2021

The tri-national poster exhibition "LEBENSGESCHICHTEN" presents eight contemporary witnesses from the digital learning programme of the same name who were persecuted under National Socialism for various reasons. The posters enable a personal approach to the topic and inclusive remembrance and can be used, for example, on Holocaust Memorial Day. The poster exhibition is available to schools as a free pdf download. 

Contemporary witnesses in the centre 

The poster exhibition "LEBENSGESCHICHTEN" contributes to recognising the history of persecuted people by giving contemporary witnesses and their memories a central role. The posters can be hung up in any order in the school, in the assembly hall or in the classrooms and can be explored independently and worked on and discussed together. A QR code on each poster refers to a digital learning programme in which didactically prepared interview excerpts with the contemporary witness can be viewed and edited. 

The "LEBENSGESCHICHTEN" digital learning programme 

The German-language project page of the free educational platform IWitness was created as an Austrian-German-Swiss collaboration. This website of the Shoah Foundation Institute, which is based at the University of Southern California, provides access to the unique Visual History Archive, which contains around 57,000 videotaped biographical eyewitness interviews - primarily with genocide survivors. Around 900 of these are in German and are being didactically edited for the first time by "LEBENSGESCHICHTEN" and made accessible to a broad public in a low-threshold manner. The primary target groups are pupils and students as well as those working in the school and extracurricular education sector. 

Teaching-learning programmes - "Activities" 

The teaching-learning programmes, the so-called activities, focus on the students' independent and critically reflective examination of historical sources, especially videotaped interviews with contemporary witnesses. For example, students can watch full-length interviews and edit their own short films using the video editor. The combination of acquiring historical education skills and media skills in the digital space is central to this. The range of activities is constantly being expanded and currently covers topics such as persecution, flight and exile, perpetrators and bystanders, resistance and memory culture.