Issue 4. War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Dieter De Bruyn
Dieter De Bruyn teaches Polish and Czech literature and culture in the Department of Slavic and East European Studies at Ghent University (Belgium), where he also obtained both his MA and PhD in East European languages and cultures. His publications on literary reflexivity and narrative unreliability in the works of Irzykowski, Schulz and Gombrowicz have appeared in edited volumes and journals including Symposium, Russian Literature and Slavica Gandensia. His current research focuses on artistic and (popular) cultural representations (in film, music, comics, literature, memoirs, popular culture, on the Internet, etc.) of the 1944 Warsaw Rising.
4.3 World War 2.0: Commemorating War and Holocaust in Poland Through Facebook
The Internet seems to have become the area where instances of individual and collective remembrance, of private and public commemoration, and of memory and postmemory intersect in a new and effective way. This article explores two Polish examples of World War II and Holocaust commemoration that have recently been issued on Facebook: the Warsaw Rising commemorative campaign and the educational project on the young Holocaust victim Henio Zytomirski. As the analysis demonstrates, what determines the value of such online projects is their performative effectiveness. The examination of both examples aims to contribute to the current debate on cultural memory, in which the focus is increasingly on the dynamical and processual character of remembering, rather than on memory as a static product.
Language of contribution: English