Digitization as the fundamental reorganization of human culture through digital media and practices has changed the way we historians research, publish, and teach. The anthology Writing the Digital History of Nazi Germany approaches this paradigm shift and is dedicated to the question of how the study of National Socialism, World War II, and in particular, the Holocaust can benefit from the use of digital techniques. At the outset, however, it must be noted that the title of the book is perhaps a little misleading: only two of the seven contributions deal with digital history; that is, the usage of digital methods such as text mining techniques for historical research. The focus of the volume is rather on digitized history in the sense of digitizing analog source material and digital forms of memory cultures. The two editors, Julia Timpe and Frederike Buda, also emphasize this in their introduction insofar as they place the focus strongly on the aspect of public history and in places at least subliminally warn against expecting too much of the new possibilities of historical scholarship in the digital age.
The book is based on papers from a 2019 workshop hosted at Jacobs University in Bremen and is divided into three subchapters. The first part, focusing on digitalized source collections, starts with “Traces of Jewish Hamburg: A Digital Source Edition of German-Jewish History” by Sonja Dickow-Rotter and Daniel Burckhardt about the digital source collection “Key Documents of German-Jewish History.” The two authors address the opportunities as well as the problems of such an elaborate online presentation of sometimes very sensitive sources and at the same time emphasize the importance of good usability and the necessary contextualization. Contextualization is also a central keyword in the subchapter's second contribution, “Out of the Storage Cabinet and into the World,” by Christiane Charlotte Weber. Weber's text deals with source materials that are even more sensitive than the ones in the preceding contribution: the holdings of the Arolsen Archives. Twenty-six million individual documents of different victims of Nazi persecution were made accessible in an online archive and further processed by an accompanying e-guide. It is a monumental project, and the author's detailed description of its challenges also reflects on the very intriguing question of whether and how the characteristics of these sources change through their transfer from the analog to the digital state.
Sebastian Bonzido opens the second part of the anthology with his chapter “‘At Least He Was Cautioned’: Digitally Researching the Gestapo's Ruling Practices.” Bonzido uses the example of the analysis of index cards from the Osnabrück Gestapo to demonstrate in a decidedly impressive way how digital history can produce new insights. However, the author also emphasizes—and this must be highlighted particularly positively—that this form of data-driven history should not result in a new data positivism. He rather clarifies where the limits and shortcomings of such a digital analysis lie. In the second chapter of the section, “Digital Discourse Analysis of Language Use under National Socialism: Methodological Reflections and Applications,” Mark Dang-Anh and Stefan Scholl also take up digital techniques. With a strong theoretical foundation, they show that perhaps the most original of all historiographical methods, the hermeneutic exploration of source material, has lost none of its relevance even in a digital world.
In the third and final part of the anthology, three contributions examine the broad field of digital memory studies and the digital teaching of history. Andreas Birk et al. begin with the chapter “Digitizing a Gigantic Nazi Construction: 3D-Mapping of Bunker Valentin in Bremen” in which they present the preliminary results of the interdisciplinary work on the 3D-mapping of the submarine bunker Valentin. The authors emphasize the importance of the historiographic dimension of such a technically elaborate and innovative undertaking. After all, it is not just about producing data but also about combining it with a historical epistemological interest. Digital maps are also the focus of Jannick Sachweh's contribution, “The National Socialist Prison System and the Illusive Appeal of Digital Maps,” in which he addresses a complex issue: How should historical content be prepared in a museum context without reducing its complexity too much, especially concerning its usability? The anthology concludes with Christian Günther's text “Authenticity and Authority in German Memorial Sites,” which takes up two central keywords of recent memory studies and thereby also, in a sense, comments on the other contributions of the book by discussing the modes of transformation of traditional memorial sites in a digital world.
Overall, the volume provides a very good overview of different approaches to a digital/digitized history of National Socialism and—in particular—the Holocaust. Despite its strong heterogeneity, the two editors succeed in creating a coherent arc that exemplifies the highly diverse field of research. It also shows how different the respective understandings of the broad term “digital” can turn out to be, examining the opportunities that can accompany a digital history but also the problems and new challenges it raises. Especially because of the appendix of further literature and resources attached to the eight chapters, it is an excellent introduction to the subject.
