"No One is Ever Ready for Something Like This." – On the Dialectic of the Holocaust in First-Person Shooters as Exemplified by Wolfenstein: The New Order

Pfister, Eugen; Zimmermann, Felix (2021). "No One is Ever Ready for Something Like This." – On the Dialectic of the Holocaust in First-Person Shooters as Exemplified by Wolfenstein: The New Order International Public History, 4(1), pp. 35-46. Walter de Gruyter GmbH 10.1515/iph-2021-2020

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For almost three decades, the depiction of the Holocaust was considered taboo in digital games. While World War II became a popular historicizing setting for digital games, the crimes of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust in particular remained conspicuously absent. In this article we show that discussions about the fundamental suitability of specific media or media forms for dealing responsibly with the memory of the Nazi regime’s crimes have already taken place several times and that similar arguments can now be applied to the digital game. With this in mind, we pursue the question of whether only so-called serious games are suitable for this purpose, or whether, on the contrary, mainstream blockbuster games – here specifically the first-person shooter Wolfenstein: The New Order – can find ways to maintain the memory of the Holocaust without trivializing it. We approach this question by analyzing chapter 8 of Wolfenstein: The New Order, in which protagonist William “B.J.” Blazkowicz allows himself to be deported to a Nazi concentration camp. We discuss this camp scene dialectically, on the one hand, as an encouragement to rethink the first-person shooter and, on the other hand, as a reproduction of a superficial iconography of the Holocaust.

Item Type:	Journal Article (Original Article)
Division/Institute:	Bern Academy of the Arts Bern Academy of the Arts > Institute of Design Research Bern Academy of the Arts > Institute of Design Research > Design and Rhetoric
Name:	Pfister, Eugen0000-0003-3422-4697 and Zimmermann, Felix
Publisher:	Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Language:	English
Submitter:	Marie-Eve von Allmen
Date Deposited:	24 Nov 2021 09:38
Last Modified:	11 Mar 2024 16:14
Publisher DOI:	10.1515/iph-2021-2020
Uncontrolled Keywords:	digital games; contemporary history; Holocaust studies; popular culture studies; Wolfenstein: The New Order
ARBOR DOI:	10.24451/arbor.15733
URI:	https://arbor.bfh.ch/id/eprint/15733