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Graduate School of Humanities
Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture
MA Thesis Heritage and Memory Studies
Digital Landmarks and Memoryscapes
The spatial connection between Pokémon Go and
places of Holocaust memory
Name student: Jelmer Peter, BA Student number: 10438785
E-mail address: jelmerpeter@gmail.com Submission date: 31st January 2018 Word count: 20.692
Supervisor: Dr. I. A. M. (Ihab) Saloul Second Reader: Prof. dr. R. B. (Robin) Boast
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Abstract
This research examines how digital media and technological developments have become intertwined with the production and transmission of, and engagement with cultural memory. I analyze the spatial connection between the location-based game Pokémon Go and places that deal with the Holocaust. In two case studies I engage their digital representation in Pokémon Go by developing the concepts digital landmark and digital memoryscape. These are digital representations that serve as an extension, thereby adding context to, and expanding the visibility and accessibility of, the real-world places they represent.
At the same time,for being a gaming experience, Pokémon Go goes against any conception of the Holocaust. This has resulted in the game’s contestation at, and exclusion from a variety of memory spaces. Therefore, in my concluding section I stress that the concept digital landmark should be used beyond Pokémon Go as a valuable interpretative tool for new spatial connections between digitality and sites of memory. The aim of this research is to develop a toolset necessary to understand the formation of memory in a digital age.
Key words: Holocaust, memory studies, digital memory, Pokémon Go, digital
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Acknowledgements
As my time as a student at the University of Amsterdam is about to come to an end, I would like to thank the people who made my studies and, in particular, the MA Heritage and Memory Studies, not only a pleasant, but an enriching and valuable life experience. But let me first turn to the MA thesis that you all now have in front of you. I think it is silly that while writing a thesis in humanities, a student should find all answers to his (or her) research questions in his (or her) own head. This was certainly not how I did it. Besides my own observations, this research draws its strength from a series of interactions with people to whom I owe all my gratitude.
First I should like to thank my academic supervisor Ihab Saloul for his supportive and critical comments on my work. Ihab, thank you for helping me to structure and clarify my arguments, making this thesis much nicer to read. I would also like to thank Robin Boast for finding the time to be second reader. Thank you Zuzanna Dziuban for your guidance during my research project in L’viv; it gave shape to some essential ideas for this research. And Ewa Stanczyk, for your willingness to discuss my work over a cup of coffee: your suggestions were most helpful.
Finally, I am very grateful to all my family, friends, and fellow students for being able to deal with my never-ending enthusiasm for this research. I will not mention you individually, but I think you know who you are. And yes, I am aware that a connection between Pokémon Go and the Holocaust seems rather peculiar, however you were always interested in what I had to say. For this I am grateful. Your reactions and remarks are always a valuable contribution to my work.
To all, thank you! Jelmer
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Table of Content
Foreword………...…1
1. Introductory Chapter………....7
1.1. Division of Chapters……….7
1.2. What is Pokémon Go?...10
1.3. Methods………14
1.3.1. Digital Site Analysis………..14
1.3.2. Annual Reports and Other Sources………16
1.4. Theories and Concepts………18
1.4.1. Digitality and Memory………18
1.4.2. Digital Landmarks……….22
1.4.3. Digital Memoryscapes………24
2. Data Analysis Chapter 1………27
2.1. ‘No Pokémon Go in Auschwitz’………...27
2.2. Bełżec and Trawniki……….29
2.3. Holocaust Frameworks………...33
2.4. Musealized Spaces……….36
2.5. Partial Conclusion………..39
3. Data Analysis Chapter 2………43
3.1. Uses of Jewish Absence………...43
3.2. Amsterdam and the JCQ………..45
3.3. Digital Landmarks………..50
3.4. The JCQ as Digital Memoryscape………..53
3.5. Partial Conclusion………..55
4. Concluding Chapter………..59
4.1. Beyond Pokémon Go……….61
4.2. Beyond the Holocaust?...64
Literature………67
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Look, what I want is to be fully present in my life – to be really
where you are, contemporary with yourself in your life, giving
full attention to the world, which includes you. You are not the
world, the world is not identical to you, but you’re in it and
paying attention to it. That’s what a writer does – a writer
pays attention to the world. Because I’m very against this
solipsistic notion that you find it all in your head. You don’t,
there really is a world that’s there whether you’re in it or not.
And if you have a tremendous experience, to me it’s much
easier to connect your writing to what is actually happening
to you rather than to try to retreat from it…
Susan Sontag, the complete Rolling Stone interview
1
Foreword
When the Pokémon Company released Pokémon Go and the game went ‘viral,’ I, together with many of my friends, kept up with the hype and started playing the game. Pokémon had been a cultural phenomenon from our childhood. One could say that we started playing Pokémon Go out of childhood nostalgia. Or perhaps it really was a fun and interesting game to play? Nevertheless out on the streets we went.
As a location-based game, Pokémon Go can best be played in urbanized places; cities are integrated in detail in Google Maps, whereas rural areas are sometimes not sufficiently or not at all resembled in the web mapping service of Google. The success and availability of location-based games such as Pokémon go is found upon virtual and web mapping devices such as Google Maps. Furthermore in cities there are many recognizable landmarks that may have digital representations as ‘Pokéstops’ - these Pokéstops are crucial for the game to evolve (I will elaborate on the characteristics of the game(play) in sections 1.2 and 1.3). Because many people play Pokémon Go in and around city centers, these places know a multiplicity of landmarks virtually represented as Pokéstops in Pokémon Go. The selection of these Pokéstops is random. They can vary from clandestine graffiti art and street signs to well-known landmarks in cities. Among these Pokéstops are often museums, memorials and monuments, and other historical landmarks. Even more specifically, as I found out while playing the game for one of the first times, a number of these Pokéstops resembled places and landmarks that were dealing with the Holocaust. The first Pokéstops I encountered that digitally represented such kind of memorials in Amsterdam were well-known: The Nationaal Monument [National Monument] on Dam Square, or the Auschwitz Monument in the Wertheim Park. These are both familiar landmarks in Amsterdam. But the Pokéstops in Pokémon Go are spread all over the city. They represent not only famous landmarks, but also landmarks not directly visible to the eye. One day it happened to me that, while playing Pokémon Go on my way to the local
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supermarket, I discovered a Pokéstop representing an engraving in the pavement two blocks from my house that I had never seen before. It was a poem that read: ‘Razzia in the Beethovenstraat. Amsterdam 1943-1945;’
Violently There were also parents, the trucks arrived. no Jewish Council
They brought an end to Death stood waiting
the childish existence. for the children in the street. Their eyes big Now 55 years ago
free of tears it stays with me
they sat neatly How my friends disappeared the smallest up front. while I stood by.1
Hannie Ostendorf Voyies, 2006.
