‘Yolocaust’ tourists are shamed online over selfies at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial
Built as a solemn place of reflection, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is an undulating sea of stone blocks lined up like so many coffins on a sprawling patch of central Berlin. But in the look-at-me-age of Instagram and Facebook, it has also become something else.
The perfect backdrop for a selfie.
At a place honouring the memory of the Nazis’ victims, young laughing visitors hop from block to block, searching for the best angles. Some pose sensually atop the slabs for eye-candy shots on dating websites. One man had his picture taken between the stones while juggling.
Then someone said “Stop!”
The effort went viral across Europe and beyond, becoming a stinging example of how record numbers of global tourists - particularly the young - have stripped revered sites of their gravitas.
“Look, this is not a place for fun selfies, and people need to know this,” he said. “No, it’s not ‘OK.’”
An up-and-coming comedian - and the descendant of a Holocaust survivor - Shapira said he has watched for years as visitors treated the memorial with disrespect. He put his project together, he said, after a neo-Nazi website ran a piece delighting in the selfie craze and what it called Berlin’s “hoax monument.”
During a school soccer match, he said, other kids teased him, warning he’d be sent to a concentration camp if he didn’t score a goal. He satirised his fate in a best-selling book roughly translated from German as “Tell It Like it Is: How I Became the Most German Jew in the World.”
But there should, he said, be limits to irreverence.
“The Holocaust is one of them,” he said.
The Yolocaust project went viral, and most of the original 12 photos he started with have since been taken down at the subject’s request. Most of those, he said, have also offered apologies.
“Sometimes you just need to give people a little push, and they get it,” he said.
“If he wasn’t a Jew, one would have condemned him for this,” the author Mirna Funk wrote in Zeit Online.
But the selfie obsession in recent years, critics say, appears to have pushed the problem to another level. During a visit to the memorial this week, tourists had written their names and messages including “I heart Berlin” into the snow on some of the lower slabs. Between the blocks, Louis, a 27-year-old Colombian tourist, had just finished taking a photo of himself with a selfie stick.
When asked if he felt some people might find that inappropriate, he quickly replied “I totally agree. This is a place that people should respect - I apologise,” before running off to his tour group.