Over the last years a new medium for representing the Holocaust has appeared: digital reconstructions of concentration and extermination camps in virtual reality. Thus, the Italian developer 101% is working on the simulation “Witness: Auschwitz”, that will allow users to relive ‘everyday’ life in Auschwitz. The Israeli project “Fragments” combines virtual testimonies with a VR simulation of the survivors’ stories. The Polish Real Invented Studios are working on a reconstruction of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the startup Stichbridge from Pittsburgh is offering a “Journey through the Camps”. The simulations stand at the beginning of a new, digital-somatic phase of Holocaust memory in which the body of the recipient becomes part of the memorial process through immersive, affective and somatic strategies. VR will allow foreign memories to be relived as proper memories – or at least that is the idea. However, although they use a new medium, the VR simulations are not developed in a vacuum. In my paper I will analyse how different memorial discourses and memorial media converge in their development. For one, the VR simulations are discussed rather emotionally amongst actors of cultural memory at the moment. Some see them as crossing an ethical line. The medium with its proximity to computer games, is considered to be unfit to represent a topic as grave as the Holocaust. Moreover, the immersive aspect of VR, allowing people to viscerally live through situations that they might never encounter in real life, is seen as a betrayal to the actual memories of the survivors. Other actors, primarily the developers, consider VR to be a medium that will allow to compensate the deficiencies of other memorial media. Paradoxically, they use more or less the same arguments as the critics. For them, VR, because it is a new medium and because of its proximity to computer games, can be used to reach a new audience of digital natives. As an “empathy machine” (Milk), VR it is also considered as the perfect medium to give people a “prosthetic memory” (Landsberg), making them live through the memory of somebody else. Nevertheless, developers are of course aware of the criticism and both the discourse of VR as an “empathy machine” and the criticism of VR to allow experience of something that is beyond representation converge in the visual strategies that are chosen. As I will show, the VR simulations refer to a long tradition of visualisations of the Holocaust. They remediate photography, films, exhibitions or artworks. At the latest since Theodor W. Adorno’s so-called „dictum“ (1951) all representations of the Holocaust oscillate between the need to communicate the history of the Holocaust (Erinnerungsgebot) and the realisation that this communication cannot – and should not – be complete (Bilderverbot). The the developers of VR simulations try to offer a representation of the camps that is as compete as it can be. However, they also shy away from representing the most drastic aspects of life in the camp – such as, most importantly, torture, murder and death.