A Digital Historical Sensation
The engraving in the pavement represented the actual location where in 1943 a Razzia of Jewish children had taken place. This notion of place provoked to me an unexpectedly strong spatial connection with the past. It was a moment in which I realized that the engraving, that I had discovered on my way to the supermarket, commemorated the exact location from where, seventy five years ago, children were rounded up, put on trucks and deported to their deaths in most likely Sobibor and Auschwitz. Indeed, the origins of this thesis are undeniably subjective, deriving from personal experience. The Razzia Poem and its location felt as a direct connection with the past. Only thus by the means of
1 For original text see appendix. I owe many thanks to Stephanie van de Bunt for translating this poem from Dutch into English.
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subjectivity I can explain the historical awareness that overtook me. I should clarify my experience by using Johan Huizinga’s concept of historical sensation:
There is in all historical awareness a most momentous component, that is most suitably characterized by the term historical sensation. One could also speak of historical contact… This contact with the past, that is accompanied by the absolute conviction of complete authenticity and truth, can be provoked by a line from a chronicle, by an engraving, a few sounds of an old song… Historical sensation does not present itself to us as a re-living, but as an understanding that is closely akin to the understanding of music, or, rather, of the world by music. (Huizinga, 1938, in Confino, 2012, p. 13)
I am well aware that it demanded of me, the passerby, a certain sensitivity and interest in history and the Holocaust in order to experience a historical sensation. Yet what interests me the most is that the ‘digital historical sensation’ would not have taken place had I not played Pokémon Go in the first place. The conclusion to be drawn is that the contact with the past was only triggered because of the location-based gameplay of Pokémon Go. Despite the engraving being located in close vicinity to my home, on a route I take on a regular basis, I had never witnessed it before. Only by playing Pokémon go, I was able to find the poem engraved in the pavement. Indeed, I had to look for the plaque that was already well visible on the screen of my phone, as part of a video game, nevertheless I had yet to discover in the ‘real world.’
My discovery of the Razzia Poem was two dimensional, since it took place in both a physical and a digital space. I discovered it in the digital dimension, and subsequently went looking for it in the physical dimension. Pokémon Go thus exemplifies how digital and virtual spaces relate to and interact with places that deal with the memory of the Holocaust. I argue that people who play Pokémon Go inevitably become entangled with the dynamics and various representations of memory. Yet what exactly happens when a memorial site to the Holocaust becomes visual in a digital space, as part of a gaming experience? What are the consequences of the connection between a
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game and a place that deals with a mass mediated trauma? Can digital dimensions increase the visibility of places where trauma took place, but where the memory of that trauma is contested or even absent? In such a case, can digitality boost historical awareness of events such as the Holocaust? In this thesis I seek to engage in the questions that arise when new technological and digital developments become intertwined with places of memory, influencing the way in which we perceive the past.
Visit to Poland
My first observations of the connection between Pokémon Go and places of Holocaust memory took place in Amsterdam, the city where I live. After my discovery of the Razzia Poem I went looking for other monuments, memorials and landmarks to find out whether they too are digitally represented in the gameplay of Pokémon Go. While mapping and collecting all these landmarks, I started to develop an idea for a thesis project. This collection of digital landmarks in Amsterdam, especially those located in the city’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, will be the case study in the thirds chapter of this piece.
Another personal experience resulted in a second case study. This research project is part of the MA Heritage and Memory Studies at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Last October me and my fellow students, together with Prof. R. van der Laarse (UvA) and dr. Z. Dziuban (UvA), undertook a field excursion to Poland and Ukraine.2 Because the idea of writing a thesis on Pokémon Go and places of Holocaust memory was already more concrete by the time we left for Poland, I made use of the possibility to visit a series of former concentration and extermination camps in Southeast Poland. Before visiting Bełżec, Trawniki and Majdanek I had already read about Auschwitz excluding Pokémon Go from its museum and memorial space. Now visiting other former camps, I was able to compare these places with Auschwitz, where the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum successfully requested the removal of
2
To learn more about our research project in Poland and Ukraine, visit www.heritageandmemorystudies.com.
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Pokémon Go. My observations at Bełżec, Trawniki and Majdanek, and subsequent interpretations of these sites in comparison to Auschwitz, shape the case study of the second chapter of this research.
The two case studies of in this thesis are dealing with places of Holocaust memory and their digital representation in Pokémon Go. In order to analyze the connection between the game and any relevant memory site, I had to visit it myself. This is a stipulation to my research: This thesis thus only includes the places that I visited, observed and interpreted; and where I was able – or unable – to play Pokémon Go.
Image 1 I took this photo on the corner of the
Beethovenstraat and the Corellistraat. Here I discovered the Razzia Poem. The engraving is visible in the center of this picture.
(Peter, J., 2017).
Image 2 The Razzia Poem as a digital
landmark in Pokémon Go. (source: Pokémon Go).
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1. Introductory Chapter
1.1.
Division of Chapters
As a starting point I will explain what Pokémon is, and specifically what novelty the location-based and augmented reality gaming features in Pokémon Go bring. Throughout this thesis Pokémon Go will serve as a main analytical and conceptual tool. It is thus important to gain some basic knowledge of the Pokémon franchise, its origins and how it turned into a global cultural phenomenon. In the section ‘what is Pokémon Go?,’ I will explain some basic concepts of Pokémon Go so that the ignorant reader will be able to cope, content wise, with the case studies included in this thesis. Thereafter I will explain my (selection of) methods. I use Pokémon Go as the main methodological tool of this research. In the Methods section I elaborate on the way in which I collect and analyze the Pokéstops in Pokémon Go, developing and explaining the concept digital landmark. In the methods section I will also name the other sources and methods that I use in my analysis.
The subsequent part of this introductory chapter then will consist of
the theoretical frames and concepts that are shaping the core of this thesis. Starting off with how historical manifestations of digital media played a key role in disseminating Holocaust memories into a transnational and global dimension, I will signal that current technological developments are still of ongoing influence on the way in which we reconstruct the past. Being one of the latest developments in gaming, - and as I will set out in the ‘what is Pokémon Go’ section, because of the location-based and augmented reality gameplay - Pokémon Go becomes entangled with the dynamics of memory on places that are related to the Holocaust. Therefore in this thesis digitality and memory meet at the spatial level. I will critically engage the connection between Pokémon Go - a digital space - and real-world places and analyze the therefrom deriving contestations, limitations, and potentialities by using the two main concepts of this thesis, which I will call digital landmarks and digital
memoryscapes. In the data chapters that follow I will apply the main concepts in
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The second chapter (‘Data Analysis Chapter 1’) elaborates on a series of former concentration camps and their digital representation in Pokémon Go. Evidently, an immediate problem of contesting narratives arises on such places of Holocaust memory. Pokémon Go is a video game. (video) Gaming is a practice or activity that one engages in for amusement or fun. This purpose of amusement or fun that is inherent to gaming stands in stark contrast to places of Holocaust memory; sites that remember the act and victims of mass murder. Furthermore, often museums, memorials and former concentration camps that carry the memory of the Holocaust, have an extensive educational and commemorative agenda. A gaming experience does not fit the narratives present at places such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the removal of Pokémon Go was an inevitable consequence. The second chapter starts with a site analysis of Pokémon Go at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Trawniki, and Majdanek. It will elaborate on how some of these places are included as digital memoryscapes, whereas others have become excluded from the location-based gameplay of Pokémon Go, laying bare, as I will argue, different frameworks of Holocaust memory. Then, in this chapter I articulate that Pokémon Go reveals the way in which some Holocaust sites are valued more than others. I will critically engage this differentiation, by arguing that Pokémon Go shows how musealized spaces that embody a strong moral narrative of the Holocaust have the power to control spaces, not only in the real world, but also in the digital dimension.
