23-24 May 2022 | Bruno Kreisky Forum, Vienna, Austria

From May 23 to May 24 2022, EHRI Partner the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, together with the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck, is hosting the first EHRI-AT Conference. It will be dedicated to “Connected Histories. Memories and Narratives of the Holocaust in Digital Space“. The programme is now online. We would kindly like to invite you to attend the conference and register here. Please feel free to share the invitation amongst your networks. The conference languages will be German and English.

Transnational Holocaust research, commemoration, and dissemination forms the mission of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). Its biggest challenge is the broad dispersal of original sources and disciplinary knowledge across many institutions. Since 2010, EHRI has been working to overcome this fragmentation and dislocation of the Holocaust’s legacy and to connect historical materials, institutions, and researchers. The subsequent opportunity to research, interlink, mediatise, and present digital data in virtual space has resulted in new research paradigms: Holocaust research and its dissemination can now be considered transnational, transcultural, digital, and interdisciplinary. EHRI has adopted the processes of digital transformation from the fields of digital history and digital humanities and regards itself as the engine of new digital methods and tools. Aside from exploiting the potentials afforded by mobile technology, EHRI is perceived as a scholarly infrastructure engaged in the long-term, sustainable networking of diverse expertise from the field of Holocaust research and dissemination, crossing disciplinary and institutional boundaries and going beyond the various politics and logics of national histories. We warmly invite proposals for the first EHRI-AT conference, entitled Connected Histories. Memories and Narratives of the Holocaust in Digital Space.

The World Wide Web and digitisation have proven to be irreplaceable instruments for the history of the Holocaust and its commemoration. Its technical potential constitutes the foundation of what Marianne Hirsch in 2012 termed “postmemory’s archival turn”. It has become an indispensable tool also for the mobilisation of the most varied social and ethnic groups engaged in public history. The example of the Holocaust impressively shows the paradigmatic shift taking place in the humanities. Memorial institutions today use the Internet on a very high professional level, as a site of self-presentation and representation and as a discussion forum for increasingly international, transcultural, and interdisciplinary audiences.

At the same time, it is not always established institutions that are using the technical possibilities of the internet to their fullest extent. Creative and sometimes controversially discussed new forms of narrating the history of the Holocaust or digitally remediated forms of Holocaust commemoration are emerging amongst individuals and groups who do not work within the realm of large memorial sites, museums, and archives. Such “private” representations have become especially popular following the boom of so-called Social Media. The use of the Internet and Social Media demonstrates – also within the context of the Holocaust – that new structures of decision-making have arisen in society that exceed the potential of traditional mass media, alongside new public forms and forums that work differently, disseminate content differently, activate people differently, and thereby not only generate a passive reception, but on the contrary, live from the broad participation of the public.

Thus, the international conference will focus on digital space as an abstract and unlimited archive for the mediation of the Holocaust. 

Visit the conference website.