Digital Translations of the Past
Curiosity brought me here. I entered skeptical, thinking this exhibit couldn’t add much to what I had already learned about these horrible times. But after my visit, I had to log off and sit quietly. I came back to leave this message.
—Comment from Visitor to the Witnessing History: Kristallnacht—the November 1938 Pogroms Exhibit on Second Life
Reproducibility—distraction—politicization.
—Walter Benjamin, “Theory of Distraction”
AS I HAVE been suggesting in each chapter of this book, even within capitalist mass culture it is possible to locate instances of complicated and potentially progressive engagements with the past. I have attempted to justify treating film and television as experiential media in the sense that they engage their viewers both cognitively and affectively. In this final chapter, I consider a very specific form of engagement with the past on the Internet, which represents a qualitatively different dimension of the experiential: the virtual. Specifically, I examine a very small subset of history websites: those that offer up a three-dimensional virtual space through which the visitor moves and in which the visitor encounters artifacts, photographs, and testimonies from the past. There are countless history-oriented websites (academic, commercial, amateur), some independent and others affiliated with universities or brick-and-mortar museums and sites, and the vast majority comprise text and image. Most commonly, embedded hyperlinks allow users to move to other pages or sites for further information. By contrast, the sites I consider here not only allow but compel the viewer to enter a three-dimensional space within which he or she will encounter objects, photographs, and voices that are meant to testify to past events. Indeed, there is a strong affective, embodied, experiential component to navigating such a site. And yet, as I show, these sites refuse their visitors a kind of seamless point of identification with individual historical figures or specific perspectives. Instead of fostering the illusion that the user is “actually there,” these sites’ artificiality and stylization call attention to their constructedness and thus have the effect of visually reminding users that the experience is virtual and not an actual experience of the past. This tension between actually experiencing the virtual space and understanding it as a mediation, as opposed to the real thing, instantiates a complicated mode of engagement.
The particular sites I consider are dedicated to past atrocity. For myriad reasons—from prurient interest to a legitimate desire to bear witness—atrocity compels attention. The representation of atrocity can similarly have both productive effects (ethically and politically) and negative effects (gratuitous displays of violence, identification with the victim, and so on). Atrocity has the potential to politicize, to make the past seem urgent and important, and perhaps to produce empathy, as Dominick LaCapra and E. Ann Kaplan have suggested, but historical knowledge cannot be produced, nor can any long-term politicization occur if the representation of atrocity only works to encourage a sympathetic identification with the victim or, even worse, a kind of voyeuristic pleasure in another’s suffering. Nevertheless, there is both an intellectual imperative and a political imperative to try to understand the nature and effects of such events and situations in the past; knowledge of past atrocities is understood to have the potential to shape or inform present and future political action in part by fostering empathy: a connection with another that is predicated on distance and difference, not on sameness.1
In part, this chapter advances my earlier suggestion that there can be a political dimension to an affective engagement with the past. Some theorists of affect have begun to explore why politics rely on the body, suggesting that for people to take a political stand they need first to feel personally affected or moved. Such theorists have pointed to the importance of affect as a motivator or catalyst to political action. Deborah Gould, for instance, has convincingly argued that a particular form of affect was crucial in mobilizing the gay community to organize and politicize itself: “I begin with the premise that feeling and emotion are fundamental to political life . . . in the sense that there is an affective dimension to the processes and practices that make up the political, broadly defined.”2 In Prosthetic Memory, I argue that even memories of events that one did not live through can be affectively charged and therefore have the potential to produce empathy and to alter an individual’s political commitments.3 These arguments hearken back to Walter Benjamin’s claims about the historically conditioned nature of both perception and attention. He was interested in the ramifications of new technologies of reproduction for ways of seeing, which in turn opened up the possibility of politicizing the masses. Although Benjamin could never have anticipated the Internet, his account of the experience of urban modernity resonates in some unexpected ways with the experience of cyberspace. In his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” he describes the kind of haptic and optic experiences of shock that were endemic to the city: “Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery. Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. . . . [T]echnology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training.”4 The mode of engagement solicited by the Internet, particularly in the era of Web 2.0, is a distracted mode, exemplified by multitasking as opposed to deep concentration or absorption. This chapter considers in detail some embodied encounters with history on the Internet and suggests that these encounters can provoke historical thinking and the production of historical knowledge that can foster political consciousness.
I look primarily at two exhibits: The Secret Annex Online, accessed on the Anne Frank House website, and Witnessing History: Kristallnacht—the November 1938 Pogroms, hosted on the virtual world Second Life and accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. In the case of The Secret Annex Online, the visitor’s virtual experience is both material and immaterial—material in that the online exhibit bears an iconic relation to the real Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and its constructed space is experienced by an embodied viewer, yet immaterial in its profound artificiality as a two-dimensional, graphic rendering of a three-dimensional space that one experiences in one’s own home. The Kristallnacht exhibit on Second Life immerses visitors in the aftermath of the destruction of Jewish communities throughout Germany on November 9–10, 1938, but the visitor, rather than inhabiting the subject position of a victim, moves through the exhibit’s virtual world as a reporter trying to understand what happened. Like The Secret Annex Online, the Kristallnacht installation calls attention to its mediated status and its artificiality, even as the visitor is invited to move through the ransacked buildings following the pogrom.
Most academic historians would agree that we can never really know what happened in the past. Some past events have left ample documentary trails, both official in the form of governmental and census records, published proceedings, and so forth as well as unofficial in the form of diaries, interviews, domestic records, and material artifacts. Other events, though, have left only residues, traces. Even when there are ample sources, however, what is left is nevertheless still partial, fragmentary.5 In some fundamental way, no matter how many records or sources we have, the past as it “actually was” or, more specifically, as it was lived by people of the time is not really knowable. Furthermore, because history, as Alun Munslow has described, is “a storied form of knowledge,”6 imaginative work is required to make the past meaningful, to turn it into history.