In the third chapter (‘Data Analysis Chapter 2’) I will analyze the Jewish Cultural Quarter (JCQ) in Amsterdam and I will look at the city’s efforts to revitalize the traces of its Jewish culture and heritage, in absence of its Jewish community. Digital landmarks in Pokémon Go have the potential to bring to the fore monuments, and other significant landmarks that are dealing with Jewish heritage or the Holocaust in Amsterdam. the city has made successful efforts to attract cultural tourism by promoting its Jewish heritage. In the absence of their Jewish communities, the post-war European city uses a virtual Jewishness for new self-identifications and cultural tourism. In this chapter I engage the
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question whether Pokémon Go users are able to experience the uses of Jewish absence in the JCQ in Amsterdam through playing Pokémon Go. The digital landmarks increase the visibility and accessibility of the manifestations of different uses of Jewish absence in Amsterdam, yet they do so to an audience that is not initially interested in the narrative established by the JCQ. It is my aim here to find out what the possibilities and limitations are of digital extensions of real-world memory spaces, caused by Pokémon Go, in the JCQ in Amsterdam.
The concluding chapter will merely be an exploration of how digital extensions of real-world landmarks can contribute to the dissemination, accessibility and visibility of cultural memory. this chapter will name and briefly interpret new attempts to use digital tools in extension of physical places in order to provide context and shape new narratives behind (established) memorials, museums, trauma sites or other places of significance that deal with the Holocaust. However, this chapter is different from the previous ones in that it is not primarily preoccupied with the acute questions and various problematizations that emerge when Pokémon Go - a video game - becomes entangled with places of Holocaust memory. Whereas the former chapters are dealing foremost with Pokémon Go, this chapter goes beyond the limits that are inherent to the game. Nevertheless I will use the concepts that have developed through this thesis, and that serve as its main conceptual tools:
digital landmarks and memoryscapes. In this concluding chapter I suggest to
think beyond Pokémon Go and the Holocaust, as well as return to the starting point of this study; how new digital technologies contribute to the production and transmission of, and engagement with memory in a spatial dimension.
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1.2 What is Pokémon Go?
Before I start my thesis it is necessary to explain what Pokémon Go is. In this brief explanatory section about Pokémon Go I give answer to a set of questions that are key for understanding the game’s relation to this thesis. What is Pokémon? What is Pokémon Go? How is it played? What are the specific characteristics of the game(play)? What digital novelty does the game bring? Why can Pokémon be lined among some of the latest technological developments? Again, this section of my thesis limits itself to the set of questions about Pokémon Go that are mentioned above, questions that are nevertheless key to understanding the relationship between Pokémon Go and places that deal with Holocaust memory.
Pokémon is a media franchise around a set of fictional species (called Pokémon) and is managed by The Pokémon Company, a sister to video game company Nintendo. The Pokémon franchise began with a series of video games in the early-nineteen nineties. Nowadays it spans not only video games, but also trading card games, animated TV-series and movies, comic books, and toys. Moreover, Pokémon has become a globally known cultural phenomenon. the basic concept of Pokémon is as follows:
Tajiri first thought of Pokémon, albeit with a different concept and name, around 1989, when the Game Boy was first released. The concept of the Pokémon universe, in both the video games and the general fictional world of Pokémon, stems from the hobby of insect collecting, a popular pastime which Pokémon executive director Satoshi Tajiri enjoyed as a child. Players are designated as Pokémon Trainers and have three general goals: to complete the regional Pokédex by collecting all of the available Pokémon species found in the fictional region where a game takes place, to complete the national Pokédex by transferring Pokémon from other regions, and to train a team of powerful Pokémon from those they have caught to compete against teams owned by other Trainers so they may eventually win the Pokémon League and become the regional Champion. These themes of collecting, training, and battling are present
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in almost every version of the Pokémon franchise, including the video games, the anime and manga series, and the Pokémon Trading Card Game.3
Indeed, the first and main objective of Pokémon, as the catchphrase of the game (‘catch ‘em all!’) suggests, is to collect all Pokémon in your Pokédex [“Pokémon-index”]. In order to catch a Pokémon, ‘trainers’ need to throw a
Pokéball at it. The catching and collecting of Pokémon is also a major part of the
gameplay in the location-based augmented reality game Pokémon Go, the latest extension of the Pokémon franchise.
in Spring 2016, The Pokémon Company in collaboration with software development company Niantic, released Pokémon Go. Within months the free-to-play game became a global phenomenon, with over 500 million downloads. As I mentioned above, Pokémon Go is a location-based augmented reality game. What is ‘location-based’ and ‘augmented reality’ gaming? Let me start with explaining the latter phenomenon, augmented reality. The definition of augmented reality in the Oxford English Dictionary is: ‘A technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world, thus providing a composite view.’4 Pokémon Go includes an augmented reality, or AR-mode in the gameplay. The AR-mode uses the camera and gyroscope of the player’s mobile phone to display images of Pokémon as if they are present in real life [image, 3, p. 13]. Augmented reality connects Pokémon with a physical dimension that is visible on the camera-mode of the user’s smartphone. As a result, a digital space becomes visually intertwined with a physical dimension.
Second, Pokémon Go is a location-based game. This means several things. First, Pokémon Go includes a geographically accurate map and specific, real-world locations and landmarks. By using a smartphone’s GPS-location, the
3 I took this summarizing text from Wikipedia. While aware of the problematic nature of this source, I think it gives a good overview on the concerned topic. Furthermore, I have not been able to find any academic sources on the Pokémon franchise, therefore this source is the best alternative possible, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon, consulted at 11-22-2017.
