Tucked away between the neoclassical pomp of the Brandenburg Gate and the lush greenery of Berlin’s largest inner-city park, the austere Holocaust memorial has become a part of the German capital’s varied urban texture since its unveiling 12 years ago.

But in the space of 24 hours this week the status of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe – a sloping field covered in a grid of 2,711 concrete slabs – has become the focus of a renewed debate about how the country deals with its past.

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A Berlin-based Israeli satirist has launched an art project that juxtaposes found selfies of people smiling, juggling and doing yoga at the memorial with archive footage from concentration camps, in order to provoke a fresh debate about contemporary Germany’s relationship with Erinnerungskultur, the culture of remembering the killing of over 6 million Jews and other minorities.

The launch of Yolocaust.de – riffing on the acronym for “You only live once” – comes just a day after a politician of the rightwing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) broke with the postwar political consensus by complaining that “we Germans are the only people in the world that have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital”.

Yolocaust creator Shahak Shapira – a 28-year-old Israeli artist and writer who has lived in Berlin for 14 years – dedicated his project to “my favourite neo-Nazi” but also said the timing of his launch and the AfD rightwinger’s comments were a coincidence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Satirist Shahak Shapira has launched ‘Yolocaust’ - the name riffs on the acronym for ‘You only live once’. Photograph: Handout

“Björn Höcke has been saying moronic things for years, so how could I have known he would do it again this week?” Shapira told the Guardian. He said he had been mulling over the project for more than a year after he and his friends started to spot selfies of people at the Holocaust memorial on Facebook, Instagram, Tinder and Grindr.

The images were taken from the social media sites without permission of the users, though a note at the bottom of the website informs people in the pictures they can ask for their image to be removed by sending him an email.



Since launching his site, Shapira said he had received and followed up one request for removal: “But he wasn’t angry, he understood what I had wanted to do with the project.”

Shapira said he wanted to provoke people into thinking about the Holocaust and appropriate ways to commemorate its legacy. “Berlin’s Holocaust memorial isn’t there for the Jews, or even the victims – it’s a moral compass for future generations, to warn them precisely about people such as Björn Höcke.”

Peter Eisenman, the US architect who designed the memorial, has previously advocated a more tolerant approach to its uses, saying in 2005 that he did not want visitors to approach his creation with a specific feeling.

“People are going to picnic in the field. Children will play tag in the field”, Eisenman told Der Spiegel. “There will be fashion models modelling there and films will be shot there. I can easily imagine some spy shoot ’em ups ending in the field. What can I say? It’s not a sacred place.”