A way to theorize this imaginative work of history is as a process of translation. Inherent in the notion of translation is the notion of incommensurability, approximating rather than achieving verisimilitude. Theorizing the production of historical knowledge through encounters with these virtual sites as a process of translation is to foreground the inevitable partiality, incompleteness, imperfection of the transmission. The process of translation in the cases I here consider is not just a linguistic practice but also a material one with an important experiential dimension. Such a translation would convey the specific, material details of historical experience but also the sensory, affective aspects. In a fundamental sense, translation serves the purpose of making something available or accessible to many more people; it is about increasing access. Furthermore, translation is deemed important or necessary when one believes a particular text—or in this case event—has value beyond its immediate context, a point Walter Benjamin makes in his essay “The Task of the Translator”: “Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifest [sic] itself in its translatability.” Benjamin makes several other observations about literary translation that are germane here: he suggests that “the original is closely connected with the translation” and that the connection is, in his words, a “natural” one, a “vital connection,” something like an “echo.”7 This seems important because it suggests that something vital can move from the original to the translation—like a spark or a charge. And yet Benjamin is careful to qualify that translation is not and could never be a replica of the original: “in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living—the original undergoes a change.” A great translation does not merely copy; literalness is not the goal. In fact, says Benjamin, “it is self-evident how greatly fidelity in reproducing the form impedes the rendering of the sense.” Finally, he writes, the goal is to produce the meaning and intention of the original without necessarily being tied to the same language structures: “the language of a translation can—in fact, must—let itself go” not as a mere “reproduction but as harmony.”8
I am in part asking what comes of considering the project of history as a translation of the past into the present.9 However, if what is in part at issue is the transmission of something of how the past was lived—a spark—then it becomes essential to consider the embodied or experiential dimension of such a translation. Benjamin’s words are revealing, for he suggests that in a good translation something vital is conveyed. In the ever-growing realm of popular history in experiential formats—from experiential museums and living-history sites such as Jamestown, Williamsburg, Plymouth Plantation, and Sturbridge Village to reenactments and reality history television shows—the transmission of some vital connection to the past is the goal. There is an implicit supposition here that with experiential, bodily engagement, another dimension is added to one’s understanding of the past or even that the affective dimension does something that a textual account cannot, producing a distinct form of knowledge. Moreover, the past was at one time lived. So with respect to representations of the past or of past atrocity in popular formats, there is a rationale for attempting to convey or translate that dynamic sense of life. The past was lived in all its complexity by people, who moved through the world as embodied subjects. Part of the aim of experiential sites is to re-create the past as dynamic, lived. The kind of translation made possible at experientially oriented museums might thus be understood as a bodily translation that has both cognitive and affective dimensions.
As the surveys conducted by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen demonstrate (see the introduction), most Americans seek to “experience history” directly, and they feel they can actually do that at certain museums and historical sites. For many respondents, these “direct” experiences were understood to be free from the kind of manipulation they associated with those representations of the past (in book or film) that distort the past to serve particular ends. When faced with authentic objects from the past, individuals felt “transport[ed] . . . straight back to the times when history was being made.”10 In the burgeoning field of affect studies, some work has been devoted to exploring the role of affect and experiential engagement in the acquisition of historical knowledge. In an essay about the Churchill Museum in London, for example, Sheila Watson has argued that the museum’s “intensely immersive experience” produces memory through “affect and emotion.” The museum uses, in Watson’s words, “objects, sound, light, photography, film and interactives,” but she pays particular attention to the way voice and sound more generally are used and concludes that “this method of interpretation, using sound and images, provides the visitor with something akin to a sense of the experience of 1940 that has been forgotten in the myth-making.” Again, as in the case of the reality history TV House series, affective engagement works to demythologize the past. At the Churchill Museum, says Watson, the “confusion, uncertainty, a rush of events without meaning at the time, and an emotional impression of the leadership of one man who provided a kind of certainty in the midst of chaos” were in some way fundamental to the experience of 1940 and thus “evoke[] historical understanding, encouraging the visitors to make historical sense from their emotional engagement with the subject.”11 But of course the strong affective dimension is enabled in part by the authenticity of the site, for the museum is housed in the original Cabinet War Rooms that served as the wartime bunker in which Churchill and his government experienced the Blitz. Moreover, that affective engagement is not entirely unproblematic, as Vanessa Agnew has thoughtfully articulated.12 How can someone in the safety of the present experience “something akin” to the dangers of life in London in 1940?13 Furthermore, the illusion is also dangerous insofar as it is premised, first, on the idea that there exists some objective truth of the past that can be accessed directly and, second, on the notion that one can have an experience of proximity with a past long gone. The power of the place, the aura associated with the actual site, can be an intoxication, creating a kind of overpresence. Visitors are thus seduced into feeling that they can actually live the past through these immersive means and that they can know the full historical truth while avoiding the “bias” of an author with his or her own agenda.
Part of the value of theorizing this transmission of knowledge about the past as an act of translation is that it is premised on the impossibility of verisimilitude and yet is motivated by the necessity of meaningful transmission. In other words, a translation admits in its very premise that it is not the original, that even if vital meaning gets conveyed through it, it does not simply replicate the original but produces something new. There is and should be a fundamental tension between the original and the translation, the past and the present. This is similar to the oscillation between the experience of proximity and the sense of distance that together are conducive to historical thinking and the production of historical consciousness. The tension between the original and the translation is thus another potential site for the production of empathy—feeling for someone else while maintaining one’s sense of difference from him or her. The sense of difference is important because it prevents one from thinking that one can ever fully understand or put oneself in the place of the other, a condition LaCapra has called “empathic unsettlement.”14 And yet the attempt to understand, to try to see through the other person’s eyes, can be very productive and can both produce historical knowledge and, in the case of atrocity, politicize the viewer, encouraging him or her to prevent such events in the future. The best translations keep these dialectical tensions in play.
