Shoah Foundation

The Shoah Foundation, fully called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization founded in 1994 by the U.S. director Steven Spielberg in the U.S., the accounts of survivors of the Holocaust, recorded around the world and to a large extent on video in order to future generations than to make teaching and training material available.

The mid- 2000s, the Shoah Foundation to the University of Southern California (USC ) in Los Angeles, which was founded there Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education was passed, which the collected and archived material now in its Visual History Archive to research and teaching purposes provides.

The short- term Shoah Foundation is currently being re-used in part as a label for today's Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and is partly in use for its Visual History Archive.

History, tasks and objectives

During the filming of Spielberg's film Schindler's List in Krakow numerous Holocaust survivors had expressed a desire to tell their life story in front of a camera and so to preserve them for posterity. The aim of the Shoah Foundation was to record as many interviews as possible with Holocaust survivors and victims of the Nazi policy of extermination as a video. Among the witnesses are victims of racial persecution as Jews, Roma and Sinti, as well as political refugees and members of other groups tracked. In addition, conversations with soldiers have been recorded, which took part in the liberation of the camp inmates, as well as resistance fighters.

A total of almost 52,000 people from 56 countries were interviewed in 32 languages ​​. The interviews have now been completed and include discussions of about 120,000 hours continuous. This also includes 931 interviews in German language. In Austria, a total of 188 persons were interviewed in Switzerland 75 people and 674 people in Germany, such as the German Holocaust survivor Ilse Arndt ( 1913-2003 ), who was forcibly sterilized in Auschwitz.

2006, the Shoah Foundation of the University of Southern California (USC ), where the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education was founded. Upon completion of the interview phase, the video footage was digitized, indexed and made ​​available on an archiving system to pass the knowledge contained therein. The nearly 52,000 video interviews were made ​​available on the Visual History Archive created by the Department, with made ​​cataloging and indexing allows a differentiated search for different criteria.

The interviews with the eyewitnesses were performed as Visual History analogous to the scientific method, history of oral history by specially trained interviewers. The Shoah Foundation Institute tracked with the use of video as a medium for the Visual History Archive didactic goals by by his own words " the audio-visually oriented youth give the Institute a lighter approach to the history [ ... ] and thus the teaching of tolerance and human rights education [ ... ] promote " wants.

When the Shoah Foundation, the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service can be completed.

In Germany, the Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin) since December 2006, is available online, through its Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS ). As the first university outside the United States, it thus enables the access to the database of the University of California, on its servers the archive is located.

Literature (selection )

  • Marion Aberle: history of the persecution of the Jews for the multimedia generation. In: FAZ July 5, 1996
  • Judith Decker: Zachor! - Remember! Shoah Foundation in Germany. In: Grandstand. Magazine for the understanding of Judaism. Volume 35, Issue 139, 3rd quarter 1996
  • Hans -Joachim Neubauer: questions make history. Ways of recollection of witnesses of the Holocaust. In: FAZ November 6, 1996
  • Ulrich Raulff: Last source. The Holocaust in the light of the fin de siècle. In: FAZ 4 April 1997
  • The conscience of Hollywood: in: Focus, 15 June 1998
  • Gabriele Chwallek, effects à la Hollywood. Spielberg's Shoah Visual History Foundation comes in for criticism. In: General Jewish weekly newspaper, June 25, 1998
  • Henryk M. Broder: Shoah Foundation Holocaust with happy ending? Steven Spielberg's videos of survivors to free the Germans from guilt. In: Der Tagesspiegel, October 5, 1999.
  • Eva Manasseh: The Testament of fifty thousand. Steven Spielberg and the Shoah Foundation. In: FAZ, January 15, 2000.
Eva Menasse
727774
de