An Israeli satirist in Germany has launched a website using savage humour and shocking images to publicly shame visitors to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial who post light-hearted selfies on social media.
The website by Berlin-based artist and activist Shahak Shapira, 28, is called Yolocaust, combining the words Holocaust and Yolo — hashtag shorthand for “you only live once”, and went live this week
It features a breathtakingly tasteless collection of photos Shapira says he found posted on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and also dating sites like Tinder and Grindr. The subjects are dancing, smiling, juggling and even doing yoga at the sprawling maze-like memorial.
Hovering the mouse over each “goofy” picture on the website photoshops in an authentic historical image showing the naked corpses of concentration camp victims.
Shapira says the provocative project is intended as a wake-up call for social media enthusiasts who may be unaware that they are on what many see as sacred ground. It is also timed to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27.
Shapira invites people who feel embarrassed by their photo being featured on the page to get in touch and he will remove it.
Reaction on social media to the website has been largely positive, and it crashed during its first hours online as it drew half a million clicks, according to his representatives.
However, a few critics on Facebook noted that the memorial’s American architect Peter Eisenman has said that he wanted visitors to treat it not as a cemetery but as a public space for people to engage.
The monument, which opened in 2005, includes a vast undulating labyrinth of more than 2,700 grey concrete blocks spread over an area equivalent to three football fields, as well as a subterranean museum dedicated to the testimony of Holocaust victims and survivors.
Shapira moved to Germany from Israel at the age of 14 and made headlines in 2015 when he was beaten up for filming a group of Arab youths chanting antisemitic slurs on the Berlin underground.
He said that he was dedicating his new website to the right-wing populist politician Bjoern Hoecke of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, who sparked an outcry on Tuesday by attacking the Holocaust memorial as “a monument of shame in the heart of the capital”.
“Of course, Bjoern Hoecke sees nothing to like about a memorial that was built as a warning to Germany about people like him,” Shapira told ZDF public television.