Virtual sites can be particularly adept at undercutting the illusion fostered by actual historical sites. Without “the aura” generated by an authentic location and the pervasive sense of the presence of the past that comes along with it, virtual sites do not foster the illusion of literally entering the past. Overcloseness to the past cannot be an issue because the original is not there in any literal sense. In a virtual site, the mediation between viewer and the past is unmistakable, due in part to the graphic and somewhat surreal renderings of space, so the illusion of an unmediated relationship is not really possible. And yet the complex interface and mode of address create the conditions for an engaged and affective experience to take place, which is crucial for the acquisition of the kind of historical knowledge I am describing. As I hope to show, there can still be a strong affective and experiential encounter, a materiality to one’s experience, even in a virtual environment. An early advocate for museums on the Internet, Lynne Teather has argued that “more than the object fetishism, more than information and data transfer, and certainly more than public relations and sales opportunities, the museum experience is about meaning and knowledge building that is based in the visitor, or in people’s experience of the museum.” Rather than be defined as a warehouse of objects, the museum in its contemporary form needs to be theorized as first and foremost an experience: “it is in the personal experience of museums that the essence of the museum lies,” states Teather.15 She quotes Douglas Worts and Kris Morrissey, who contend that virtual museums ought to be understood to “facilitate[] experience—not deliver[] it.”16 Ross Parry and John Hopwood have described a shift in the nature of museum space from “hard” to “soft”—“from a museum space that is prescribed, authored, physical, closed, linear and sitant, to a space that instead tends to be something more dynamic, discursive, imagined, open radial and immersive.” In their discussion of virtual reality technology in actual museum space and on a museum’s website, they suggest that it quite literally “reconfigure[s] what and where museum space is.”17
However, Hilde Hein cautions that “real” objects and their attendant authenticity are the one thing that museums have always had: “In relying on ‘simulation and simulacra,’ however moving, museums are displacing the very thing that previously distinguished them, namely their presentation of ‘the real thing.’” She acknowledges that visitors and viewers have real experiences—in her words, “you really do touch[,] smell[,] blink at, or hear something that the museum has put in front of you. Maybe it makes you weep or feel dizzy. You have an experience, a real one.” But she worries about how that experience gets connected to a meaning or, more precisely, an educational meaning, which is the purported objective of most museums and certainly of all history or atrocity-related museums. It is imperative, she believes, that what is presented is “genuine” and that “the stimulus must not be fraudulently contrived.”18 Although her concern is indeed warranted, I am not sure that having “real objects” necessarily prevents an exhibit from being contrived. As Spencer Crew and James Sims have famously argued about museum objects, “The problem with things is that they are dumb.”19 Objects don’t speak; curators speak. One need only consider the numerous controversies over museum exhibits on the mall in Washington, D.C. The Enola Gay is undoubtedly a “real” or authentic object, but that alone does nothing to guarantee how it is narrativized or brought into meaning by an exhibit. Moreover, the multilayered, multisensuous mode of address of a virtual space—the solicited tactile engagement (which I explain more fully later), the use of sound and voice-over, the appearance of photographic images—can be used to encourage the connection of the experience to specific historical meanings.
It is instructive to distinguish between the different kinds of history exhibits online. There are the bare-bone ones that I mentioned at the outset: sites devoted to some element of the past but composed primarily of text and image. Unlike a book, however, such sites often have embedded hyperlinks that allow the reader/viewer to pursue the specific aspect of the topic in which he or she is interested and thus to move in a less linear fashion through the material. More and more, however, one encounters sites that take the form of three-dimensional environments, both re-created museums or museum rooms and reconstructions of real-world sites.20 Some websites allow the visitor a three-dimensional, 360-degree, panoramic view of a room. The website for Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott, for example, provides links to several rooms in the house. By clicking on a link, the viewer enters the room and has the opportunity to explore the space. Although no additional information about objects in a room is provided, a sense of the space is evoked (see figure 4.1).21 At this site, each room is accessed individually from the main page; one cannot move directly from room to room; the restrictions on one’s mobility work against a sense that one is actually there.
Although a range of exhibits and museums might fall under the category of “virtual museum,” there is no single accepted definition of such a museum. That said, some cite Geoffrey Lewis’s 1996 article in Britannica Online, in which he defines the virtual museum as “a collection of digitally recorded images, sound files, text documents, and other data of historical, scientific, or cultural interest that are accessed through electronic media. A virtual museum does not house actual objects and therefore lacks the permanence and unique qualities of a museum in the institutional definition of the term.”22 Werner Schweibenz has defined the virtual museum as “a logically related collection of digital objects composed in a variety of media, and, because of its capacity to provide connectedness and various points of access, it lends itself to transcending traditional methods of communicating and interacting with the visitors[,] being flexible toward their needs and interests; it has no real place or space, its objects and the related information can be disseminated all over the world.”23
FIGURE 4.1 Orchard House virtual tour, Louisa May Alcott’s room.
Some brick-and-mortar museums have websites that offer what they call “virtual tours” that enable visitors to click through a series of static images or photographs of objects from their collection. Others enable visitors to wander through the virtual museum space at their own leisure, following their own interests. The “Panoramic Virtual Tour” at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum website works this way: one clicks on arrows on the floor to follow different paths through the museum.24 Although a smaller space, the Vatican’s virtual Sistine Chapel is also a three-dimensional environment.25 When one clicks on the link to enter, one finds oneself standing in the back of the chapel, gazing at The Last Judgment on the far wall. Religious choral music begins to play. One can move freely about the chapel with the mouse or trackpad, zooming in on any area of interest. Unlike in an actual visit to the Sistine Chapel, one can zoom in on the ceiling frescoes for a closer look. Parts of other museums are available in this virtual format, although, as I have been suggesting, there is great deal of variation in what is designated as a “virtual tour.”26 In their review essay on the state of the field, Sylaiou Styliani and colleagues conclude that “virtual museums cannot and do not intend to replace the walled museums. They can be characterised as ‘digital reflections’ of physical museums that do not exist per se, but act complementarily to become an extension of physical museums’ exhibition halls and the ubiquitous vehicle of the ideas, concepts and ‘messages’ of the real museum.”27 And yet it seems to me that part of the power of the virtual is its ability to reconstruct spaces that literally do not exist anymore or do not exist as they once did and to translate those temporally lost experiences into the present.
THE SECRET ANNEX ONLINE
The Secret Annex Online exhibit enables a more concrete examination of all of these issues: the experiential aspect of virtual sites, the possibility of an embodied translation of the past, the oscillation between a sense of affective engagement with the past and alienation from it, and the problems of overpresence. A virtual exhibit housed on the Anne Frank House website offers individuals located anywhere in the world the ability to enter into a three-dimensional graphic re-creation of the building on the Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam in which Anne’s family, Fritz Pfeffer, dentist and friend, and the Van Pels family hid from 1942 to 1944.28 I argue that this virtual site creates the occasion for the kind of bodily translation of the past that I have begun to theorize here. Furthermore, I try to convey how credibility and materiality are here created virtually. This site is, to use Hein’s word, “contrived.” And yet in part because it bears an iconic relationship to what we know to be the real building in Amsterdam and in part because the way we experience this site relies very heavily on Anne’s own words taken from the diary she wrote while in hiding, it has a kind of authority. Our knowledge of the existence of the real Anne Frank house enables the virtual experience to have meaning and to feel real.
