If a Tree Fell in a Forest

Who shapes the
image of a former
concentration camp?

A Mirrored Image

Should memorials
only look back?

Redpilled

Do places
carry ideologies?

77 circles

A Mirrored Image

Redpilled

77 circles

Redpilled is a story about the spread of alt-right ideology and its close correlation with the global rise of meme culture. Told from the perspective of Wojak (lit. soldier)— a hugely popular meme character known for its versatile ability to lend itself to a number of human stereotypes – the work delves into the dangerous humour and fascination with violence perpetuated by memes. Throughout the work, references are made to recent terror attacks, such as the Christchurch shooting, drawing a direct connection between the seemingly harmless online environment of nihilism and its violent ‘real-life’ consequences.

If meme humour seems innocent at a first glance, it is because it is designed to. Kickstarting mildly racist, misogynist and antisemitic jokes prepares the ground for ideas seen as extreme to slowly enter mainstream political discourse. Through their massive appeal to younger generations, memes are increasingly being used as a gateway drug — an effective tool for spreading elements of alt-right ideology.

The term meme (from the Greek mimema, ‘imitated’) was first introduced in 1976 by the British biologist Richard Dawkins, who thought of memes as the cultural parallel to biological genes, in control of their own reproduction. Their comic element is established around a fixed set of characters such as Wojak, Pepe the Frog, Doge, Overly Attached Girlfriend, or Trollface. Like memes themselves, these characters undergo continuous evolution. Wojak, a character drawn using Microsoft Paint, was initially launched as a relatable ‘I know that feel, bro’ guy with a warm facial expression, and it evolved over time to include the categories of doomer, zoomer and boomer. Although these all parody their respective generations of Millennials, Gen-Z and Baby boomers, the narratives are generally told from the perspective of doomers with a dismissive attitude towards boomers, as epitomized in the expression ‘ok boomer’. A doomer, typically male, is the archetype of nihilism and despair. He is a victim of different hardships with a fatalist attitude towards global issues such as climate change and overpopulation. His common fantasy is to rise above the ‘normies’ after being enlightened or ‘redpilled’. This expression, which originated on the anonymous 4chan imageboard website, is a reference to the 1999 movie The Matrix. Shortly after its first appearance, it was adopted by far-right political subcultures, gradually coming to mean that a person has been disillusioned about reality, often radicalised in some way.

Which different interpretations of the Holocaust exist in today’s European population? Who and what shapes the image and the legacy of a former concentration camp? Spoken word artist Onias Landveld and filmmaker Jakob Ganslmeier address some of these issues in their collaborative video A Mirrored Image.

Ganslmeier grew up in Dachau, Germany, close to the former concentration camp which is now a memorial centre, while Landveld grew up in Suriname (later in the Netherlands) and had never visited a concentration camp memorial before. ‘My imagination was trained by Hollywood’, Landveld says in the piece, referring to the numerous representations and mediations of the Holocaust he consumed in his youth. In this work, which was created at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial in Germany, where little of the former camp remains to be seen, Ganslmeier asked Landveld to put his imagination of WWII camps into words. The crimes of colonialism directed his imagination of the atrocities committed by the Nazis when roaming the empty spaces of Bergen-Belsen and the still-active military training grounds surrounding it: ‘My imagination is black’.

The resulting work brings together their radically different perspectives while opening up new questions: What is the relationship between the Holocaust and post-colonial discourse? Can the two eventually be brought into dialogue?

A Mirrored Image and spoken word poetry

Amanda Gorman (22) impressed many worldwide when she read her poem The Hill We Climb at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration in Washington on January 20, 2021. Only two weeks before, on January 6, pro-Trump rioters had stormed the Capitol building. Gorman, whose work examines themes of race and racial justice in America, felt she couldn't "gloss over" the events of the attack in her piece, nor of the previous few years.

Hearing Gorman speak, and seeing her perform, may have been the first encounter with spoken word poetry for many across the globe, an experience that will not easily be forgotten. In A Mirrored Image, spoken word poetry embodied by Onias Landveld, is to be heard and witnessed in person. The memorised texts need to be said aloud, to be performed. Recitation, wordplay, repetition, comparison, and alliterations characterise the poems that are frequently serving as vehicles for social justice, politics, race, and community. Voices and bodies are poetic tools: body language, hand gestures, eye contact, pronunciation, intonation, and voice inflection, are key to the connection of the artist with his/her audience. Rhyme is not a necessity, rhythm is: elements of folk music, jazz or hip-hop enhance the presentation. The text takes its quality not from how it appears on a page but from phonaesthetics, the aesthetics of sound. Spoken word is part of an ancient oral artistic tradition, dating back from well before the print was available.

