Dachau from a Distance: The Liberation during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Coinciding directly with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted plans for important milestone memorial services and dramatically decreased physical visitor numbers. Institutions responded by offering their content in digital formats, which as Ebbrecht-Hartmann’s study highlights, resulted in the “transferring, transitioning and transforming” of digital Holocaust commemoration online (2020:1103).

Taking The Liberation application as its principal case study, this chapter considers how the Dachau memorial site reacted to the restrictions and invited the public to engage with the site from a distance. Drawing parallels with rephotography, this research posits that the user is invited to actively uncover historical images and to reread and recode them from the perspective of the present. Thinking about interaction as a form of performance (Nash 2022), then, this work critically explores the possibilities of digital user experience as a mode of Holocaust memory practice at a temporal-spatial remove.

The full chapter is available here.