In addition to information about the museum, a visit to the Anne Frank House website also reveals several educational links designed to provide information about Anne and her experiences. One of these links, The Secret Annex Online,29 takes you to the exhibit I focus on here. Clicking on The Secret Annex Online brings you to the home page, where a voice-over, a woman speaking in British-accented English, explains why the Frank family had to go into hiding; this voice-over, accompanied by photographs, reconstructions of the rooms, photographic images of the family, and photos of Anne’s handwritten diary provide a brief though thorough overview of the experience. You can either let this sequence play through or click on several other visible windows, one of which says, “Go straight inside,” and takes you to the moveable bookcase behind which lies the secret annex. Other options include “The Outcome,” “About the House,” and “Who’s Who.” These last few windows, like the one that opens and immediately starts playing, are not interactive, but kinesthetic—especially “About the House,” in which instead of selecting where you will go, you are moved from room to room. For those visitors interested in a more textual description, there are several links at the very bottom of the page that offer written narrative accounts of aspects of Anne Frank’s history.
Our ability to engage with and experience the canal house is a powerful way of producing specific and embodied knowledge about the past because the architectural space itself dictated the contours of Anne’s existence. In his essay “Networked Media: The Experience Is Closer Than You Think,” Stephen Borysewicz calls attention to the importance of movement through architectural space as part of the museum experience; it is a “kinetic experience affecting most of our senses.” He thus urges that the Web be “a resource that more closely resembles a museum visit than a museum collection,”30 which is the case with the virtual Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Walter Benjamin uses the example of an individual’s engagement with architecture to articulate his theory of distracted attention or engagement. He suggests that buildings and architecture conceived more broadly are received “tactilely and optically” as an embodied experience. In fact, this is the experience of urban modernity par excellence, as embodied by Baudelaire’s flaneur, who moves through the city. Benjamin writes, “The tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means—that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually—taking their cue from tactile reception—through habit.”31 What he describes is an active, tactile, embodied form of mastery, a form of engagement enabled by The Secret Annex Online, which re-creates the quirky architectural spaces of the canal house in which the Frank and van Pels families hid along with Fritz Pfeffer. For Anne and her family, the nature of the space and how it was lived—as well as the power of that space to shape experience—was a crucial component of her story and thus crucial to understanding in a palpable way something of her historical experience of confinement. The visitor to the site is invited to interact with and move through the space in an active way that produces a kind of knowledge about the conditions of existence for Anne and her family.
But aspects of the design also have the effect of alienating the virtual visitor. First of all, there can be frustrations associated with the interface; using the computer trackpad or mouse to navigate the rooms is challenging at first, and you may often overshoot the object you are attempting to approach. Also, not all objects in the rooms are accessible; they all do not yield up information. These frustrations have the effect of reminding you, the virtual visitor, that you are not really there, that you are engaging with a representation.
The three-dimensional environment and use of graphics in The Secret Annex Online very effectively create the illusion of space and thus can enhance our sense of engagement with the place, but, importantly, not replicating Anne’s experience of the place where she hid. Although I am most interested in this site’s interactive parts, I want to call attention to the menu item “About the House,” which is not interactive, because it mobilizes some of the pedagogical strategies that I would like to highlight. If you click on “About the House,” a page opens with a photo of Anne. Clicking on her photo initiates a tour of the annex, which is introduced by a voice-over: the female narrator speaks in accented English. Then you hear a girl’s voice, also in accented English, reading from Anne’s diary a description of the rooms. With Anne speaking to you, you remain yourself. As you are moved through the rooms, you first see a graphic three-dimensional representation of the empty space, which is followed by a gradual fading in of furnishings, until the image appears as a photograph, though one that looks aged. There is an intentional blurring here of computer graphics and photographs. In fact, the “photographs” of the house that appear here are actually reconstructions created by museum curators. As the website itself explains, the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam displays the rooms of the annex empty, with no furnishings or objects; they had been removed after the inhabitants were arrested, and Otto Frank wished it to remain in that state. The furnishings and objects you see in the online version “were created based on photographs made in 1999, when the front part of the house and the secret annex were temporarily furnished as part of the creation of educational materials showing how they were used.”32 The represented architectural space creates a sense of presence—a sense of movement and of being in space—but is also artificial and contrived, foregrounding its status as a reconstruction. The oscillation between empty rooms graphically drawn and photos of the furnished spaces reminds visitors both that they are not actually there and that the house no longer exists as it actually was.
When you end this tour given by Anne, you have the opportunity to explore the house on your own. The particular mode of engagement elicited here complicates the standard notion of interactivity that dominates the way we think about engagement on the Web and with websites. What I am claiming is that the experience of the Anne Frank website is more like an encounter than it is a simple matter of pointing and clicking on objects, though there is that, too. You do things intentionally, but things happen to you as well. You can click on a window that allows you to explore any room in the entire warehouse, but there is also a window that allows you to begin at the famous moveable bookcase, behind which lies the secret annex. Even this experience, though, is not one of complete choice and agency. Upon clicking on a door, you are swept right up to it, at which point it opens, and you are carried into the room (see figure 4.2). Your vision pans from one side to the other; the experience, in other words—and I mean this both literally and figuratively—is a combination of both moving and being moved. The site offers you a nuanced position between agency and submission. You may choose where you would like to go. You can pause on an item or architectural detail. You can click on certain designated objects to learn more about them and what they tell us about the contours of existence in the annex. But each time you click on a door or object, you are moved by it, forced to confront objects and encounter the space as your embodied self and then process intellectually what is there. In an eerie way, you are both there and not there. If you have the exhibit site open on your computer but are not actively engaging with it, muted sounds still emerge from the house.
Sandra Dudley has emphasized the way objects in a museum engage viewers sensuously in order to make the claim that “the material properties of the thing itself are essential to how our bodily senses detect it and thus to how we experience and formulate ideas about it.”33 I would of course agree that objects are provocative, in the sense of provoking, especially those objects that come out of the past, promising to bring with them some piece of that prior experience and thereby facilitate our comprehension of the past. And yet in brick-and-mortar museums the tactility of displayed objects is registered not through the physical sensation of touch—we are not allowed to touch the objects—but through vision, by looking at them. In other words, the objects we encounter virtually on a website function much like the objects in a museum—they testify to a kind of materiality; they invite a kind of tactile engagement because they might be touched and have a physicality, although, as in a physical museum, they cannot literally be touched. I am calling attention not only to the fact that in a virtual environment clicking on the mouse is a way to touch objects by proxy, but also to the way in which aural and visual solicitations stimulate a sense of touch. Furthermore, “the cultural artifacts that are exhibited in the physical environment of a museum are usually shown in display cases, where only a limited amount of information about them is available. In virtual museum exhibitions, museum artifacts can be digitized and visualized in a virtual interactive environment. A virtual exhibit can contain information that a physical exhibit in a museum showcase cannot.”34 As Dudley asserts, however, the objects also authorize the experience. Authentic objects are meant to serve as a guarantee of connection to the past, to history, anchoring or securing the narrative. Similarly, even though we are not face to face with three-dimensional objects while at The Secret Annex website, the authenticity of what we are seeing is conveyed through our knowledge of the real house and the objects that the Frank family lived with and among. The online exhibit is authorized by the museum. Just as in a literary translation, what matters most is a fidelity to the original meaning.
