Memorial to the Lidice children killed in the massacre

In June 1942, the Czech village of Lidice was destroyed in a Nazi reprisal after the Deputy Reichsprotektor for Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich, succumbed to the injuries he had sustained in an assassination attempt on May 27. Lidice was chosen as the target of German retaliation because of its residents’ continued hostility to the Nazi occupation and the suspicion that the village was sheltering Czech resistance fighters. On June 10, the entire population of Lidice was rounded up and, the next day, all men and boys above 16 were shot. Nineteen men, working in a mine, and seven women were sent to Prague where they too were shot. The rest of the women were sent to the Ravensbrück camp where many died in the gas chamber or from fatigue. The children were sent to a camp in Lódz, Poland. Those found suitable for ‘Aryanization’ were given to German families while the rest were gassed at Chelmo. In all, 340 Lidice citizens were murdered (192 men, 60 women and 88 children).

After the war, 143 women survivors from the concentration camps returned to Lidice and 17 children were returned to their mothers after a two-year search. Lidice was rebuilt in 1949, 300 metres from the original site, which was turned into a memorial in 1962 housing the common grave of the men, a monument and a museum.

This year, a group of Czech advertising executives, working for the Czech branch of McCann Erickson, discovered that the memorial was not getting visitors and offered it free publicity. Soon, they shocked the memorial’s director, Milous Cervenci, with a fake web game called Total Burn-Out of Lidice (www.totalburnout.cz/eng). Visitors to the site were asked to burn Lidice down; they would score 10 points for killing a Czech, 50 if it was an escape attempt. However, a few clicks into the game, the visitor confronted the question: “What are you playing at?! This is not a game but reality.” The game would then offer a link to the Lidice Memorial website. The director of the memorial, initially shocked, had come to endorse the game. However, the 68-year-old mayor of Lidice, Vaclav Zelenka, one of the 17 children who had survived June 1942, voiced the opinion of most descendants of survivors — “perverse”. Zelenka lost his father, two uncles, a couple of cousins to the tragedy. His mother had gone to two concentration camps and his grandmother to Auschwitz.

If you attempt now to click on the url, you will encounter an announcement from the management of the Lidice Monument that the “internet campaign” of the memorial has been terminated following the resolution of the Lidice local authority dated 14 September, 2006. The director also apologises to those offended, particularly descendants of bereaved families, but reiterates the mission of the memorial to preserve Lidice in public memory “as an appeal in the struggle against Nazism and totalitarianism, as well as against evil and violence.”

Human decency has prevailed for the moment, and the memory of the dead will not be insulted for a while it seems. We live in an age when nobody persists with what is shocking and controversial for long, never mind the scale of the initial shock. Paradoxically, it is also an age in which you cannot catch somebody’s attention without screaming into his ears. The information network surrounding us does not allow for discrimination and value judgment when it comes to sorting information for what is needed. Such a problem of plenty can only result in a death of interest and a dearth of intellect. What then of the other side of the equation, the claim that the controversial web game rendered the best service in years to the Lidice dead? Cervenci himself had claimed that it was keeping the memory of the massacre alive for a new generation. In an interview given to Radio Prague on September 6, Jan Binar, the creator of the game, claimed that the click-rate had risen from zero to 12,000 in two days.

Web games based on history enjoy educational success and popularity if the BBC’s history games are anything to go by. But then, the BBC history games do not deal with controversial subjects — encounters with Vikings, Roman conquests, and so on, either take up what is harmless or set protectively far back in the past; there are no games dedicated to war crimes and genocides. Binar categorically said that their project was aimed at teenagers who sat in front of the computer for long hours and yet did not know Lidice at all, who, in fact, knew nothing older than ten years. Thus the idea of intruding into their world of computer games, and “shocking and intriguing” them into acquaintance with Lidice.

An important aspect of a historical narrative is the kind of connections established between events, marking the political and cultural contexts of the author. And each age allows such a narrative to have its own rhetorical tools. Binar and his colleagues, children as they are of their own age, seized upon the twin pillars of the market and of technology to create a narrative that apparently spoke the language of the reader. But there lay the catch — this was reality translated into a game that didactically brought one back to reality. This double subversion was the essence of Total Burn-Out, which would otherwise lose its split or dual identity — the only identity it could boast. The visitor was lured with the temptation of re-creating a burn-out of Lidice only to end up being lectured. The reason why the game ran into trouble was the fact that it subverted first the state’s narrative on Lidice till 1989, coloured by standard communist, anti-Fascist rhetoric. It also refuted the newer narratives that would have turned the memorial into a commodity like so much of history and art under capitalism. Treading a narrow path between the sombre and the trivial, Total Burn-Out was always prone to appear more offensive than it actually was.

Had Total Burn-Out been merely a game, it would have been easier to proscribe it and censure the creator. Had it been merely a didactic lesson in history, it might never have enjoyed an audience. The problem lies in that what is offensive need not be devoid of educative potential. The game differed from the state memorial’s own campaign with regard to means and presentation, not ends. In a post-Holocaust, post-9/11, anything-goes-and-therefore-nothing-matters culture, the individual is too desensitized to react to disturbing knowledge from afar.

Additionally, studies constantly remind us that we are becoming more ignorant even as the information around us multiplies, that reading habits are abysmal, that concentration spans have shrunk drastically, that the average reader does not spend more than a couple of minutes over the front page of the newspaper. In such a situation, history cannot but take recourse to aggressive marketing. It tells us a lot about Jan Binar’s times that he had to make a spectacle of what was already spectacular.

History, as a cultural construct, is not the past. And the past is not a narrative in itself. History is an approximation of the past according to the biases with which the author of the narrative operates. As a ‘re-creation’, it allows for a creative element. By that logic, Total Burn-Out had the licence to read and write history the way it did. Unlike the pretence to political neutrality and naturalness of most commodities in a market economy, this game was very much political. The State and the Market both fear history — one monopolizes the narrative and makes it monolithic, while the other emphasizes an ever-present where everything is constantly re-invented.

Binar’s creation broke from the earlier narrative and apparently yielded to market dynamics, driven by technology that, in turn, is driven by the market. The offended would justifiably complain that since technology controlled the content, it may also shape the intent, and the educational outcome therefore could be very different from what Binar had in mind. However, Total Burn-Out actually contained an inbuilt critique of the very means it seemingly adopted — it used the available parameters to attract its audience but, by refusing to be a game, immediately demolished those very parameters.

Asked if they really needed to shock people into thinking about the past, Binar retorted that if the media and the academy would focus on places like Lidice, there would not be any need to shock anyone. Since they do not, you need to create and provoke discussion and debate on a subject. And a debate does not please all. Nevertheless, when it is something as serious as genocide, you may have to withdraw a cause, even though you mean well, because your tools are problematic. Now that Total Burn-Out is gone, one hopes that the brief ignition of interest in Lidice’s past will burn on for a while, until that too is subsumed by the drives of the market.