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Dossier thématique

Embodying memory and sensitive pasts:

Fictional profiles through the prism of historical “truth” 
Nolwenn Tréhondart
Traduction de Yarri Yamara
Cet article est une traduction de :
Incarnations mémorielles et passés sensibles [fr]

Résumé

This article deals with heritage-focused narrative experiments on digital social media, where fictional profiles are created to revive the memory of certain periods of history. These profiles, which often pay little heed to authenticity as encouraged by social media platforms, in personifying history are to be considered as part of a culture of remembrance. The article focuses on the fictional profile “Ich bin Sophie Scholl” that was disseminated on Instagram in 2021 by two German public radio stations. It explores issues that arise from this form of memorial mediation, related to the industrial formatting of social media and the dynamics of participation by user-readers and community managers, underscoring the game of shared playful pretence. Lastly, the article highlights certain criticisms, notably related to the de-contextualisation of history due to the use of unsourced archive documents.

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Texte intégral

Introduction

1In recent years, heritage-focused narrative experiments, aimed at reviving the memory of certain periods of history through the use of “fictional profiles” have proliferation on digital social media. “Profile” here is understood in the digital context as a set of information describing characteristics of a user, such as their pseudonym, their interests, their habits, and the texts and images posted, all displayed in a relatively visible and accessible manner. A profile is also characterised by the list of friends or followers, composed of users from the same social media, and owners themselves of a profile. For Louise Merzeau (2016, p. 5),

in its current form, the profile belongs simultaneously to two paradigms: one documentary, the other communicational. It is the articulation point between collections of resources (texts, photos, videos, sounds) and relational dynamics (actions, connections, judgments) each one of the two systems sustaining the other.

  • 1 This research was undertaken as part of the project “Study on fictional profiles” funded by the Éco (...)

2The operating rules of digital social media encourage users to create profiles that correspond as much as possible to their “real” identity, by inciting users to reveal information related to their looks and their tastes. Yet in this space where everyone appears assigned to their true identity, some profiles resist the imperative of transparency. They subvert regulatory identification procedures sometimes with the aim to manipulate and deceive, sometimes for creative and artistic purposes, proposing to users to take part in a shared playful pretence (Schaeffer, 1999). In this way, several fictional memorial embodiments, that mix visual arts (stories, reels, images) with invention writing, within a multimodal form shaped by the formats imposed by the platforms, have sprung up.1

3For example, the posts left by the Poilu [hirsute] Léon Vivien2 on Facebook until he “died emanate from a character invented by the First World War Museum in the county of Meaux. This communicational initiative aimed to use the perspective of a teacher called to the front to recount the history of the First World War from a particular lens while, at the same time, putting to use the museum’s photographic archives. The account @abdoudiouf19933 on Instagram relates the eventful journey of a migrant leaving Dakar for Europe; some followers believed it to be a true story (Gibert, 2015), but Abdoudiouf is in reality a character invented by a communications agency to promote Getxophotos, an international photography festival.

4In other cases, profiles are created inspired by a person who actually lived, but is now deceased: such profiles make use of archival documents (films, posters and photos from the era) and biographical elements (personal diaries, letters) that allow one to reconstitute certain personality traits. The visual embodiment of these profiles is portrayed by professional actors who are filmed or photographed by a crew with an aesthetic that sometimes appears homemade. The account Eva.Stories4 for instance was wildly successful on Instagram: this fictional profile retraced the last months of the life of Eva Heyman, a Hungarian Jewish teenager, who died in a concentration camp during the Second World War. The project was initiated by an Israeli entrepreneur who, observing that Holocaust memory was dying out as the living testimony accounts of survivors became increasingly rare, set out to familiarise young people with the Holocaust. While the name of the account “Eva.Stories is distinct from the name of the young Eva Heyman who inspired it (Heyman, 2013), the account @ichbinsophiescholl,5 analysed in this article, seems to want to coincide with the real person: the account in the style of a daily diary, stages the last ten months of the German resistance fighter Sophie Scholl, member of the White Rose movement. Her life is described, post by post, from 1 May 1942 to 22 February 1943, when she was executed by the Nazis.

5For Louise Merzeau it is no coincidence that this genre of narrative structure using profiles are increasingly used for commemorative, heritage or cultural purposes. What she names “archival fictions create a space for play between internet users who reactivate “a past which involves and defines them collectively in the present of the social media” (2016, p. 8). These profiles are part of a culture of remembrance, recounting grand-scale history through personification.