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gameplay is always connected to real-world locations. This characteristic of location-based gaming, connects the game, a digital space, with the real-world, and physical places it represents [image 4, p. 13]. As a result, players of Pokémon Go need to explore real-world surroundings in search for Pokémon they can catch and collect. As Raj puts it, ‘the technology has the ability to recognize the locations of historical monuments, public museums, and other important establishments and will place objectives nearby to encourage visitation.’ (Raj, 2016, p. 1195) These locations integrated in Pokémon Go are called Pokéstops. Pokéstops are in-game resemblances of actual places, such as monuments and museums present in the real-world. Players can gather items such as Pokéballs from these Pokéstops. In order to play Pokémon Go, that is catching Pokémon and visiting Pokéstops, players must undertake physical activity, going out of their homes and walk through the cities and landscapes that are represented in Pokémon Go. The Pokéstops are a vital part of the gameplay; without visiting Pokéstops, a player can run out of resources necessary to play the game. Location-based gameplay cannot be played from a fixed location; it encourages active participation and visitation of places it integrated in its gameplay. Furthermore, the two specific characteristics of Pokémon Go (augmented reality and location-based gaming ) together shape a relationship between the game - a digital space - and locations in the real world, amongst them - as I will elaborate on in this thesis - memorial spaces, museums and memoryscapes that are dealing with the Holocaust.
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Image 3 AR-mode in Pokémon Go. This image
depicts the poisonous gas Pokémon ‘Koffing’ in front of the Memorial to the Killed Gypsies during World War II, located on the Museumplein in Amsterdam. Pokémon appear randomly in the gameplay. (source: Pokémon Go).
Image 4 This image depicts the
location-based gameplay of Pokémon Go. An avatar walks around on a map, a representation of a real-world map. The blue dots are Pokéstops. They represent real-world landmarks in the area (source: Pokémon Go).
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1.3 Methods
1.3.1 Digital Site AnalysisThe main tool of analysis in this thesis is the location-based augmented reality game Pokémon Go. I use the game to create new concepts, and to map debates surrounding places of Holocaust memory. In doing so, I use a structured methodology, which I will propose to call ‘digital site analysis:’ a search for digital representations (in Pokémon Go) at places, landmarks, and landscapes that embody memories of the Holocaust and Jewish absence. The Pokéstops in Pokémon Go - or as I propose to call them digital landmarks - are such kind of digital representation. I collect my data sources, the Pokéstops, undertaking a series of steps.
• step 1: I visit a landmark that is related to the topic of this research.
Such is the case on Photo image 5, which I took during my visit at the Umschlagplatz Memorial in the Dutch Theatre. The memorial is located inside the Dutch Theatre in the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam, an area that will be the main case study in the third chapter of this thesis.
• step 2: Subsequently I launch the Game Pokémon Go on my
smartphone. Once it is launched, I will look for Pokéstops in the gameplay. As we can see on image 6, the blue circle-shaped symbol next to the avatar - that represent my location in the location-based game - is a Pokéstop, a digital landmark. Second, the digital dimension in Pokémon Go, as visible on image ‘6,’ is a virtual map of the real world. Landscapes, or rather memoryscapes, with - or without - (a series of) digital landmarks, I will call digital memoryscapes.
• step 3: I ‘enter’ the Pokéstop in Pokémon Go (by touching the blue
symbol visible on the screen of my smartphone). As we can see on
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Dutch Theatre in the game as a Pokéstop. The Pokéstop is now a downsized image of the memorial and has a title, ‘Joodse Herinnering
Monument’ [Jewish Remembrance Monument] and subtitle ‘Ter herinnering aan het die van hier werden weggevoerd. 1940-1945’ [In
memory of those who were deported from here. 1940-1945]. This Pokéstop, I can now conclude, is a digital representation of a place that embodies the memory of the Holocaust.
• step 4: Image 8 is a full-scale screenshot of the Pokéstop. I collect this
particular one, and other screenshots of Pokéstops that digitally represent landmarks that deal with Holocaust memory. I will use these Pokéstops to develop my concepts, digital landmark and digital memoryscape. Furthermore the collection of these Pokéstops shape the core data and interpretative sources throughout this research (with the exception of the concluding chapter that goes ‘beyond’ Pokémon Go). All Pokéstops are included as images in the data chapters or appendix.
Image 5 ‘step 1’ Photo of the Umschlagplatz
Memorial at the Dutch Theatre in the Jewish Cultural Quarter (Peter, J., 2017).
Image 6 ‘step 2’ Pokémon Go gameplay. The
blue-circled symbol is the Pokéstop that represents the Umschlagplatz Memorial (source: Pokémon Go).
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Image 7 ‘step 3’ Downsized image of the
Pokéstop/ digital landmark (source: Pokémon Go).
image 8 'step 4' Full-scale image of Pokéstop/
digital landmark (source: Pokémon Go).
1.3.2. Annual Reports and other sources
Many memory sites, museums, memorials, memoryscapes and other places of importance to this research are managed by institutions. Often, these institutions are crucial in understanding the digital representation that these places of memory may or may not have. The visibility of digital landmarks and memoryscapes is dependent on the relationship between Pokémon Go and the managing institution of the real-world places that Pokémon Go includes in its gameplay. These institutions, mainly museums, are managing, and controlling their spaces; they have an agenda, and establish narrative on the places of memory they manage. Therefore the annual reports of these institutions are important sources in my research. In these annual reports we may find educational and commemorative strategies that the institution uses. They also provide important data on visitor numbers, marketing, and other tools that these institutions use to boost cultural tourism. Throughout my data chapters I therefore quote, paraphrase and interpret sections from annual reports of Bełżec State Museum, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, Majdanek
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State Museum, Jewish Historical Museum (Amsterdam) and the Jewish Cultural Quarter (Amsterdam). Finally, I will include online news sources and articles that wrote on the arrival of Pokémon Go and the game’s influences. Both case studies will include such sources.
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1.4 Theories and concepts
1.4.1 Digitality and Memory
This research poses itself at the crossroads of two main concepts, that characterize different, but increasingly intertwined fields of studies: digitality and memory. both concepts are approached with interdisciplinary research, from a wide variety of angles. However, in my research I emphasize the connection between digitality and memory. Hence I will examine the way in which new digital media are transmitting representations of the past, and therefore shaping collective memories. In search for a case study that connects digitality and memory, I make a link that seems rather unusual at first sight; As a main analytical and conceptual tool I use the location-based augmented reality game Pokémon Go - a digital space - to examine how some of the latest digital developments have become involved with spaces of Holocaust memory; in my thesis the concepts of digitality and memory intersect at the spatial level. I therefore analyze a series of memorials, monuments and memoryscapes, however I will constantly link these memory ‘physical spaces’ to their representations in digital spaces. Yet before I explain the link between Pokémon Go and the Holocaust, I will first articulate a necessary understanding of how digital media and technological developments have become intertwined with the production and transmission of, and engagement with Holocaust memory.
In order to understand the relationship between digitality and memory, we first should elaborate on the concept transnational memory. In a brief overview article on the different characteristics and cases of transnational memories, Aleida Assmann distinguishes two developments that enable collective memories to spread into a global discourse, to become transnational:
• ‘The connectivity of digital technologies and media, and
• new transnational actors and networks that are reshaping the global world from above and below’ (Assmann, A., 2014, p. 546).
