(Translocal) Re-Figuration of Memorial Space
Voicing Places of Remembrance: On the (Translocal) Re-Figuration of Memorial Space
Against the backdrop of societal transformations - including the widely circulated metaphor of the “disappearance of eyewitnesses,” which has „haunted“ public, political, and educational discourse for at least two decades (Skriebeleit 2011) - and the increasingly abstract connection to contemporary life due to growing temporal distance from the historical event, Holocaust remembrance is transitioning from communicative to cultural memory (cf. Assmann 2006). In this process, places are gaining importance as carriers of memory - as “contact zones or resonant spaces in which the history of the Holocaust echoes in a particularly profound way” (Ebbrecht-Hartmann 2020, translation by author).
Among other factors, the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic significantly accelerated an already ongoing shift toward a kind of digital turn in Holocaust remembrance (cf. Ebbrecht-Hartmann 2020). The (digital) transformation of remembrance cultures and Holocaust education in the transition to cultural memory unfolds against the backdrop of a re-figuration of spaces in a tense relation between modernity and post- or late modernity, closely tied to an increasing mediatization of communicative action (cf. Löw & Knoblauch 2019: 6f). This topic has so far received only limited attention in Holocaust education, both in research and in practice. The focus area engages with this type of “spatial turn” (Soja 1989, 1996) within Holocaust studies (cf. Fogu 2016).
As part of the teaching format Mapping Memory Mainkofen - developed and implemented in collaboration with the memorial site at the Mainkofen District Psychiatric Hospital, the University of Education Upper Austria and the memorial site Hartheim Castle - teacher education students from Passau and Linz jointly design stations for the hybrid anchoring of commemorative markers along a stelae trail on the Mainkofen clinic grounds. The content addresses various aspects of the Nazi “euthanasia” murders of patients and is aimed at both individual visitors and guided groups.