FIGURE 4.2 Door to the Frank family’s hiding place on The Secret Annex Online.
Indeed, I am suggesting that there is a materiality, a corporeality, to the experience of The Secret Annex Online despite its virtuality. Film theorists have recently argued for the materiality of the cinematic experience, as I described in detail in chapter 1; such claims pertain here as well because this virtual annex experience is strangely a physical visual experience: we are not literally there, but through our vision as well as through various aural cues we are coaxed into the space. We translate what we are seeing on the computer screen into an embodied experience. Vivian Sobchack has written extensively about the ontology of embodied vision, explaining that “we sit in a movie theater, before a television set, or in front of a computer terminal not only as conscious beings but also as carnal beings. Our vision is not abstracted from our bodies or from our other modes of perceptual access to the world. Nor does what we see merely touch the surface of our eyes.”35 However, she makes a distinction between the kind of “presence” offered by cinematic or photographic representations and those offered by digital ones, privileging the former. The digital, she assumes, is predicated on a system of simulation, copies that lack an original. And yet the case of the Anne Frank Secret Annex Online is quite the opposite because there is an original. What is lacking is an experience of the original in the past. The electronic representation is a way of experiencing a virtual proximity to an original. Sobchack disputes that electronic space can be inhabited, but that is precisely what happens at The Secret Annex Online. Some small bit of Anne’s experience—which was very much an experience of a historically specific space, the confined space of their secret hiding place—is translated as we move through the virtual house, listening, approaching, and even touching (with a mouse) the virtual objects on display. We interact with the space. While our body is affectively engaged watching a movie, we have limited agency; here we are affectively engaged but also able to move and interact with the object on the screen before us. The experience is ontologically different from sitting before a movie or TV screen, no matter how engaged we are with the representation.
FIGURE 4.3 The Frank children’s height chart shown on The Secret Annex Online.
A particularly powerful “object” in The Secret Annex is Otto Frank’s height chart on the wall of the “Room Frank Family” (see figure 4.3). Either by clicking on a link called “Anne and Margot grow fast” upon entering the room or by moving around the room and finding the handwriting on the wall and then clicking on it, you are pulled into the spot where their parents kept track of the children’s heights. This “object” is powerful both because of its familiarity—many of us have marked our own growth this way or have marked the growth of our children—but also because their height chart is so different—the Frank girls stopped growing when their hiding place was invaded and they were taken away to Bergen-Belsen. We see the marks Otto’s pen made and his handwriting on the wallpaper, and there is a physicality, a materiality, a singularity to it.
The poignancy of this encounter is disruptive in a constructive way. Saul Friedländer describes the way individual voices pierce through the complacency of written historical accounts, suggesting that “such a disruptive function . . . is essential to the historical representation of mass extermination and other sequences of mass suffering that ‘business as usual historiography’ necessarily domesticates and ‘flattens.’”36 In her book The Skin of the Film, Laura Marks underscores the materiality of film and, in particular, the way in which the objects depicted in film can stimulate viewers’ senses and thus produce embodied knowledges. Because of this stimulation, she suggests, intercultural cinema becomes a site at which a kind of “sensory translation of cultural knowledge” occurs.37 Her model is potentially very useful in that it implies that a kind of embodied transmission can take place across geographic, temporal, and cultural divides, which is what I am proposing happens at The Secret Annex Online. However, her emphasis is on the transmission of cultural continuities rather than on gaps. Furthermore, she believes that the experience is primarily mimetic, “an experience of bodily similarity to the audiovisual images we take in.”38 I would suggest otherwise: that our experience is characterized by a fundamental alternation between mimesis, sameness, and connection, on the one hand, and difference, absence, and distance, on the other. What is being transferred here is a play of presence and absence—both Anne’s and our own. In fact, it is the very absence—of Anne, of the real annex in Amsterdam when we are seated at our own computers, of the past as it was actually lived—that makes translation necessary.
This website relies very heavily on photographs, both those of Anne and the other occupants of the annex as well as those of the interior of the house and the families’ possessions. Indeed, the photographs and their indexical link to the Franks, their lives, the rooms they made their home and the events that transpired there help both to authenticate and to mediate the virtual experience. The fact that the photos that appear on the website are often coupled with spoken voice-over enhances their affective quality; the voice-overs, all female in British-accented English work to transport the visitor across space and time. The voice that reads passages from Anne’s diary is the voice of a young girl, powerfully breathing life into the photos on view, but also speaking directly to us, the listeners/visitors.39 Of course, the voice is not actually Anne’s voice, but the words are hers. And the experience of hearing them has a great emotional impact, particularly while we are looking at the photographs.40 Elizabeth Edwards suggests in her essay “Photographs and History: Emotion and Materiality” that photographs do not suffer in the digital arena because they have always been reproducible. In fact, digital formats can often breathe new life into photos, and that is clearly the case at The Secret Annex Online. She writes, “While these new technologies may bring about changes to the immediate material reality through which photographs are experienced and determine forms of attention and precise modes of perception . . . , using such facilities involves the viewer’s own sensory and embodied practices: . . . the finger on the keyboard, the sweeping movements of the mouse . . . almost stroking the photograph into life.”41 The visitor’s body becomes the site of the translation.
On The Secret Annex site, photographs serve multiple functions, but it is important to reiterate that they seldom stand alone, unaccompanied by voice-over. They are stroked into intelligibility by the stories we hear in the form of voice-overs; they rekindle a life long gone. Hearing Anne’s words spoken while virtually exploring that space connects us to it in powerful ways, but not in the form of simple identification. These images also serve an evidentiary function, calling attention to certain key elements of the annex—the window by which Anne and Peter van Pels stood during their heartfelt conversations, the height chart, the magazine cutouts on her wall. There is a materiality to these details. The virtual three-dimensional space is overlaid with these affective details, specifics that set her history apart, making it precise and not generic: they are very specifically her details. And the photographs in this digital arena help to do this work.
