by Tiffany Cheng
The conceptual premise of this project is about the residual impact of distorted images over time. Why did a civilized country like Germany allow the mass extermination of Jews to happen? Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party developed a highly sophisticated and efficient system of public persuasion that was able to ensure public cooperation and acceptance of an atrocity of such magnitude as the Holocaust. Nazi propaganda promoted specific imagery and symbolism to suggest new myths and meanings to elicit anti-Semitism in the German people who were exposed their influence; the extent of this anti-Semitism gradually escalated from classroom bullying into violent riots such as Kristallnacht.
I decided to explore these ideas because I was captivated by the motifs of betrayal and hatred faced by Holocaust survivors. I wondered what it felt like to be living during a time when an elitist group was just beginning to manipulate public opinion against you and the people with which you identify. From the social infiltration of an anti-Semitic mentally via caricatures comes the Jewish identity of being “the other.” The ground was laid very incrementally until the feeling of being ostracized became fear and being despised. In order to begin understanding the emotions and reactions associated with your friends and neighbors suddenly turning on you, I looked to retellings of these events from personal memory. We study history to understand people and society, and personal experience can shed light on human incentive, reaction, and emotion.
This projects was created in the 2010-2011 iteration of IML 340: The Praxis of New Media. The video testimonies were made available by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s VIsual History Archive.