No inside photographic records exist from the years between 1940 and 1945 when the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was operational. In remembering we mainly rely on the oral testimonies of survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders. Onias Landveld’s poem that shapes A Mirrored Image, reflects his struggle with his particular implication in the crimes committed to humanity at Bergen-Belsen and beyond. In spoken words.

A MIRRORED IMAGE (2022)

Directed by Jakob Ganslmeier

Words and narration by Onias Landveld

Camera by Jakob Ganslmeier

Edited by Ana Zibelnik

Sound by Darius Timmer

Redpilled is a story about the spread of alt-right ideology and its close correlation with the global rise of meme culture. Told from the perspective of Wojak (lit. soldier)— a hugely popular meme character known for its versatile ability to lend itself to a number of human stereotypes – the work delves into the dangerous humour and fascination with violence perpetuated by memes. Throughout the work, references are made to recent terror attacks, such as the Christchurch shooting, drawing a direct connection between the seemingly harmless online environment of nihilism and its violent ‘real-life’ consequences.

If meme humour seems innocent at a first glance, it is because it is designed to. Kickstarting mildly racist, misogynist and antisemitic jokes prepares the ground for ideas seen as extreme to slowly enter mainstream political discourse. Through their massive appeal to younger generations, memes are increasingly being used as a gateway drug — an effective tool for spreading elements of alt-right ideology.

The term meme (from the Greek mimema, ‘imitated’) was first introduced in 1976 by the British biologist Richard Dawkins, who thought of memes as the cultural parallel to biological genes, in control of their own reproduction. Their comic element is established around a fixed set of characters such as Wojak, Pepe the Frog, Doge, Overly Attached Girlfriend, or Trollface. Like memes themselves, these characters undergo continuous evolution. Wojak, a character drawn using Microsoft Paint, was initially launched as a relatable ‘I know that feel, bro’ guy with a warm facial expression, and it evolved over time to include the categories of doomer, zoomer and boomer. Although these all parody their respective generations of Millennials, Gen-Z and Baby boomers, the narratives are generally told from the perspective of doomers with a dismissive attitude towards boomers, as epitomized in the expression ‘ok boomer’. A doomer, typically male, is the archetype of nihilism and despair. He is a victim of different hardships with a fatalist attitude towards global issues such as climate change and overpopulation. His common fantasy is to rise above the ‘normies’ after being enlightened or ‘redpilled’. This expression, which originated on the anonymous 4chan imageboard website, is a reference to the 1999 movie The Matrix. Shortly after its first appearance, it was adopted by far-right political subcultures, gradually coming to mean that a person has been disillusioned about reality, often radicalised in some way.

Glossary

Brenton Tarrant, the man responsible for two consecutive mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019), marked up his two AR-15 style riffles in handwritten text referencing extremist right-wing ideologies and previous terrorist attacks. Tarrant cited Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, Dylann Roof and others as an inspiration.

Some of the symbols that appeared on his riffles and clothing during the attacks:

  • 14

    Shorthand for Fourteen Words: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” coined by white supremacist David Lane.

  • The Iron Guard (Romanian: Garda de Fier) was a Romanian militant revolutionary fascist movement and a political party founded in 1927 by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.

  • The othala rune is part of several runic alphabet systems that were common in pre-Roman Europe. The Nazis adopted this rune, among others, into their symbology, eventually causing it to become a popular symbol among the white supremacists of today.

  • The black sun is another example of ancient European symbols appropriated by the Nazis in their attempt to invent an idealized "Aryan/Norse" heritage. Particularly the SS under Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler frequently used the black sun symbol, which has led neo-Nazis and other modern white supremacists to adopt such imagery.

  • 2083

    A nod to the lengthy manifesto of Anders Breivik.

  • Feliks Kazimierz Potocki

    Participated in the Vienna expedition in 1683 during the Great Turkish War and fought against Tatars and Turks in many battles.

  • Sebastiano Venier

    Doge of Venice who fought against the Turks during the Fourth Ottoman-Venetian War.

  • Alexandre Bissonnette

    The university student who burst into the Quebec City mosque on January 29, 2017, and opened fire on 40 people and four children.

  • Tours 732

    Battle of Tours, 732. Kingdom of the Franks defeats Al-Andalus Arabs in central France, halting their advance.

  • Vienna 1683

    Siege and Battle of Vienna, 1683. The farthest advance of Ottomans into Europe.

  • Turkofagos

    Literally: Turk-eater. The nickname was attributed to the Greek revolutionary Nikitaras or Nikitas Stamatelopoulos during the Greek Revolution and War of Independence of 1821 against the Ottoman occupation. The word is still used by modern Greeks to describe somebody with “deep-rooted hate” against their Turkish neighbors.

Other hate symbols and codes:

  • Since the early 1800s, the gesture increasingly became associated with the word “okay” or its abbreviation “ok.” Recently, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance, after being used by white supremacists to express the letters ‘wp,’ an abbreviation for ‘white power.’