WITNESSING HISTORY: KRISTALLNACHT—THE NOVEMBER 1938 POGROMS
Unlike The Secret Annex Online, which is a graphic representation of an actual and singular space, the Witnessing History: Kristallnacht—the November 1938 Pogroms online virtual exhibit is an imaginative reconstruction of a German town at a specific historical moment. I have to admit to trepidation in writing about an installation hosted on Second Life, a self-proclaimed “3D world where everyone you see is a real person and every place you visit is built by people just like you.”42 Although there is much to say about this “virtual world,” I address only the aspects relevant to this project. Second Life is a for-profit, interactive platform where users produce content and then buy and sell commodities of all kinds. Because the content is user produced, there is no rhyme or reason, no underlying logic, behind the existence of particular places and the absence of others. Some sites are meant to be simulacra of real-world places and others pure fantasy. Most seem to be set in the present, but there are some historical sites as well. Some seem heavily researched, and others not as much (or at all). I entered Second Life for the first time when following a link to the exhibit Witnessing History: Kristallnacht—the November 1938 Pogroms posted on the page “Online Exhibitions” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) website.43
Because Second Life is neither a coherent nor a comprehensive world, because its sites can vary dramatically from one another, and because they are produced for different purposes by different users, you do not need to visit numerous sites to be able to make claims about a specific location. That said, a few general points need to be made about the platform. First of all, though anyone can join Second Life—and there is no fee to join—you do have to register to enter this world. As part of joining, you must select an avatar that will move through the three-dimensional space as your proxy, the experience of which has epistemological ramifications that I take up later. Second, the sites are graphically rendered and composed with tools that all who create them must use, so there is some standardization to the look and feel of sites. The look of the animation, not dissimilar to that of a graphic novel, is stylized and somewhat surreal and artificial, quite unlike a photograph. And finally, you must use your avatar to move through the space, either by pointing a mouse to where you want the avatar to go or by clicking on a control pad with arrows indicating which way you want the avatar to move and whether to walk, run, or jump. Moving the avatar is somewhat clumsy and does not feel at all like natural movement.
The Witnessing History: Kristallnacht—the November 1938 Pogroms installation was created to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of Kristallancht.44 The occasion presented an opportunity “to explore the applicability of this emerging technology for staging virtual exhibitions and finding new ways to incorporate visitor voices into the exhibition development process.”45 In the summer of 2008, USHMM partnered with Global Kids, a youth civic leadership nonprofit in New York City, “to help [it] train teenage interns at the museum to design a space on the Second Life teen grid that would allow their peers to learn about Kristallnacht.”46 Upon this project’s completion, USHMM realized its potential and decided to move forward with it by contracting a design company to work with the museum in creating the online Kristallnacht exhibit: “As the ability of virtual worlds to enable kinetic experiences became more obvious as a result of this work, the Holocaust museum decided to build a more elaborate and nuanced installation on the main Second Life grid based on the design document originally created by the teenage interns at the museum.”47 The images and objects depicted come from the museum or museum research, and the audio testimonies were solicited for this purpose. Project manager David Klevan conducted interviews with nine survivors and used five- to eight-minute segments of those interviews for the installation.48 The installation is authorized and legitimized by its connection with USHMM.
USHMM’s permanent physical exhibition was originally designed to be a visceral experience for the visitor, engaging him or her not just intellectually but emotionally as well.49 Because this approach was considered a crucial strategy for learning about the Holocaust, it follows that the Second Life installation would also be committed to a similar mode of address. As Karl Kapp and Tony O’Driscoll explain in their case study on the exhibit, “People learn in museums by moving through an installation in a way that allows them to absorb the content in a kinetic and synthetic way.” Accordingly, “the Holocaust Museum wanted to explore the possibility of building virtual installations to learn more about the ways in which visitor experiences mimicked or differed (both for better and for worse) from those in real-world exhibitions.”50 As Styliani and colleagues have argued, “In a virtual museum environment, the visitor is not an observer but s/he interacts with the learning objects and s/he constructs her/himself the knowledge.”51
Linking to this particular location in Second Life first transports your avatar to a space outside of the USHMM; although the image of the outside of the building resembles or is evocative of the actual brick and mortar museum in Washington, D.C., it is not identical to it; unlike the actual museum, the virtual museum is surrounded by water. Likewise, the German town recreated in the exhibit is meant to be evocative of the historical moment but is very clearly an imaginative reconstruction; it does not correspond to an actual German town. As you maneuver your avatar toward the museum, a text box appears, proclaiming, “Welcome to Witnessing History. You are entering an environment focused on a single event—Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass). Here, you will take the role of a journalist, recalling the testimony of eyewitnesses as you investigate what happened during the November 1938 pogroms.” What is epistemologically important from that start is the conceit: you enter not as a Jew living through the event, but as a reporter. In fact, there are several layers of mediation between you and the events of Kristallnacht: you are entering Second Life not exactly as yourself, but as your avatar, and with that avatar you enter the museum in the role of reporter. As you enter the lobby of the building—which, like the exterior, is reminiscent of the actual museum, a space built in brick and stone, but not an exact replica of the museum—another text box opens up with instructions: “Enter the newsroom in front of you to begin the experience. Review the bulletin boards, and when you are ready to continue, click the yellow dossier folder.” In the newsroom, one sees rows of tables with books and lamps and a bulletin board with photos and memos, which are meant to offer some background or context to the event. On a desk in the far corner, a yellow folder glows (see figure 4.4). Moving in the room opens another text box, which adds, “Welcome. Review the background information on the boards. When you’re ready to continue, touch the yellow dossier, and learn more about Kristallnacht through the recollections of eyewitnesses.” A layer of mediation between visitor and event is erected by this frame. It is predicated on a temporal distance from this past event. You are not invited to live through or experience Kristallnacht, nor are you positioned to be a Jewish victim. Rather, you are directed to move through the destroyed environment, listen to aural testimony, and report on it after the fact.
FIGURE 4.4 The newsroom entrance to the Witnessing History: Kristallnacht virtual exhibit.
