Transparent, the Emmy-nominated TV series about a 68-year-old grandfather who comes out as a trans woman to her dysfunctional-boho family, doesn’t only dissect gender, but Jewishness. After binge-watching it, I felt compelled to ask my Oma - a European word for grandmother - more about my family history. I knew my German grandfather was forced to leave university when he was 21. Him and his family - butchers who had literally sold pork to the Nazis - left soon after, to Israel, Chicago or Botswana. I knew my grandmother left Europe in 1930, but still had relatives back in Amsterdam. She told me that after the war, her family discovered who had died and how. One story sticks out: her aunt’s children were taken by the Gestapo when she was out buying food for them. Distraught, and presciently aware of the impossibility of her children’s return, she gassed herself. Oma told me: ‘When you found out someone died, you always hoped it was of natural causes and not in that dreadful way.’ My direct antecedents were lucky to escape the Holocaust’s darkest chasms, but trauma still threaded through their lives.
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, and along with thousands - hopefully millions - others, I’ll be thinking of all the people cruelly taken and those who never even got to exist. A modern method of remembrance is Yolocaust. It’s a portmanteau of banter-ful ‘yolo’ and ‘Holocaust’ in which six million Jews were forcibly removed from their homes, put into death camps and killed, buried in mass graves. Five million others (LGBT people, Communists, Socialists, Roma Gypsies, the disabled…) faced the same end. Yolocaust borrows wanky selfies of 12 people who have used Berlin’s slickly-designed Holocaust Memorial as a backdrop for social media photos full of yoga poses, head-stands or cheerful grins. These are placed over images of mass graves. So the yogi isn’t just doing dancer's pose on the memorial, but on the emaciated bodies of hundreds of corpses.
Shahak Shapira, the German-Israeli artist who designed Yolocaust, provided an email address: undouche.me@yolocaust.de so that anyone in the selfies could request their removal. As of last night, Shapira closed the site after receiving 2.5 million hits. A statement reads: ‘The crazy thing is that the project actually reached all 12 people whose selfies were presented. Almost all of them understood the message, apologised and decided to remove their selfies from their personal Facebook and Instagram profiles’. To Shapira, by reaching the ‘douches’ via thousands, the project has been ‘a success’.
Maybe I’m a liberal handwringer, or perhaps my moral compass has been dragged rightwards by toady populists transforming the Western world into a retrogressive place of isolationist nationalism. It could be that I’ve inherited my grandmother’s preference for the bad-bad thing over the worst-bad thing. But part of me thinks that anyone documenting the Holocaust Memorial can’t be that bad? I rage at idiots in Liverpool Street station who sit on the Kindertransport memorials chomping their greasy tubs of McDonald’s, unaware of the statues’ purpose. But Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial is a destination, you don’t get there by accident.
Where you can accidentally end up is forgetfulness. A striking element of Transparent, of Cabaret before it, about all other smart and respectful depictions of genocide, is that they show what life was like before, when things were normal. They show Darfur, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Armenia - when things were normal. Weimar Germany wasn’t normal. It was progressive. The Nazis weren’t helping a knuckle-dragging nation get organised, they were patriarchal racist thugs there to set the clock backwards on tolerance, integration and radical ways of interpreting identity. The Nazis perverted modern technologies to manifest their hate, starting with rhetoric. Remind you of anyone?
It’s a theme of the hypocritical far-right to call liberals ‘Nazis' for being so strict on tolerance: as the Women’s March sign put it ‘Feminazis Against Actual Nazis’, but Nazis exist. They’re Richard B. Spencer, the self-proclaimed ‘alt-right leader’ who shrieks ‘heil Trump’ after describing fantasies of a white ethno-state. They literally endorsed Trump. And fibres of their intolerance have got caught in the mechanisms of our own democracy.
The third stage on the Path to Genocide is Dehumanisation, and Trump got there by calling refugees ‘ravages’. His wall might soon count as Preparation, stage six. But there are several countries already on Genocide Watch’s ‘emergency’ list. We owe it to them to learn what their normality was. We can and should learn what happened, revising our knowledge to stop stereotypes embedding, being careful not to glean everything from the internet, a place far-right hate can prop up entire election campaigns. But we must also document our normality, what joy is, what freedom is, what people dicking around at memorials look like. Nothing’s ever going to look quite like the Holocaust, but if the world we live in shifts to looks similar, even remotely so, we need to notice how strange it is, and say so: write to our MPs, confront hatred when we see it, stick up for the oppressed. We can’t just say how much worse things were before, we must stop those horrors from happening ever again.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.