6In this article, I will focus on the fictional profile “Ich bin Sophie Scholl” produced and disseminated in 2021 on Instagram by two German public radio stations. I will first put this new form of mediation in perspective with the prism of the industrial formatting of forms of memory by socio-digital platforms. I then present the dynamics of participation that emerge from polyphonic enunciation, where users and community managers jointly play the game of shared playful pretence. Lastly, I will examine several critical viewpoints, which raise the issue of the risk of decontextualising history, linked notably to the use of unsourced archival documents and to the tendency to turn history into an event on digital platforms that are essentially used for entertainment and everyday communication.

1. Digital mediation of sensitive pasts

7In a context in which the last generation of Shoah and Second World War survivors is disappearing, museums and cultural institutions are inventing new forms of mediation to educate young generations about “sensitive” pasts and revitalise the culture of remembrance. The reconstitution of historical events through the form of performative sensorial and affective practices on digital social media has thus become a current practice. Instagram, X (ex-Twitter) and Facebook are today mediatic instruments playing an ever-growing role in perpetuating and commemorating collective remembrance of the past (Manca et al., 2022). Some historians speak of a paradigm shift in which the “era of the witness” is being replaced by the “era of the user”. User audiences are being invited to participate in the collective creation of a “mediated” memory (Van Dijck, 2007)—or “mediatised” memory (Hoskins, 2009; Niemeyer, 2011)—whose hybrid form is characterised by an entanglement of human and non-human actors, and inspired by the participatory culture that is unique to digital social networks.

8Several questions however arise, linked to the emergence of historical mediation strategies within a framework of digital surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019). Remembrance functionalities are at the heart of attention design strategies of social media platforms, whose industrialised systems of memory production and management of personal memories, subject to the workings of the affective Web (Alloing & Pierre, 2017), exploit nostalgic emotions of users. Moreover, while these digital memorial embodiments offer users moments of reflective pause within social media flows, the appropriation of defunct, and sometimes marginal and fragile, subjectivities, raises the question of the “ethics of digital participation” (Severo & Thuillas, 2022). The risk of spreading a sensational, trivial and romanticised vision of history (Stelmach, 2022), modelled on the aesthetic codes of social media is moreover pointed out by several users who follow the account @ichbinsophiescholl: 

User 1. “I wonder when Sophie S. is going to post her first photos of underwear and start promoting consumer items here...”

  • 6 All comments cited and all the excerpts that follow from the @ichbinsophieschool account have been (...)

User 2. “Am I the only one who feels this is sensationalising the Nazi period? Over-personalisation and stylisation that appears alongside photos of food, photos of exercise moves, photos of duckfaces and asses. I find this inappropriate.”6

9Moreover, the profiles “Ich bin Sophie Scholl” and “Eva.stories” speak and interact as if they lived in today’s times: the two young girls have smartphones, Internet access and a social media account on which they post every day. The lead community manager of the “Sophie Scholl” profile, Suli Kurban, explained in an interview (Meyer, 2021) that the goal was to encourage audiences not only to educate themselves, but also to ask themselves questions like: “What am I ready to give for my ideals and beliefs?” But the angle of citizenship education through fictional profiles that recount war, antisemitism and activism in resistance movements, sometimes seems overshadowed by posts in which the heroines abide by social media codes of entertainment, taking selfies and using filters to make their followers laugh. One user commented: “The real Sophie Scholl defended our basic rights. It is really irreverent to take selfies of her on Instagram.” For the journalist Nora Hespers (2022) such processes make Sophie Scholl appear as a “small naive mouse on Instagram,” when instead she should embody a form of critical thinking. In contrast, the last post on Eva.stories shows her filming the interior of a livestock wagon, on her way to a concentration camp. That scene, however, was criticised for its potentially traumatising and shocking character, and also for how it risked trivialising the violence it portrayed, drowned as it was in Instagram’s flow of mediatic reception.