Clicking on the yellow folder initiates the movement to 1938 Germany: the back wall of the newsroom disappears, and in its place appears an outdoor street scene. A text box explains, “As you leaf through the accounts of the eyewitnesses [contained in the folder], your mind takes you back to that night . . . And you begin to reconstruct the events of Kristallnacht through their stories.” And yet even though you enter as a reporter, you do in fact enter the space. You literally step from the floor of the newsroom onto the cobblestone streets of an unnamed town, which functions as a composite of many towns in the German Reich in early November 1938. The evening light is haunting. A text box tells you that “this environment was inspired by the stories of Kristallnacht survivors” and invites you to “explore and touch everything.” Once you are on the street, there is no longer easy access to the newsroom. It is dark, and there are no precise instructions for where to turn. You sense that the unexpected might happen at any moment. The street is littered with books and papers. Some walls have graffiti in German; clicking on the writing renders a translation. In one place, the words read, “Ist in Dachau.” A box translates, “Is in Dachau,” and explains, “In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, more than 10,000 Jewish men were interned in Dachau, the first concentration camp founded by the Nazi government.”
As you move your avatar through the street, you are unsure of where to go or what you will see. Any open door may be entered, and lit signs and windows yield information. Entering the police station, prominently located near the center of this square, yields up moving real (rather than re-created) testimonies that are initiated by your avatar’s presence in the room. You hear accented voices explaining what the speakers’ experienced that night. One testimony bleeds into another. One woman recounts, “So my mother told me that my father was arrested and the circumstances under which he was arrested. He tried to hide in the attic, and the policeman came and said, ‘Look, I have to bring in a body. If he doesn’t come, I have to take you into custody.’ So my father gave himself up, and he was sent to Buchenwald. He was in Buchenwald for four weeks and was dismissed because he was a World War I veteran fighting for the German army, the German army. And the dismissal was under the condition that he would leave the country right away.”52 Other testimonies recount the men being taken away from the synagogue to concentration camps. A different voice describes two SS men holding the rabbi by either arm and a third cutting off his beard.53 What I want to emphasize here is that you are having a real experience in the virtual arena, but it is not an experience of Kristallnacht. It is an experience of hearing survivors talk about their experiences. A textbox entitled “The SS and the German Police” explains,
As the pogrom spread, units of the SS and Gestapo (Secret State Police), following [Reinhard] Heydrich’s instructions, arrested up to 30,000 Jewish males, and transferred most of them from local prisons to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps. Significantly, Kristallnacht marks the first instance in which the Nazi regime incarcerated Jews on a massive scale simply on the basis of their ethnicity. Hundreds died in the camps as a result of the brutal treatment they endured; most obtained release over the next three months on the condition that they begin the process of emigration from Germany. Indeed, the effects of Kristallnacht would serve as a spur to the emigration of Jews from Germany in the months to come.
When you exit the room, the testimonies cease. The experience of the room is in some ways evocative of the experience of reading the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman in that the voices sound authentic and real, and they conjure up a living, breathing person, but the visuals are rendered graphically, more surreal than real. In other words, there is friction between the stylized graphics and the realness and authenticity of the survivors’ accented voices. Much of the affective charge comes from the haunting quality of the testimonies.
Moving your avatar around a certain street corner, you come upon an illuminated store window—Strauss Markt. As you approach the window, testimonies begin to play: “Display windows had been broken . . . ink had been poured—there was yelling and screaming on the streets.” Suddenly the sound of glass breaking pierces the silence; the window shatters before your eyes. This is a shocking, jarring moment, a moment of the unexpected (see figure 4.5). You encounter, albeit in a mediated form, the shock and violence of the event, but, again, not exactly as a victim; you are still on the outside looking in. As with The Secret Annex Online, here you both do things and are compelled to process the things that happen to you. A text box explains, “During Kristallnacht, Nazi storm troopers smashed Jewish store windows, destroyed goods and carried out massive looting. The Nazis forced Jews to pay the costs of the violence perpetrated against them and banned Jews from gainful economic activity.” The combination of the actual voices and the artificial, highly stylized graphics creates a kind of dissonance—it suggests that the real experience is out of reach, but that a trace, perhaps even the spark that Benjamin described, remains.
FIGURE 4.5 Broken window in a Jewish neighborhood on Kristallnacht. From the Witnessing History: Kristallnacht virtual exhibit.
Other sites you might visit are the embassy (where you learn of the experience of people trying to escape), a school that has been ransacked and from which Jewish children are later forbidden, a synagogue that is being burned, and a hiding place for Jews. To learn both about the hiding places and about the experience of Jews trying to hide, you enter the cramped lobby of a building with an old-fashioned elevator—touching the elevator initiates testimonies that describe the experience of hiding. You can enter the elevator and travel up to a hiding place itself. Inside the hiding place, you hear the testimony of a woman recalling how on that fateful evening her family went home and silently got into bed. In the middle of the night, the Nazis came pounding on the front door. She recalls the fear it instilled in her as a child, a fear, she says, “you can never forget.” She remembers that a neighbor eventually opened the door and asked the men what they were doing. They said they were looking for Jews, and she told them they were not home. They never knew if the neighbor did this to protect them or not.54 A text box later explains,
SA and Hitler Youth units throughout Germany and its annexed territories engaged in the destruction of Jewish-owned homes and businesses; members of many units wore civilian clothes to support the fiction that the disturbances were expressions of ‘outraged public reaction.’ The pogrom proved especially destructive in Berlin and Vienna, home to the two largest Jewish communities in the German Reich. Mobs of SA men roamed the streets, attacking Jews in their houses and forcing Jews they encountered to perform acts of public humiliation. Although murder did not figure in the central directives, Kristallnacht claimed the lives of at least 91 Jews between 9 and 10 November. Police records of the period document a high number of rapes and of suicides in the aftermath of the violence.
The conditions in the ransacked school explicitly testifies to what the experience was like for children. Voices explain that Jewish children were expelled from school, and the desks were heaped in the yard. The destruction happened on the night and early morning of November 8 and 9; one survivor recalls that Jewish children were told, “there’s no school for you today, go home.” Like all of these virtual sets, the school room is recognizable as a school room but is not literally modeled on an existing schoolroom; rather, it is an imaginative reconstruction. What happens when your avatar enters the room is that a translation occurs. There is an attempt at meaningful transmission, but it is not literal. You see rooms destroyed, but the rooms are graphically rendered, not photographic (see figure 4.6). There is an imaginative translation at work.
