Shaping Holocaust remembrance through Nazi photographs. A multimodal analysis of Israeli schoolbooks.

The paper examines the visual and verbal representation of the Holocaust in Israeli schoolbooks. The relations between images and texts or captions are revealed through a multimodal discourse analysis. Most photographs were transposed to Israeli schoolbooks, unattributed and de-contextualized, from Nazi archives and amateur albums. These photographs have become the icons of the Holocaust, and even the Holocaust itself, or its simulacra, for post-memory generations. Therefore, the perpetrator’s perspective often comes through as objective and factual. Schoolbooks transform these photographs to educational resources, or to means by which the state educates its young to remember. The question is, how do these images construct what the students need to remember or rather, what meaning are students prompted to make of them? In the schoolbooks, the photographs illustrate the Zionist narrative “from Holocaust to resurrection” in which the state of Israel is presented as the alternative to another Holocaust. The annihilation is graphically described in detail, but the annihilated are not narrated. Most are presented only as icons of the “final solution” and specimens of categories. This representation attests to an interest to traumatize, not to inspire mourning or arouse empathy and reverence towards the victims “we don’t want to become again”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]