Pokemon Go(es) to Auschwitz

While I think I'm wrapping up my time writing about the Holocaust (final book deadline is 9/21, release date is late 2016 or early 2017) I can't stay away from some stories.

Who remembers the "selfies at Auschwitz" controversy of 2014? Or from 20 years before that the "someone laughed during Schindler's List" controversy? I'm going to touch on these very briefly in order to contextualize the current Pokemon Go kerfuffle. TL:DR is teenagers sometimes act in ways that make their elders all judgy. But for reals, what they're doing isn't that different than what oldsters do. But games are maybe different than selfies.

I've actually long wanted to comment on the incident where "69 students were evicted from the theater because some of them laughed and talked while Holocaust horrors were on screen."  This actually prompted a visit from director Steven Spielberg to the Oakland high school responsible for taking their class to see Schindler's List. There are several good defenses listed in the articles above. The one I want to focus on, however, is the idea of an inappropriate emotional response. Of course, we shouldn't laugh when someone gets shot on screen, right? And extra, extra we shouldn't laugh when it's a Holocaust victim, yes? Well, yes. But that doesn't mean that these students' behavior was worth universal derision. If we think about the ways in which emotional responses are policed within American culture, especially for boys/men, is it really surprising that laughter replaces distress in a moment like this? Particularly in a large group where performing masculinity is essential to one's cultural cache? The argument I want to make here is that both the laughter and the selfies are moments where individuals try to process their emotional experience within (restrictive) cultural norms.

So, flash forward 20 years. Can we have this same discussion when facing the reality that kids take selfies at Auschwitz? What's the emotional response (and record thereof) that is appropriate when visiting a death camp? I want to briefly consider the following images, gathered from a Google image search of various combinations of tourist/picture/portrait/Auschwitz.

A sunny day, a vacation picture, a death camp on the horizon.

A family portrait with crowds of tourists, a location that could be anywhere.

So...are these images acceptable because they are portraits, rather than selfies? Is it the presumed egotism of the selfie that causes the controversy? These groups aren't smiling or making the dreaded duck face. But neither are they clearly expressing shock and distress, the presumed "appropriate" reaction.

Photographer sees you, seeing and photographing Auschwitz.

What about that one time when basically every European major league football team visited Auschwitz while wearing matching uniforms? And were then photographed? Pictured  is team Italy, but you can find pictures of team Sweden and team Germany as well. Not everyone wore warm-up suits, but they did all match, and were clearly there for some promotional learning.

Alamy Stock Photo #G7PBJM

Or how about an Auschwitz stock photo? 

What I'm getting at here is that there isn't a good way to photograph oneself at a place like Auschwitz. The impulse is to track and process our experiences in all of these images, or to imagine and purchase what that experience might be like in the case of the stock photo. How are selfies different?

The one that broke the internet.

The photo above got the most traction, with articles featured in USA Today, The Washington Post, and others. It's actually a perfect storm for those who want to attack one or many of the following: teenagers, young women, social media users, emoji users, tourists, people who like pink. Yet Princess B here is doing nothing so very different than the portraits seen above, tracking, processing, and representing our experience of a terrible place. Teenagers do it differently and more publicly than their predecessors, possibly. But I'm willing to bet there are a slew of photo albums and slide carousels that hold smiling death camp visitors, processing and tracking their experience as well.

This one, including the tag "Arbeit Mach Freiiiiiiiiiiiii" faced its own unique derision
as it came from a group of Israeli teenagers.

The image above looks a little like it could be a boy-band album cover. The faces have been politely blurred (whcih maybe I should have done here as well, but I'm commenting on facial expressions, so...) Yet this doesn't seem that different than many of the images of footballers participating in promotional tours of the death camp. 
In fact, a search of "tourists crying at Auschwitz" produces no significant image results. I'm not surprised. When I was busy crying in one of those reflection areas at the USHMM the last thing I wanted was a picture. Yet I may have photographed myself out front (may have even taken a selfie) before or after the visit, documenting that I was there.

Ah, but what of Pokemon Go at Auschwitz? Or at the USHMM? I don't like it. No, sir, I don't. But I'm trying to figure out why I feel differently about this. Isn't Pokemon just another way of processing the world? How is it different than a selfie?

Pokemon @ Auschwitz 7/11/16

It's not like I can claim "distraction" as the reason why it's bad. After all, posting to social media is in it's own way distracting. Everyone will pretty much take a peek at what their friends are doing if they log in to post a selfie. Our focus slips. away from the space in front of us and towards the world of the interwebs, and friends, and others' selfies. So that's not it.

The mediation of memory is part of it. There's an anonymity to it that feels weird to me in a way that the selfie or uncomfortable laughter at Spielberg doesn't. I think the biggest problem, however, is tucked away in the slogan itself: "Gotta Catch 'Em All." Pokemon Go is an experience you have everywhere. Or can have, or try to have, as you pursue all of them. 

Memorials, by their very nature, are not everywhere spaces. They have been set aside in order to emphasize a particularity of experience. When you take a selfie at a memorial, you're still documenting a place and your relationship to it. When you catch a Pokemon, you mark an experience that you've had at a park, a grocery store, your neighbor's backyard, and then move on to the next one. It's not a process, but a pursuit. The mediation makes them one and the same, coupled with a sense of triumph that feels counterintuitive to the goals of the memorial. 

For the record, I'm not anti-Pokemon. Go forth and triumph. Just maybe not at Auschwitz. 

Hey-yo.

And because you made it all the way to the end, here's my best duck-face selfie (which is not very good, I kept laughing), in front of a disturbing painting in my living room. Still, while it references slavery and lynchings, my house is not a memorial to those things. So feel free to come catch a Wartorle over here.