  • 23/16

    Representing the twenty-third and sixteenth letters of the alphabet, W and P, meaning "White Power" or "White Pride”.

  • 9%

    The percentage of the world's population that is purportedly white.

  • 18

    Refers to the first and eighth letter of the alphabet, giving ‘AH’ or Adolf Hitler.

  • 88

    A white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler.” H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 stands for HH or Heil Hitler.

  • 311

    311 is a number used by Ku Klux Klan members to refer to the Klan. The eleventh letter of the alphabet is the letter “K”; thus 3 times 11 equals “KKK,” i.e., Ku Klux Klan.

  • 100%

    An expression of an individual’s pure Aryan or white roots.

  • Day of the rope

    A phrase referring to a fictional event in the neo-Nazi book The Turner Diaries. In the novel, the "Day of the Rope" is an event where mass lynchings took place against minorities, journalists, race-mixers, and politicians, all within the span of a day.

  • The Great Replacement

    The term was first used in the book Le Grand Replacement by the French writer Renaud Camus in 2011. It shares many features with other conspiracy theories claiming to reveal plans to usurp or pollute the ‘white race,’ most notably David Lane’s ‘white genocide conspiracy theory’ (ca. 1988).

REDPILLED (2023)

Written and directed by Jakob Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik

Animation by Oddkin

Sound by Daniel Hermann-Collini

Deforesting the area where a commander’s house stood is a violent act. After the British Army burned down the concentration camp buildings in 1945 to prevent the spread of diseases, nature started to reclaim the camp. With the exception of the commander’s house, the Bergen-Belsen grounds were made visible again between 2007 and 2011 as immense, open fields in a forest, often surrounded by NATO cannon roar. Nearly eight decades after the war, the bare ground on which the commander’s house once stood is in the process of being made accessible to the public too. At the request of the artist Jakob Ganslmeier, Bundeswehr reservists felled the trees in one of the first camp sections formerly associated with the perpetrators. The clearing resembles a giant wound. Can the discourse that this act provokes ever turn it into a healing scar?

What does the nothingness of this blank space tell us? Like the reservists who cut them down, the trees bore witness not to the crimes committed by the Nazis, but to a long silence in the period that followed. It is this silence that the blaring noise of the motor saws breaks so radically.

Talking about perpetrators is a disturbing and uncomfortable process that doesn’t necessarily bring relief. But refusing to acknowledge that there were perpetrators, and that without them there would be no victims, can only lead to an incomplete image of the camp’s history. 77 Circles may not offer an understanding of the place by means of projection — filling in the blanks — but it acknowledges its mere existence and attempts to make perpetrators part of the memorial’s experience and history at large.

The text was inspired by and at points adapted from the writing of the following authors: Tim Cole, Holocaust Landscapes (2016), Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence (2002), Walid Raad, I Might Die Before I Get a Rifle (2011), Dora Apel, War Culture and the Contest of Image (2012), Armando’s notion of 'guilty landscapes’ and the lyrics of Nick Cave.

Introduction by Dr. Elke Gryglewski

Director of Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen

A great deal of time now separates us from the National Socialist period. Our society is shaped by post-National Socialist, post-migratory and post-colonial perspectives. Looking at the perpetrators of National Socialist persecution can help us clarify responsibilities and draw conclusions for the present.

If we want to learn from history as a society, we must grapple with the perspectives of National Socialist perpetrators and bystanders. What drove them to ostracize, persecute and murder other people? How did they benefit from supporting and contributing to the political system? Why did so many people look away? These questions are often uncomfortable and sometimes painful because they can touch on personal family relationships.

The site of the commandant’s house in the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is representative of place that can symbolize perpetratorship – if that place has been revealed and prompts people to ask questions. What building stood here? Who was the commandant? What type of person was he? Was he one of the ‘ordinary men’ or one of the perpetrators who were given the opportunity to satisfy his sadistic streak in the National Socialist system? The project, therefore, picks up questions that apply to all of our work: What perspectives must be taken into account when dealing with the past so that we can comprehend the scale of the crimes and not overlook the victims? How can we reveal the ideological continuities after 1945 in order to raise awareness of the need for prevention and sensitisation to the antisemitic, racist, and far-right ideas that still exist?

The Houses of Darkness project offers the Memorial an opportunity to include visitors in a process that we have embarked upon as employees.

77 CIRCLES (2023)

Directed by Jakob Ganslmeier

Voice by Ana Zibelnik

Camera by Jakob Ganslmeier and Ana Zibelnik

Edited by Ana Zibelnik and Jakob Ganslmeier

Sound by Daniel Hermann-Collini

Text edited by Isabel Fargo Cole, Jaka Gercar

Redpilled