#everynamecounts

Reviewer: Brian Millen

Link: https://enc.arolsen-archives.org/en/

Data and Sources

• Participants in the projects are working with photographs and digital scans of materials found in the Arolsen Archives. The kinds of materials that are currently available to digitize are Buchenwald Prisoner Registration Forms, Buchenwald personal effects cares, Dachau Change Reports.

Processes

• The materials that are to be made part of the digital memorial are already Digital indexed in the Arolsen Archives in the form of photographs and scans. These photos and scans are to be turned into text-based data including information from the images that will make the database searchable and useful for researchers, families, and memorialization. This work is being crowdsourced, allowing the public to get involved in the digital cataloging of the information from the documents. A Zooniverse project was set up to accomplish this. The Zooniverse platform will serve participants an image on the left with fields on the right side of the page corresponding to the relevant information #everynamecounts is looking for from the materials. The central names on these documents have already been indexed digitally, but there is other information on these documents, such as occupation, hometown, and names of family members that have not been indexed yet. Archivists involved with the project emphasize the importance of this information, especially that of the family members. These documents might be the only available trace of those individuals, whose status might thus be unknown as of now.
• Participants are given reference materials that help with things like the German language itself, as well as with identifying the kinds of documents. These reference materials help volunteers who are not academics take place in the work.
• Each document must be indexed three times before it makes it into the memorial. I assume this is for verification purposes.

Presentation

• The #everynamecounts digital memorial is a work still currently underway. It appears that the project is in a second phase of sorts. It began in January of 2020. In February 2021, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, more documents (including more kinds of documents) were made available to index.
• From 1/21/21 to 1/27/21, a multi-media installation containing names of and information about victims of Nazi persecution that were projected onto the facade of the French Embassy in Berlin. This visualization of the data was produced in collaboration with media artists from the design studio URBANSCREEN.

Digital Tools

• Zooniverse

Languages

• The website is accessible in English, German, Polish, and Spanish. It is unknown what languages the memorial itself will be available in.

Review

#everynamecounts is an initiative undertaken by the Arolsen Archives, also known as the International Center on Nazi Persecution. It is an organization with a comprehensive archive of information on 17.5 millions victims and survivors of National Socialism. It started as the Central Tracing Bureau in 1943 as a way for the British Red Cross to set up a registration and tracing service for missing persons. The International Refugee Organization took it over in 1947 and renamed it the International Tracing Service. From its inception, it has existed as way to find missing persons, clarify people’s fates, providing family members with information, and providing information for compensation and pension matters. Its current legal basis for the organization, now called the Arolsen Archives, was established by the Berlin Treaties of December 2011, which regularize the funding of the archives.

#everynamecounts is a project which undertakes the creation of a digital memorial for the victims of the Nazi Regime. The claimed goal of this memorial is to remember and commemorate those victims, as well as to draw attention to discrimination, racism, and antisemitism today. In a video on the project’s About page, the director of the #everynamecounts Floriane Azoulay claims that the “reasons for persecution are not history.” There are two related objectives at work here. One is that that of creating the digital memorial, which will aid remembrance of Nazi victims, especially for a younger audience. The second is the means of accomplishing the first, which is a digitization of materials that have yet to be indexed digitally or were only partially digitized.

It is of course impossible to say whether or not the project achieves its objects, since the project is incomplete. But I will mention a few things about its stated goals and the means through which it is going about achieving them.

There are two aspects of this project that I think are interesting on the grounds that they provide for two necessities called for by the historian and memory scholar Wulf Kansteiner. In his essay The Holocaust in the 21st Century: Digital anxiety, transnational cosmopolitanism, and never again genocide without memory, he describes the state of Holocaust remembrance institutions and their inability to reach a younger audience in a digital context. The anxiety surrounding historical revisionism and disrespecting the victims of the genocide prevent them from going outside of established standardized norms of collective memory in order to appropriate new digital tools and methods. The result is that less people are engaging with the history. An important consequence of this, according to Kansteiner, is that, due to this lack of engagement with the violences of the past, people are less equipped today to notice the conditions for totalitarianism and to will its prevention.

#everynamecounts’s most recent campaign, as part of its second wave of crowdsourcing, is directly targeted at Gen Z, the current generation of 16-25 year olds, and getting them involved with scholarship involved with Nazi persecution. The Arolsen Archives commissioned a study conducted by the Rheingold Institute which found that members of Gen Z are more interested in the Holocaust than their parents’ generation(s). Furthermore, they found that studying injustices of the past raised Gen Z students’ awareness of current social issues. This attacks the problem Kansteiner raises on several.

First, it gets young people interested in the Holocaust via the production of a digital interface. What’s interesting is that the Rheingold study showed that young people already have an interest in learning about the Holocaust. This affirms Kansteiner’s point that it is the fault of the dominant Holocaust memory institutions that young people are not engaging. The young people’s drive to learn is there. They have simply not been afforded the opportunity to do so in a way conducive to how their brains have been formed by their technological milieu. Additionally, although the approach is different than the video game-centric one proposed by Kansteiner, it is similar insofar as it gives young folks the chance to engage with history in an active and empowered way. By being able to actually take part in the production of an archive of data, students are not the passive consumers of information, but are taking place in the construction of a preindividual milieu necessary for knowledge (I am very careful not to call this work knowledge-production, because it is not). Lastly, it guards against the threat of historical revisionism that the main current of Holocaust remembrance is so worried about. By engaging with primary source materials from the period, by engaging with information of real people who are victimized, it connects young people to past that they did not live directly, but that they nonetheless inherit. By engaging with these tertiary retentions which document the events of this horrifying historical situation, students have access to collective secondary retentions which provide them with collective secondary protentions, which are anticipations of the future based on such retentions of the past. This can help students build knowledge that equips them to be mature responsible citizens that can face the potential injustices of the day. However, as is my critique with a lot of memory studies work, this information-accumulation is not enough on its own. We are going to require transformations in education that help our students make this information work, that is, turn this information into knowledge as therapeutic prescriptions for the present. Hannah Arendt argues the origins of totalitarianism can be found in thoughtlessness, so in our own post-truth era, students must be taught how to think. This is how we can prevent something like the Holocaust from happening again. Without it, this information remains lifeless and subject to entropy, spurring social entropy of all kinds.