicating so difficult in the first place.

Matthew Boswell works at the interface of academic research and the creative and cultural industries. He is currently the Programme Manager of media.cymru, a groundbreaking consortium of 23 partners driving sustainable, inclusive, economic growth in the Cardiff Capital Region's media sector. He is the author of Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film (2012).

Antony Rowland has published nine books, including Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry (2022), The Future of Testimony (co-edited with Jane Kilby) (2014) and Holocaust Poetry (2005). He received an Eric Gregory award from the Society of Authors in 2000 and is currently a member of the Higher Education Committee for the English Association.

Introduction

Part I: Interactive Video Testimony
Chapter One: Entering Dimensions in Testimony
Chapter Two: Ghosting the Museum
Chapter Three: Witness in the Light Stage

Part II: Reading the Virtual
Chapter Four: Virtual Landscapes
Chapter Five: The Virtual Anne Frank
Chapter Six: The Topography of Terror and Resistance to the Virtual

Conclusion

Bibliography
Index