10What can be said of the danger ran by Sophie Scholl who, blithely, shares anti-Nazi tracts on a social media network open to all? If Instagram had existed in 1943, the platform would have been monitored by the Nazis and Sophie Scholl would probably have been wise enough to express herself through more confidential channels. Some internet users have pointed this out, warning her:

User 4. “Why are you using Instagram in such a fascist context and filming the printing of tracts? Everybody can see what you are doing. It’s extremely naive to film it all. Do you want to get arrested? You shouldn’t film yourself doing things that are illegal or punishable, don’t you think?”

User 5. “This is ignoring that such a post would have meant death at the time.”

User 6. “If Sophie Scholl had had Instagram, none of her messages would have been public!
She would have been completely censured. We need learn the lessons from history! When basic rights and freedoms are restricted, opinions are repressed. If people are being excluded, we must ring alarm bells!”

  • 7 Privacy: A Manifesto [in the French version titled “The Glass Citizen”] is an essay by Wolfang Sofs (...)

User 7. “REALITY: The Nazi regime would ask Instagram to hand over localisation and list of contacts. Goodbye White Rose. SOPHIE Scholl would have no phone network or probably not even a mobile phone in our age of glass citizens.”7

11Such comments raise the question of freedom of expression, comparing the regimes of censorship in Nazi times and in contemporary times. Lastly, as we will see further on, the “Sophie Scholl” project has also been criticised for its lack of historical contextualisation (Frentzel-Beyme et al., 2022), which sometimes results in the spread of wrong information and incorrect representations of the real role played by Sophie Scholl in the German resistance. These criticisms, which are also linked to the fragmentation of the narrative thread, illustrate the tension between the educational and informational role that a public radio station aims to play and a choice of trivialising and playful representation of history through a fiction created on social media. The question then becomes what kind of interactions do social media users have with these historical fiction profiles, to what extent are they aware of their fictionality, and do they adhere to the pact of shared playful pretence that is proposed by the originators of these profiles?

2. The making-of of the “Ich bin Sophie Scholl” project

12The “Ich bin Sophie Scholl project was conceived by two German public radio stations: Südwestrundfunk (SWR) and Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR). For the centenary of Sophie Scholl’s birthday, the stations set out to retrace the life of the student-member of the White Rose resistance movement, from when she arrived in Munich on 4 May 1942 until she was executed on 22 February 1943. New posts were added to the account even after Sophie Scholl’s arrest by the Nazis showing archive documents that related the few days she spent in prison prior to her execution. Tom Lass, a filmmaker specialised in mumblecore aesthetics (improvised dialogues, scenes built around characters, DIY aesthetics modelled on social media codes) was hired as director. Several actors and actresses in costume portrayed the heroine and her entourage (including her brother Hans and other members of the resistance group).

13The project does not look much like a documentary archive on Sophie Scholl, but more like a daily digital diary, putting at its centre a fictional interpretation of a mediatic figure from history, some of whose life experiences are historically documented. According to Radio Südwestrundfunk (2021), the aim was to get audiences to interact with a historical fiction profile from a perspective that is “current, emotional and radically subjective (Hespers, 2021), and to “bring the resistant out of history books to the here and now. The account reached its peak in June 2021 when it totalled 929,000 followers.

14The last months of Sophie Schollʼs life were then being recounted, day by day, following a chronology inspired by “real” moments, reconstituted from archives and the work of historians. This intermedial format (Müller, 2000) intersected social media codes and aesthetics (colours, filters, comments, hashtags, short video formats, GIFs, etc.) with those from black-and-white film archives. Speaking in the first person, filming herself from her point of view, the actress Luna Wedler slips into skin of Sophie Scholl to post images of herself and her friends with a smartphone that we never see on the screen. She also shares documents from the period (posters, newspapers, videos) which she comments on, and issues various appeals to her followers. Sophie Scholl is in actuality also embodied by a team of community managers with different realms of expertise (history, journalism, psychology, discrimination, arts): by turn, they represent her in her interactions with her followers. At the end of each post, questions are systematically presented so as to open a discussion. Users participate in the reconstitution of history, perform it through their involvement, by responding to the questions or providing advice to the fictional profile through online votes. Some of the lighter questions are linked to family and daily life, issues that everyone can easily identify with (“Which do you think is more restful: spending time with the family or skiing?” asks Sophie Scholl in one of her posts). The loneliness Sophie Scholl feels when her boyfriend is away is often presented in resonance with the isolation users felt during the covid lockdown.