Like the USHMM visit itself, this online exhibit ends with a set of video testimonies from survivors; visitors are then prompted to record their responses on a public comment board. As Kapp and O’Driscoll suggest, “A cursory reading of the public comment board is more than sufficient to convince anyone that the Holocaust Museum succeeded in delivering a kinetic, intellectual, and visceral learning experience for participants.” Importantly, the fact that these artifacts and testimonies are accessed in a virtual historical setting, as opposed to simply on a webpage, enabled them “to be woven into an immersive experience that allowed participants to viscerally feel the connection between history, personal action, and place.”55 Clearly, visitors to the Second Life exhibit were moved; there is a strong affective dimension. One visitor wrote, “I was at the DC Holocaust Museum last year, and hate to say—the noise and crowds somewhat diminished the powerful effect of this for me. but this, at my own pace, in my own space—wow. perhaps the most emotionally powerful place I’ve seen on Second Life. THANK YOU for your awesome work.”56 By way of conclusion, Kapp and O’Driscoll state, “it is hoped that visitors gain a better understanding of what it was like for those who experienced the tragic events of Kristallnacht in reality.”57 But I think they overlook a key aspect of the exhibit’s design: the experience of the exhibit is an experience of the past’s mediation. We approach it as outsiders, which we always have to do when we approach the past. This is not to say that the experience is not affecting—it most certainly can be. But the exhibit does not try to re-create the experience of living through that dreadful night. This is important for ethical reasons—it does not allow visitors to wallow in the victims’ pain—but also for the purpose of producing historical knowledge and fostering historical thinking: there is a re-creation of sorts here, but the visitor is made self-conscious of that project from beginning to end.
FIGURE 4.6 A ransacked room in the Witnessing History: Kristallnacht exhibit.
The experience of this website is multisensorial in the ways I have described as well as clearly visceral and affecting for visitors in the way the staff at the Holocaust Museum intended it to be. But it should not be considered immersive, at least in the straightforward sense. The strategies that work to make the experience affecting, that attempt to create a sense of proximity to this episode in the past, can never quite overcome the profound distance between visitor and the actual event, and that, I think, is a good thing. The original is not present. What we experience is a translation. There is an important tension between our affective, experiential engagement with the site, which makes it feel real, and our awareness of it as a mediation, a representation. Considering it a translation foregrounds the distance between visitor and the history represented, but also the possibility that a spark, something vital, some meaningful transmission, has occurred.
. . .
So what kind of constructive and perhaps even politicohistorical work can be accomplished by a virtual museum or installation such as the ones I have described? I conclude by way of an ongoing research project at the University of Manitoba, Embodying Empathy,58 which aims to assess “the ability of new digital technologies to represent experiences of suffering in contemporary museums.”59 The members of the research team—composed of scholars working in the fields of philosophy of history and representations of atrocity, English, psychology, sociology, and cognitive science—share an interest in the possibilities opened up by digital technologies “to assist in forging empathetic and ethically engaged communities from those who witness, interact, and attempt to come to terms with representations of suffering in museum contexts.” In other words, they are interested in exploring quite specifically the political dimensions of the particular kinds of affective engagements made possible by the construction of online spaces where visitors interact with and engage complicated aspects of the past. As in the Kristallnacht installation on Second Life and The Secret Annex Online, here too the researchers are building a web platform comprising “several virtual spaces based on real buildings and peopled with characters and narratives which blend ‘found’ archival testimony and fiction.” Although their particular interest is the history of Canada’s Aboriginal Residential Schools, dormitories run by the church and aimed at separating Aboriginal children from their families and traditions, their methodology would be applicable to other sites of atrocity. As their prototype depicts, a visitor enters a dormitory, which yields up objects most associated with the residential schools: “a school desk, a chair, a writing slate and a reel-to-reel tape recorder, as well as two of the spaces most often associated with the IRS [Indian Residential Schools]: the schoolroom and the dormitory.” Like the other sites, this one, too, relies on the logic of encounter. For instance, when you pass a reel-to-reel tape recorder, an oral history begins to play (see figure 4.7).
FIGURE 4.7 Reel-to-reel player in a virtual Aboriginal Residential School created for the Embodying Empathy project website. (Courtesy of Struan Sinclair and Dylan Fries)
Importantly, as in the Kristallnacht exhibit, in the Residential Schools exhibit you are visiting a school after the fact. What is left are traces; the voices are mediated by the tape recorder. You hear a girl’s voice describing, “On my first day in boarding school, my dad delivered my brother, older sister, and me to this huge, cold, cucumber-smelling place that chilly, September day in 1949 or 1950. I remember the priest and a couple of nuns pulling us apart as we desperately tried to cling on to one another. I swear those nuns look like identical twins. Little did I know that I would not see my brother again for another ten months, not up close anyway. Once in a while I would manage to get a glimpse of him from a distance, but we were never allowed to interact.” As she speaks, you hear children’s voices in the background and muffled sounds that evoke a cafeteria. As in the Kristallnacht exhibit, some of the objects in the room function as portals into other connected story rooms. Instead of taking on an avatar to enter the world, you enter as yourself. But once there, as the video prototype attests, you encounter “fully animated interactive characters drawn from our archive of oral histories.” In many ways, this research project aims to harness the power of these digital technologies to produce both historical knowledge and empathy. It suggests, as I have, that affective engagement can be a powerful tool in the production of certain kinds of historical knowledges and that the online experience can function ontologically as experience even as it looks and feels artificial. Indeed, its obvious constructedness is part of what makes the knowledge production and empathy possible—you have a real experience of engagement with some aspect of the past, but it is clearly a mediated experience, not the event itself.
What I hope to have shown in this chapter is that virtual sites can make possible a real experience that you, the visitor, nevertheless understand to be qualitatively different from the experiences of the people from the past whose histories you are learning. You do not move through the annex in some simplistic or straightforward way as Anne. Rather, she speaks to you. The virtualness of this experience and the stylized graphic depictions of the space preclude the possibility of thinking you are living the past, that you could ever occupy Anne’s place or fully understand her experience. You are a visitor to that space, made to see it, to be moved by and in it, and, most importantly, to think about it—but not as Anne. Similarly, in the Kristallnacht installation, the presence of an avatar and the use of a narrative frame—you enter as a reporter—insist on the fundamentally different nature of your experience vis-à-vis the atrocity from that of a person who lived through Kristallnacht. Furthermore, there is the assertion of a temporal break: you are in the present looking back. And yet these sites’ powerful affective qualities and the sense of inhabiting and engaging in a multisensuous way with the space of the digital environment are crucially important for the embodied translation and the kind of meaningful transmission of that spark that I have described. The story of Anne Frank is a story about a very specific place at a very specific time. It is a story about a series of rooms and what one girl did and thought there—which sheds a glimmer of light on a particular episode of Jewish life in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Curators and museum designers cannot control the meanings that visitors will make from their exhibits, but, like the researchers working on the Embodying Empathy project, they can create the conditions in which past atrocities can become part of a usable past.