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Transnational memories are collective memories (re-)formulated in a global dimension. Connectivity, digital technologies, media, and new transnational actors and networks enable memories, that were before constraint by ethnic or cultural nationalism, to overflow national borders and to enter a trans-national or global domain. The transnational character of the Holocaust derives not only from its historical and topographical European embeddedness. Rather, its ‘transnationality’ foremost came into existence when cultural reproductions of the Holocaust were shared across borders, outside the European countries where the Holocaust took place. In this process of sharing memories across borders, digital technologies played a crucial role. In an illuminating study on the Holocaust and the formation of cosmopolitan memory, Levy and Sznaider dispute the idea that Holocaust memory is firmly embedded within the ‘containers of the nation state.’ (Levy and Sznaider, 2002, p. 88) Instead, they stress that the Holocaust stands out as a transnational, paradigmatic event, writing: ‘At the beginning of the third millennium, memories of the Holocaust facilitate the formation of transnational memory cultures, which in turn, have the potential to become the cultural foundation for global human rights politics’ (Levy and Sznaider, 2002, p. 88). They subsequently argue that the Holocaust obtained a paradigmatic character in a trans-national memory culture because of the multiplicity of cultural representations of the Holocaust that produce shared memories. Indeed, the Holocaust is one of the most culturally reproduced historical events; books, novels, films, documentaries, plays, art, poetry, comics and other media have manifested the memory of the Holocaust as a global icon (Confino, 2012, p. 2). However, Levy and Sznaider signal a specific set of key, mediatized events, made possible by technological developments, that were crucial for the Holocaust to lose its local, and national context and enter a global dimension. For instance, they name the worldwide broadcast of the Eichmann trial in the nineteen-sixties, and the popular TV-series The Holocaust in the mid-seventies as instigators behind the cultural dissemination of memory of the Holocaust. These mass media reproductions made the event spill over national boundaries and lose its nation-specific character, giving the Holocaust a global resonance. Subsequently, with its memory now entering a global dimension, the Holocaust
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as a historical event became increasingly decontextualized from historical embeddedness, and turned into an global icon. Aleida Assmann argues that digitality takes on a crucial part in the dissemination and circulation of historically decontextualized Holocaust narratives. She provokingly states that ‘the carriers of global icons - i.e. the Holocaust - are not the teaching institutions but the mass media’ (Assmann, A., 2010, p. 114). Indeed, films, television, and the internet make possible the limitless dissemination of Holocaust narratives. These institutions of mass media are not constrained by ethnic or national identities. They are thus crucial for the way in which we should understand the Holocaust as a transnational concept; a contemporary phenomenon that has become connected to a set of values, moralities and identity formations, shared across border in a transnational sphere.
When memories of the Holocaust have become accessible to a transnational audience, they are no longer owned by those who lived through the event itself; they have become disembodied from their ‘original’ carriers. In his studies on collective memory, Jan Assmann distinguishes between communicative memory and cultural memory. The transmission of communicative memories is a social interaction, and these memories are carried by the witnesses of the event. As the last surviving survivors, perpetrators, and witnesses pass away, memory of the Holocaust becomes institutionalized. At this point communicative memory turns cultural; memory that exists in ‘disembodied form and requires institutions of preservation and re-embodiment’ (Assmann, J., 2008, pp. 109-118). Consequently, the transmission, of Holocaust memory, that was once social and oral, becomes a cultural practice and is managed by cultural and political institutions. Seventy five years after the event took place, the Holocaust has become institutionalized, and the way in which we relate to it is foremost shaped by cultural reproductions of the event. Crucial for the transmission of cultural memory, Landsberg writes, are cinematic reproductions and experiential museums. They are able to create a mass-mediatized experience of cultural trauma to a broad audience. This audience that did not live through (or during) the trauma itself and has no direct relation to or memory of it, can be enabled to appropriate the memory of the Holocaust by an experiential encounter with a
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cultural reproduction of it. The memory transmission that takes place is thus not ‘real,’ but feels real, because it is experiential, or as Landsberg puts it,
prosthetic. She writes: ‘This new form of memory, which I call prosthetic memory, emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative
about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum’ (Landsberg, 2004, p. 2). Prosthetic memory articulates how by for instance watching a movie a person can experience a past that he or she did not live. Prosthetic memories are therefore not socially constructed, rather they are the effect that mass-mediatized representations of trauma have on the personal experience of their audiences. Moreover prosthetic memory can only exist in the context of, as Landsberg argues, mass culture and mass media. Again, technological developments make it possible to have a mediated memory that one nevertheless experiences as real or genuine (Landsberg, 2004, p. 17). In the case of the Holocaust, we are dealing with a global icon that can be experienced by a transnational public, through an immense body of cinematic representations, museums and many other forms of cultural reproduction. In particular digital and virtual representations have a substantial influence on the engagement with collective memories, and production and dissemination of new memories of historical events such as the Holocaust. Pokémon Go can be put in line with what Landsberg describes as prosthetic memory. Due to its location-based gameplay, Pokémon Go creates a digital representation of places of memory, and is in that quality an excellent example of the way in which digital media establishes new experiential encounters between an audience and memory on a spatial level.
Cross connections between transnational memory and mass media is a much-written about topic. Scholars often mention the same series of influential mediatized events that took place since the early nineteen-sixties, and they articulate how cultural, filmic and mediatized representations served as a premise to the global icon that the Holocaust is today. Yet, although cinema, film, television and documentary remain important actors for the transmission of memory, they are long-established forms of media. They are inventions from what I would call a ‘pre-digital age.’ Ever since the invention of television,
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numerous new technological developments have become part of our daily lives. In a contemporary digital age, our world is characterized by quickly succeeding technological developments. Returning to what Aleida Assmann wrote on transnational memory; the connectivity of digital technologies, the internet and media are enabling collective memories to spread into a global discourse. Because digital developments are continuous, the influence they have on the dynamics of memory is ongoing. With the emergence of the internet, new digital spaces, such as Facebook and Twitter have become inextricably connected to how we relate to and think of the past. Similar to old forms of media, these digital media communicate and establish new conditions for the way in which we understand the Holocaust. Moreover, digital media reformulate our relationship to the past within their digital spaces. I therefore stress it is urgent to analyze Holocaust memory in context of the contemporary manifestations and ongoing developments of new digital media.
1.4.2 Digital Landmarks
Pokémon Go can be lined among the latest of technological developments.
