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This Israeli artist made a website to shame people who take ‘Holocaust selfies’

An Israeli satirist in Germany has launched a website using savage humour and shocking images to publicly shame visitors to Berlin's Holocaust memorial who post light-hearted selfies on social media.

Published: 19 January 2017 16:47 CET
This Israeli artist made a website to shame people who take 'Holocaust selfies'
Shahak Shapira. Photo: DPA.

The website by Berlin-based artist and activist Shahak Shapira, 28, is called Yolocaust, combining the words Holocaust and Yolo – hashtag shorthand for “you only live once”, and went live this week (www.yolocaust.de).

It features a breathtakingly tasteless collection of photos Shapira says he found posted on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and also dating sites like Tinder and Grindr. The subjects are dancing, smiling, juggling and even doing yoga at the sprawling maze-like memorial.

Hovering the mouse over each “goofy” picture on the website photoshops in an authentic historical image showing the naked corpses of concentration camp victims.

Shapira says the provocative project is intended as a wake-up call for social media enthusiasts who may be unaware that they are on what many see as sacred ground. It is also timed to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th.

 Answering a list of “frequently asked questions”, Shapira addresses issues such as what kind of behaviour is “allowed” at the Berlin site, whose full title is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and which he says draws an average 10,000 visitors per day.

“No historical event compares to the Holocaust. It's up to you how to behave at a memorial site that marks the death of six million people,” is his tart reply.

He also preempts potential criticism of his use of the distressing images on the site with a bit of gallows humour.

“'Isn't this disrespectful towards the victims of the Holocaust?' Yes, some people's behaviour at the memorial site is indeed disrespectful,” he writes.

“But the victims are dead, so they're probably busy doing dead people's stuff rather than caring about that.”

Along with the original selfies, Yolocaust includes the comments, hashtags and “likes” from the original social media accounts, including a caption reading “Jumping on dead Jews @Holocaust Memorial”.

 

A photo posted by Klee Lilikuh (@kleedia) on Jan 19, 2017 at 1:15am PST

Shapira invites people who feel embarrassed by their photo being featured on the page to get in touch and he will remove it.

“Just send an email to [email protected],” he quips.

'Warning to Germany' 

Reaction on social media to the website has been largely positive, and it crashed during its first hours online as it drew half a million clicks, according to his representatives.

However a few critics on Facebook noted that the memorial's American architect Peter Eisenman has said that he wanted visitors to treat it not as a cemetery but as a public space for people to engage.

The monument, which opened in 2005, includes a vast undulating labyrinth of more than 2,700 grey concrete blocks spread over an area equivalent to three football fields, as well as a subterranean museum dedicated to the testimony of Holocaust victims and survivors.

Sunbathers and children playing hide-and-seek are not uncommon sights at the memorial, which is one of Berlin's top tourist draws.

The German website of Vice magazine noticed the selfie trend there as early as 2013 and a series of glib photos taken at the Auschwitz memorial site in today's Poland have repeatedly caused outrage.

Shapira could not immediately be reached for comment but his publisher, Rowohlt, said that one of his grandfathers had “narrowly survived the Holocaust” while the other was murdered during the attack by Palestinian militants at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

He moved to Germany from Israel at the age of 14 and made headlines in 2015 when he was beaten up for filming a group of Arab youths chanting anti-Semitic slurs on the Berlin underground.

Shapira spoke out about the hate crime and subsequently met with Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and wrote a book about life as a Jew in today's Germany.

He said that he was dedicating his new website to the right-wing populist politician Björn Höcke of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, who sparked an outcry Tuesday by attacking the Holocaust memorial as “a monument of shame in the heart of the capital”.

“Of course Björn Höcke sees nothing to like about a memorial that was built as a warning to Germany about people like him,” Shapira told ZDF public television.

By Deborah Cole, AFP

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ART

African-born director’s new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

One of the rare African-born figures to head a German cultural institution, Bonaventure Ndikung is aiming to highlight post-colonial multiculturalism at a Berlin arts centre with its roots in Western hegemony.

Published: 8 July 2023 10:13 CEST
African-born director's new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

The “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (House of World Cultures), or HKW, was built by the Americans in 1956 during the Cold War for propaganda purposes, at a time when Germany was still divided.

New director Ndikung said it had been located “strategically” so that people on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in the then-communist East, could see it.

This was “representing freedom” but “from the Western perspective”, the 46-year-old told AFP.

Now Ndikung, born in Cameroon before coming to study in Germany 26 years ago, wants to transform it into a place filled with “different cultures of the world”.

The centre, by the river Spree, is known locally as the “pregnant oyster” due to its sweeping, curved roof. It does not have its own collections but is home to exhibition rooms and a 1,000-seat auditorium.

It reopened in June after renovations, and Ndikung’s first project “Quilombismo” fits in with his aims of expanding the centre’s offerings.

The exhibition takes its name from the Brazilian term “Quilombo”, referring to the communities formed in the 17th century by African slaves, who fled to remote parts of the South American country.

Throughout the summer, there will also be performances, concerts, films, discussions and an exhibition of contemporary art from post-colonial societies across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania.

‘Rethink the space’

“We have been trying to… rethink the space. We invited artists to paint walls… even the floor,” Ndikung said.

And part of the “Quilombismo” exhibition can be found glued to the floor -African braids laced together, a symbol of liberation for black people, which was created by Zimbabwean artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti.

According to Ndikung, African slaves on plantations sometimes plaited their hair in certain ways as a kind of coded message to those seeking to escape, showing them which direction to head.

READ ALSO: Germany hands back looted artefacts to Nigeria

His quest for aestheticism is reflected in his appearance: with a colourful suit and headgear, as well as huge rings on his fingers, he rarely goes unnoticed.

During his interview with AFP, Ndikung was wearing a green scarf and cap, a blue-ish jacket and big, sky-blue shoes.

With a doctorate in medical biology, he used to work as an engineer before devoting himself to art.

In 2010, he founded the Savvy Gallery in Berlin, bringing together art from the West and elsewhere, and in 2017 was one of the curators of Documenta, a prestigious contemporary art event in the German city of Kassel.

Convinced of the belief that history “has been written by a particular type of people, mostly white and men,” Ndikung has had all the rooms in the HKW renamed after women.

These are figures who have “done something important in the advancement of the world” but were “erased” from history, he added. Among them is Frenchwoman Paulette Nardal, born in Martinique in 1896.

She helped inspire the creation of the “negritude” movement, which aimed to develop black literary consciousness, and was the first black woman to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Reassessing history

Ndikung’s appointment at the HKW comes as awareness grows in Germany about its colonial past, which has long been overshadowed by the atrocities committed during the era of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

Berlin has in recent years started returning looted objects to African countries which it occupied in the early 20th century — Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon.

“It’s long overdue,” said Ndikung.

He was born in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, into an anglophone family.

The country is majority francophone but also home to an anglophone minority and has faced deadly unrest in English-speaking areas, where armed insurgents are fighting to establish an independent homeland.

One of his dreams is to open a museum in Cameroon “bringing together historical and contemporary objects” from different countries, he said.

He would love to locate it in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s restive Northwest region.

“But there is a war in Bamenda, so I can’t,” he says.

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