This semester I am once again teaching my Jews of Germany course-a course I never thought I would find myself teaching, especially given that it is not my specialty per se (I do have a secondary specialization in turn of the century Vienna). As the existing curriculum in an academic job often dictates what one will teach upon arrival, the course fell into my hands upon appointment at SUNY New Paltz as a Lecturer in the Languages, Literatures & Cultures program in German. Teaching the course for the first time in the fall of 2015, it quickly became my favorite course ever taught, as a result of both the students in that section and the content that I selected to teach and engage the students in discussion. This course was an incredible experience, not least because of the makeup of my classroom. It consisted of a number of Jewish students and a significant number of them were Ashkenazi Jews or Jews of German (and Eastern European) descent, as well as third generation Holocaust survivors. In and of itself, this was one of the most memorable moments of my teaching career. Flash forward to fall 2016. Again, I find myself in a classroom full of students eager to learn about the history of Germany's Jewish population. Many assume initially that the course will focus solely on the Holocaust, but the history of Germany's Jews did not start or end with the Holocaust and neither did the history of anti-Semitism on the European continent (and beyond). Starting at the beginning of the semester, we traced the course of German history from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, and we did not begin to touch on the history of the Holocaust until mid-Semester. Dealing with the historical context of Weimar Germany and the pre-WWII period, we read Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin was a member of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and his essay-written in 1936 after the rise of Hitler to power and the creation of the Ministry of Propaganda under Goebbels-lays out the trajectory of art from its origins as a cult object with an auratic presence (situated in a particular space and time and acquiring layers of meaning throughout its historical existence) to its reproducibility through the ever-increasing mechanization in society that forces it to lose the authenticity it once had. This is particularly evinced in the advent of photography and its medium of descent, film. Benjamin's essay culminates in what can be perceived as his diagnosis of the role that film will play in the years, decades, and centuries to come: it will serve as a propaganda tool that will be able to influence the masses. Undoubtedly, Benjamin saw on the one hand the potential of film to educate and politically mobilize the masses, and, on the other hand, the potential abuse of it in its ability to manipulate and deceive them. As the in-class discussion evolved, I could not help but wonder what Benjamin would have to say today if he were to come back to visit the present, specifically in the context of the 2016 American election given that this was the context in which I was teaching his work (the text was discussed pre-Election). I asked the students what the next transition in technology was following the advent of the age of mechanical reproduction. We concluded it was undeniably the shift to digital technology. How digital technology differs from mechanical reproduction is that it removes or, perhaps more clearly stated, it eliminates entirely the distance between the producer and the final product and the recipients of that product. In this way, it differs from mechanical reproduction in that there is no longer an apparatus between producer and product and no longer a distance in time or space required for distribution of the end product. It is instead automatic. Rather than having a machine capture or copy an image that must then be cut and edited, digital technology allows for the immediate manipulation of information and image and its direct transfer to others en masse. One must not go anywhere or wait for its release. Memes are generated and disseminated within seconds. Social Media sites facilitate these images in reaching the masses at rates unimaginable. They transcend national boundaries and borders within seconds. Fake news articles can also be written and posted online, and they reach their readers at similar rates. We have seen the damage this has caused. The platform for today's collectively and individually produced propaganda consists of social media pages such as Facebook and Twitter, on which a number of articles and memes are posted, shared, and recommended to readers instantaneously. Some of these articles are based in fact and some are mere propaganda. As such, readers are no longer required to seek out the truth, they only need to seek out their own world view (and in the case of Facebook's algorithms and its trending article share system, this is not even required). Thus, they are able to find images and articles that represent, support, and structure their own desired realities and beliefs or create and circulate them. If Walter Benjamin were to time travel and arrive in today's world, I am certain that he would contribute a new theoretical perspective on the technological advances of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the means (or perhaps I should say memes?) by which information is now conveyed to the public for mass consumption. It no longer even has to be embedded in an aesthetic work of art, for it must no longer hide the fact that its content is political. It simply is. Truth, then, as something that may have once been authentic is no longer attainable in the world of the internet. It is self-producing and self-affirming. It does not need facts to make it real. Truth has become digitally (re)producible in the age of social media and the internet, reified to a point of irretrievability. It is a simulacrum as Baudrillard would have it.
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AuthorI'm a Germanist who specializes in Black German Studies. ArchivesCategories |