Unusual at first sight, the game Pokémon Go is in different ways connected with the memory of the Holocaust. This connection is foremost a spatial one. Due to Pokémon Go’s augmented reality and location-based gameplay, the game becomes entangled with places of Holocaust memory. However, to explain the role that Pokémon Go plays in the contemporary dynamics of Holocaust memory, we first have to look at how the game is set up. In the section ‘What is Pokémon Go?’ of this thesis I explained some of the specific characteristics of the game and the gameplay: Pokémon Go is a game with a certain digital novelty, because it utilizes augmented reality and location-based gaming. These two characteristics of the game are some of the latest technological developments. Moreover, these technologies create a relationship between the game, as a digital dimension, with actual real-world locations. The Pokéstops in Pokémon Go connect with actual places, monuments, museums, memorials and other significant landmarks in the real world. Because of the location-based
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gameplay, players need to explore these sites in order for the game to evolve and progress. As a result, players come into contact with representations of the past. Visiting Pokéstops in the game implies being physically present at landmarks in the real-world. Among them are memorial spaces, museums, and memoryscapes. Some of them are dealing with the memory of the Holocaust. Again, in principle the relationship between Pokémon Go and the Holocaust is thus spatial; we are dealing with a new digital media that becomes intertwined with Holocaust memory in the spatial dimension.
This spatial connection between Pokémon Go and the Holocaust is premise to the conceptual framework of this thesis. As I articulated before, Pokéstops are digital representation of real-world memorials, museums, monuments, and other significance places of memory. These Pokéstops created the idea for the main concept, which I propose to call digital landmark. Digital landmarks are the virtual equivalents of real-world landmarks. They are digital, but their existence is based on a spatial connection to a specific place in the physical dimension. Any digital landmark is only visible when in close vicinity to its physical counterpart, where it is able to establish a virtual connection to the location it represents in the real-world. Furthermore digital landmarks are not merely digital reproductions of physical landmarks; they function as an
extension to them. A digital landmark adds something to the place it represents.
More precisely, it highlights or marks the place it digitally represents, and can therefore bring to the fore obscured or hidden places, or create new narratives of the places it connects with, within its digital space; as a result, a digital landmark can add context to its physical counterpart, and is thus contextual. However at the same time digital landmarks are visible as part of a digital space that has its own set of characteristics and value systems. And thus these digital landmarks also put the physical landmarks they represent in a different context, making them de-contextual from their spatial embeddedness. This is for instance the case with Pokémon Go, where places of Holocaust memory are an integrated part of the gameplay. This dichotomous nature of the digital landmark, as context-giving and decontextualized at the same time, can result in a sometimes contesting relationship of the game with narratives that are present at the real-world location it represents. This problematic of the digital
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landmark will shape the third chapter of this thesis, in which I will - by using the concept of digital landmark - analyze memorials, museums, and other places of Holocaust memory in the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam.
1.4.3 Digital Memoryscapes
A second concept, that I propose here, can be seen as a spatial broadening of the concept digital landmark; digital memoryscape. To understand the notion of memoryscape, following Phillips and Reyes, is to imagine ’a complex landscape upon which memories and memory practices move, come into contact, are contested by, and contest other forms of remembrance; older ways of conceptualizing the past- largely framed in terms of national and local perspectives - are unsettled by the dynamic movements of globalization and new memories and new practices of remembrance emerge.’ (Philips and Reyes, 2011, pp. 13-14). I argue that a digital memoryscape exemplifies a mere elaboration to the memoryscape that Phillips and Reyes define. I put the term ‘digital,’ in front of ‘memoryscape,’ because digital memoryscapes add a digital layer to the already existing memoryscapes. their presence is digital, not physical. To a certain extent digital memoryscapes share the same characteristics as digital landmarks. a digital memoryscape is a virtual extension of a real-world location; it is a digital space that shares a spatial connection to a physical counterpart. In this quality, digital memoryscapes are both providing context, and at the same time they are de-contextual from spatial embeddedness for being part of a digital space (Pokémon Go). However following Phillips and Reyes’ definition, a digital memoryscape differs from a digital landmark in that it represents not a single place, such as a monument or memorial, but rather a broader area or landscape. As a result a digital memoryscape comprises the sum of historical landmarks and traces in a delineated area. However, this interpretation of digital memoryscape is
inclusive; in that it includes several significant landmarks in a digital space,
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memorialize a certain past are made. Consequently a digital memoryscape would be the sum of digital landmarks that are located within its virtual border. It seems rather obvious to understand a digital memoryscape as such; however in this thesis we will also come across digital memoryscapes that are dealing with exclusion. These are memoryscapes that are present in the real-world, but obscured from the digital. Here their absence in the digital dimension is often resulting from an act of exclusion. They are therefore not non-existent in the digital dimension, nevertheless they are deliberately removed, hidden, or excluded from digital representation. Digital memoryscapes can become excluded when in mismatch with the narrative present at the real-world memoryscape it represents. A new, digital representation of an existing memoryscape can contest earlier forms of commemoration, and established narratives that are already present, at the places it represents. As I will set out in this thesis, exclusion of a digital memoryscape is a frequent outcome when it contradicts already established narratives in the places it represents. The clash between narratives that emerges with the arrival of digital representation, I argue, lay bare the memory frameworks present at places that are dealing with the memory of the Holocaust. This notion of exclusion becomes more clear when we return to how Pokémon Go is entangled with places that commemorate the Holocaust. In the chapter that now follows I will elaborate on a series of former concentration camps and their representation as digital memoryscapes in Pokémon Go.
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2. Data Analysis Chapter 1
2.1 ‘No Pokémon Go in Auschwitz’When Niantic and Nintendo released Pokémon Go in July 2016, the game had an immediate social and cultural impact. In a short period of time, the game was downloaded more than 500 million times. Worldwide people went out on the streets to catch their favorite Pokémon in the location-based augmented reality game. Already in the first days after the release, several incidents stirred up controversy about the augmented reality, and location-based gameplay in Pokémon Go. Because Pokémon Go can be played everywhere there is a gps-location, people also went playing the game in places that are commemorating victims of the Holocaust and other mass atrocities. It did not take long before a debate started on the consequences of playing Pokémon Go at places of Holocaust memory. After reports of people playing Pokémon Go in and around Auschwitz, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and Washington’s Holocaust Museum asked visitors in a public statement to refrain from playing Pokémon Go at the sites. In a tweet from its official twitter-account, the Auschwitz State Museum called upon Niantic to ‘not allow playing ‘Pokémon Go’ on the site of our Memorial and similar places. [because] it’s disrespectful to the memory of victims!’5 According to Andrew Hollinger, communications director at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, ‘Playing the game is not appropriate in the museum, which is a memorial to the victims of Nazism.’6 Furthermore Hollinger addressed that ‘we are trying to find out if we can get the museum excluded from the game.’7 As a result of the outcry from the Auschwitz State Museum and Washington’s Holocaust Museum, Niantic removed the sites from the game. Niantic also removed other content from
5 This tweet was included in an online news article on Pokémon Go and Auschwitz, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/07/12/Holocaust-museums-auschwitz-want-pokmon-go-hunts-stop-pokmon/86991810/, consulted at 10-16-2017.
