Remembering John/Ivan Demjanjuk: Inclusive and exclusive frames in cosmopolitan holocaust discourse

Abstract

This article analyzes the media representations circulating around the trials of the accused Nazi collaborator John/Ivan Demjanjuk. It examines the American, Dutch, German, Russian, Jewish-Dutch, and Jewish-American discourses that framed the consecutive legal proceedings in Israel, the U.S., and Germany. Our study interrogates the convergences and divergences in the transcultural translations as well as the local appropriations of the events that formed part of the cosmopolitan remembrance of the Holocaust. We reconstructed inclusive media frames which were able to traverse different languages and cultures. We also found exclusive frames in our study that did not travel across these boundaries. The palette of views on Demjanjuk’s personal guilt and on the capacity of the trials were informed by culturally restricted or culturally resonative mnemonic tropes and were sponsored by different groups of memory agents.

Multimodal Analysis in Qualitative Research: Extending Grounded Theory Through the Lens of Social Semiotics

“…He was indicted in Germany in 2009 for his involvement in the murder of prisoners of the Sobibor extermination camp during the Holocaust. The media coverage of these processes addressed not only legal issues and aspects of the defendants and their crimes but also issues of historical circumstances as well as guilt and responsibility in a wider sense (Sommer, 2020). The coverage was not limited to mass media statements, but also included web-based forms of communication such as Facebook groups, forum discussions, YouTube videos with corresponding comments, blog entries, tweets, and so on.…”