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| Euronews |
If you've ever visited a holocaust memorial, anywhere in the world, you
probably went in knowing that it was a place to be treated with a
certain solemn respect. Well, that is unless you are one of the
numerous, rather upsetting people who decided to take a funny selfie
while you were there. If that's the case, you'd probably be better off
reading a different article, I'm not planning on giving any quarter.
The focal point here is the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, an angular field
of 2,711 slabs of concrete. In recent years, it's become something of a
hotspot for selfie takers. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if
they were just showing their face in the image to demonstrate where they
were, but many of these images show people grinning, pulling silly
faces, juggling and even doing handstands in the midst of a monument to
the lives lost during humanity's greatest atrocity.
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| Euronews |
Thankfully, this stagnant display of disrespect hasn't gone unnoticed,
but beyond mere complaints, Israeli satirist Shahak Shapira decided to
mock the mockery, in the form of the
'Yolocaust' website.
On it, you'll find selfies taken at the monument, pulled from various
social media platforms, and reworked so that the background instead
shows photographs of some of the worst horrors of the holocaust.
It's disturbing, doubtlessly, but it expertly frames just how removed
some people have become from history, even things that happened some 70
years ago. Shapira doesn't have permission to use any of the images, but
a disclaimer at the bottom of the site says that the owners are well
within their rights to ask for them to be taken down. The phrase 'poetic
justice' is ringing in my ears. It feels nice.
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| Euronews |
The project is more well timed than even Shapira may have realised, as
it comes on the heels of a statement by a politician from the right wing
AfD party complained about Germany being the only country with a
"monument to shame" at the heart of the capital. It's hard to know how
Germans, or anyone should approach discussions about the holocaust, but I
think we can all agree that it's not alright to juggle in the middle of
a monument to its victims.
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