6 This quote I took from an online news article, ‘ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3686794/Disgust-pokemon-9-11-memorial-Holocaust-memorial.html,’ consulted at 10-16-2017.
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sensitive places, such as the Hiroshima Memorial in Japan.8 Thereupon the video game company set up an online form where specific sites, such as other memorial museums, can request their exclusion from Pokémon Go.9
Immediately after the release of Pokémon Go, controversy erupted over the fact that the game could be played at sites that commemorate the victims to Nazi genocide. What happens when monuments, memoryscapes and other sites dealing with the Holocaust become visible in a digital space as part of a gaming experience? In the first instance, this relationship between a digital gaming space and the places it represents seems rather problematic. In the case of Pokémon Go, many memorials and trauma sites were directly removed from the game. However, digitality and technological developments make possible the production and proliferation of new forms of remembrance, exposing the contemporary debates on memory and commemoration of the Holocaust in a transnational context. As I set out in the conceptual framework of this thesis, digital landmarks and memoryscapes possess the potential to add new meaning and context to the places they represent. However, this potential is often limited, because at the same time these digital representations are de-contextual, since they are part of a digital space, in this case a video game. This dichotomous characteristic of digital landmarks and digital memoryscapes - that they are providing context in their digital spaces, spaces that are often being de-contextual from their spatial embeddedness - lays bare the paradoxical relation between new digital media and places of memory. In this chapter, by using the concept of digital landscapes, I will articulate the problematizations that emerge when digital spaces interfere with commemorative spaces, memorials, monuments, memoryscapes and museums that are related to the Holocaust.
The subsequent section of this chapter elaborates on the digital representation in Pokémon Go of a series of former concentration camps, all
8 I found this piece of information in an online news article on Pokémon Go,
‘https://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/pokmon-go-remove-pokstops-Holocaust-8537988,’ consulted at 10-16-2017.
9
I found this article on the support page of Niantic’s Pokémon Go,
‘https://support.pokemongo.nianticlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008306667,’ consulted at 10-16-2017.
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located in Poland. By using the notion of digital landscapes, I will explore the former labour-, concentration-, and extermination camps Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Majdanek and Trawniki. It is my aim to find out whether or not these sites are, similar to Auschwitz and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, excluded from Pokémon Go. When this is the case, I will elaborate on the reasons that lie behind exclusion; each site has a different explanation for its inclusion or exclusion in the gameplay of Pokémon Go. While analyzing the digital memoryscapes of the different Holocaust sites in this chapter, I will pick up on topical debates and problematizations in Holocaust and memory studies. In the so-called ‘digital site analysis’ that shapes this chapter, a variety of memorials, museums, memoryscapes, and trauma sites will play a leading role. However I will relate these places, methodically and continuously, to the digital landmarks and memoryscapes that represent them in the digital space of Pokémon Go.
2.2 Bełżec and Trawniki
The first digital memoryscape I will analyze is the Bełżec Memorial and State Museum. The town Bełżec is located in the south-east of Poland, near its border with Ukraine. Together with extermination camps Treblinka II and Sobibor, Bełżec served to carry out Operation Reinhard, the Nazi’s plan to exterminate all Jews from the General Government (Poland) (Snyder, 2010, pp. 253-254). Bełżec was the first of the Operation Reinhard camps and it became operational in March 1942. It was active only until December 1942. The exact number of victims at Bełżec has long been a matter of scholarly dispute. However, in the last few decades research has led to the estimation that 450.000 Jews were murdered in the gas chambers of Bełżec (Pohl and Witte, 2001). This number derives from archaeological research and excavations on site, and the deportation lists from Jews throughout Galicia that were deported to Bełżec. Bełżec is the most lethal camp of Operation Reinhardt; Only three people are known to have survived the Bełżec extermination camp. Furthermore, only one
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survivor, Rudolf Reder, has given a written witness testimony of the camp (Buntman, 2008, p. 423).
Notwithstanding the recent increase in academic knowledge about the role of Bełżec in the extermination of Polish Jewry, it has long been a forgotten site. Directly after Bełżec had served its ‘purpose’ in the final days of 1942, the Nazi’s attempted to destroy all evidence of the camp (O’Neil, 1998, p. 50). Ever since Bełżec has been a desolate place without any memory of what happened. Only until the beginning of the twentieth century, after new archaeological research was conducted, plans were made to turn Bełżec into a memorial site. In 2004 a memorial covering the entire surface of the former camp was established. Buntman describes the memorial as a: ‘reconfigured landscape that is constructed from grey-coloured inorganic materials: industrial slag, concrete, cast iron and stone’ (Buntman, 2008, p. 423). This visually dominant and conceptually strong characteristic of the memorial calls attention, according to Buntman, to that which is unobservable beneath the surface; to the horror of the experiences of those who lie beneath the grounds, in the mass graves that were located by archeologists in the 1990’s. The Bełżec State Museum is located inside the former camp next to the memorial. The Bełżec State Museum and Memorial is part of and funded by the Majdanek State Museum, near Lublin. Today, the memorial and museum at Bełżec dominate the surrounding landscape in a town that seems mostly left abandoned.
While launching the Pokémon Go application upon arrival at the Bełżec memorial, it became immediately clear that the game cannot be played at and around the museum, memorial or even anywhere near the former camp boundaries. The roads surrounding the camp were visible on the screen of my phone - this indicates that the game is operational - yet important landmarks in and outside the former camp were not marked as digital landmarks in Pokémon Go, nor any Pokémon appeared on my screen during my one and a half hour visit to the site. The main conclusion to be drawn from my observations is that Bełżec, being in this way similar to the Auschwitz State Museum and Washington’s Holocaust Museum, is a location that is deliberately excluded from Pokémon GO: while the surrounding area was indeed integrated
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in the gameplay and visible on the screen of the smartphone, it was not able to undertake the game’s distinctive actions (that is visiting Pokéstops and catching Pokémon).
The ‘unavailability’ of Pokémon Go at Bełżec signals the exclusion of the game from a Holocaust memory site. Still a footnote should be made that the absence of Pokéstops has a second - albeit less relevant - explanation. The area surrounding Bełżec is a rural one, remote from urban landscapes, and while travelling through the region I noticed that barely any significant landmarks were digitally represented in Pokémon Go. Therefore, besides a deliberate removal of the game at the former campground in Bełżec, the reason behind the unavailability of Pokémon Go could also very well be linked to the lack of Pokémon Go activity in the surrounding area. I merely stress that both explanations can be of influence on the absence of the game at the Bełżec Memorial and State Museum. However the former explanation, namely the intentional exclusion of Pokémon Go at Bełżec by the makers of the game, seems most likely to be the case.
The latter assumption that the absence of digital landmarks and memoryscapes in Pokémon Go is predominantly caused by the lack of people playing the game in the surrounding area of the concerned site, was consolidated when I arrived at another Holocaust memory site, the Trawniki concentration-, and training camp. Trawniki is a small town that is located in a rural area in Southeast Poland. It is situated some 40 kilometers south of the city of Lublin. Today the name Trawniki is first associated with the Trawniki Männer. The Trawniki men were Ukrainian and Soviet POW’s, who were trained at Trawniki to willingly or forcibly participate in the Final Solution as ‘henchmen of the Third Reich’ (Black, 2001, pp. 43-44). Although the Trawniki men formed a diffuse group of perpetrators, most of them were known for their ruthless behavior as camp guards at several Ghettos and extermination camps such as Treblinka, Sobibor, Bełżec, Janowska, or as members of shooting squads during mass executions (Black, 2011, pp. 1-99). What is lesser known about Trawniki is that it also functioned as a forced labor camp for Jews. On 3 and 4 November 1943 as part of Operation Harvest Festival some 6.000-10.000 Jews were executed at
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Trawniki (Browning, 1992, pp. 137-142).10 Today there are very little landmarks that tell the troubled history of the camp and its role in the Final Solution. After World War II the factory where the Jews worked was temporarily re-opened but today it is an abandoned space. Most buildings from the Trawniki camp, such as the SS-houses and the Trawniki barracks, still stand but they are left abandoned or re-allocated as living spaces for the local population. A small commemoration stone that is placed on a trip of grass in the south-east corner of what once used to be part of the camp, commemorates the Jews that were executed in Operation Harvest Festival. Other than the commemoration stone, Trawniki bears no traces of its infamous history.
When I first launched the Pokémon Go app during a guided tour through the former Trawniki camp site, I encountered a different situation as the one I had experienced earlier that day in Bełżec. In Trawniki there was one landmark, the local train station, that was digitally represented in the game. This digital landmark was located some 200 meters away from the former entrance of the camp. Furthermore, Trawniki and its surroundings are not banned from Pokémon GO, since Pokémon appeared on the in-game map. Pokémon Go is fully operational at Trawniki, where Pokémon go users can undertake all the game’s distinctive actions. The availability of Pokémon Go signals the fact that Trawniki is a lesser known site than camps such as Auschwitz and Bełżec. Since little commemoration activities take place at Trawniki, none has undertaken the initiative to remove Pokémon Go in or around the Trawniki camp site. However, the fact that Trawniki is not excluded from Pokémon Go does not mean that the site is an inclusive digital memoryscape; with only the Trawniki train station as a digital landmark, the representation of Trawniki in Pokémon Go does not include the significant Holocaust landmarks in its digital memoryscape. We may not even speak of a
10 Christopher Browning gained wide academic recognition for his best-selling ‘Ordinary Men, Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.’ His thesis on ‘Ordinary Men’ supported a functionalist point of view on Holocaust perpetrator ship. According to Browning, the Final solution was the result of the structure and institution of the Third Reich, and happened only after a cumulative radicalization. As a reaction to Ordinary Man, Daniel Goldhagen published his book ‘Hitler’s willing executioners,’ in which he proposed an intentionalist viewpoint by putting human beings and ideas, and thus for example racial motives in the center of narrative. The two books sparked a scholarly debate (between so-called functionalists and intentionalists) on Holocaust and genocide perpetratorship that is still relevant today.
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digital memoryscape since not a single landmark bearing traces of the site’s history is represented in the digital space of Pokémon Go. Nevertheless, in order to understand the absence of digital representation at Trawniki, the site should be put in a broader framework of Holocaust memory. The - nonexistent - digital memoryscape at Trawniki seems to be the “odd one out” in the analysis of this chapter. By comparing Trawniki with the other camps that are included in the analysis of this chapter, we may come to an understanding of why this site is not excluded from Pokémon Go, but does also not include digital landmarks or digital memoryscape. As I will articulate in the following paragraphs, Trawniki is crucial for understanding the different frameworks through which we remember the Holocaust.
2.3 Holocaust Frameworks
Returning to the words of the director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, who stressed that it is inappropriate to play Pokémon Go at a museum that is a commemoration site of the victims of Nazism, and considering the removal of the museum from Pokémon Go merely days after its release, here it seems that we are dealing with a double standard; on the one hand we have a Holocaust museum in the United States that exclaims controversy over the fact that visitors play Pokémon Go in its exhibition space. As a result, the museum was removed from Pokémon Go. On the other hand we have a town in Southeast Poland where 6.000- 10.000 Jews are buried in unmarked mass graves, but where it is possible to play Pokémon Go. This somewhat contradicting method of dealing with location-based gaming on sites that are in different ways related to the Holocaust, I argue, lay the different frameworks through which we perceive the history of the Holocaust. It is thus not the problem of Niantic and Pokémon Go that some Holocaust sites are included in the game, while others are not. Niantic even put online a web form with which museums, memorials and other sites that feel misrepresented in the game, can request their removal
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from Pokémon Go.11 Rather the game uncovers how we relate to the past, and how our memory of the Holocaust is shaped. In the following paragraphs I move beyond the observations I have obtained by playing Pokémon Go at the different Holocaust sites, identifying contemporary debates on Holocaust memory in a digital age.
The Holocaust and Auschwitz are often mentioned in the same breath. It is a common misconception that Auschwitz is main site where the Holocaust took place. Auschwitz-Birkenau only became the center of mass extermination in spring 1944, when most Polish and Soviet Jews under German occupation had already been shot or gassed. ‘By the time the gas chamber and crematoria complexes at Birkenau came on line in spring 1943, more than three quarters of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were already dead’ (Snyder, 2010, p. 382). A second misconception concerns the method of killing. Not all Jews were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Only in recent studies the so-called ‘Holocaust by Bullet’ is brought to the fore. Until 1942, most Jews were not murdered in gas chambers, but shot over pits that in many cases they had to dig themselves (Browning, 1992, pp. 80, 137). The Holocaust by bullet killed an estimated 1.5 million Jews (Black, 2011, p. 2). However it is the image of concentration camps and gas chambers that is most strongly embedded in the collective memory of the Holocaust. ‘Auschwitz is the most familiar killing site of the Bloodlands. Today Auschwitz stands for the Holocaust, and the Holocaust for the evil of a century’ (Snyder, 2010, p. viii). This note is from the introduction of Bloodlands (2010) a revealing study of historian Timothy Snyder. His argument for why we link Auschwitz and other concentration camps so directly to the Holocaust, and tend forget the Holocaust by bullets, is straightforward: Jews who were sent to concentration camps were among the Jews who survived the Holocaust (Snyder, 2010, p. 382). Some 5.000-10.000 Jews survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and its surrounding forced labor camp system. In comparison to the survivors of Auschwitz, the number of
11 The web form can be found on the support website of Pokémon Go
‘https://support.pokemongo.nianticlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002830287, consulted at 10-17-2017.