15Other questions refer to historical or cultural knowledge and interrogate the modalities of citizen engagement of reader-users: (“What do you think will happen when the tract is distributed throughout Munich University, and then throughout the whole country?”; “What other slogans could we paint on walls?”) Many followers go along with the game:

“It may seem a bit cuckoo, but I would write be compassionate.”

“Wake up!”

“Everyone be careful.”

“All men are equal, could you write that? I still don’t understand how an entire people, ours, let themselves be blinded to the point of seriously thinking that we were worth more than others.”

16These examples show how the writing of a historical fiction profile on social media is carried by a dynamic of collective enunciation in a continuous reinterpretation of history, which leaves traces in discussions and exchanges, and doing this, participates in the formation of collective memory. The profile “comes to life” not only thanks to the forms it leaves, but also thanks to the traces of reception its soliciting presence continuously elicits. In a study on the Instagram digital comic strip, Été (Tréhondart, 2019), I previously highlighted the importance of the push to participate and the key role that community managers play in such collective creation projects. Well-versed in forms of algorithmic governmentality based on the volume of interactions between users, community managers probe different points of view and are attentive to collective and individual expressions which they seek to highlight.

Example 1 

User 8. “Dear Sophie, love is sometimes tiring and inexplicable, but unfortunately we don’t choose whom we fall in love with. So be happy and grateful that you found Fritz and that he offered you such a smile during your ski holiday. Don’t give up and stay strong!”

Ich bin Sophie Scholl. “@user8 Dear User 8, thank you for your words! Love is sometimes simply a rollercoaster. Today, once again I think everything is so wonderful. But then the next day, I’m full of doubts again. But most of the time, I just miss Fritz.”

Example 2

User 9. “We hope you had a good trip and came back well rested!”

Ich bin Sophie Scholl. “@user9 I don’t really relax. The ticket inspector gave me a real fright by all of a sudden asking for my ticket!”

17Like in Été, some questions seem designed more to polarise so as to increase interactions between users and, in that way, increase the visibility of the profile (see, for example, the numerous discussions and debates on the supposed homosexuality of Sophie Schollʼs brother). Nevertheless, while the community management team seemed to readily respond to trivialities, anchored in the shared playful pretence, the team was a lot more reserved, or even simply silent, when certain criticisms were addressed to them. Such criticism, whether emanating from amateur or expert historians of the period, essentially centred around the de-contextualisation of documents from the period that were presented, the absence of sources, as well as the blurring of boundaries between fiction and historic “truth.”

3. The profile and the risk of decontextualising history

18On Sophie Schollʼs profile, stories filming White Rose resistant fighters in everyday scenes sit alongside archive images documenting life in Germany in 1942. But the sources of most of these historical documents are not cited, as if the profile’s creators were afraid to break the fictional pact with user-receptors. The documents are presented as if picked up spontaneously by Sophie Scholl in the streets. By sharing them on Instagram, Scholl is trying to share her indignation and elicit reaction.

Poster 1

Poster 1 showing a female hamster loaded with several packs of provisions, with the caption: “Shame on you, hamster woman!”8

I see posters like this all the time on my way to university. A woman in the shape of a hamster?! The things they invent... Now, women are supposed to be ashamed of stocking up and to not want too many things. Yet, so many things can only be had with food cards, how can you actually fill your shopping basket? This year, ration cards have been much less widely distributed. Moreover, some people would like to stock up reserves. People are not going to forget so easily the famine of the First World War. Can you condemn them for that?

What do you think about stocking up?

#Hamster #Propaganda #Poster #Purchasess #IAmSophieScholl

Poster 2

Poster 2 showing a plane bombing a town, with the caption “The enemy sees your lights! Switch them off!”9

I was so annoyed by Hans and Willi! How could they have banished me from the White Rose plans and disappear in the bar. I will speak to Hans about it tomorrow, now I can’t change anything.

Coming back home, I saw this poster. It’s not the content that interests me. It’s more the art of the poster which interests me. Its style strikes a chord with me. I wonder if the designer likes to paint this kind of poster. If I had become an artist, like I intended to, I wouldn’t want to paint propaganda posters. But does one really have the choice today? Can you still use talent built painfully over years in a different way? Everything that is beautiful is considered “degenerate...

Really beautiful art will not appear again until after the war ends, and then I am going to go and visit all exhibitions! Maybe one day I will become a real artist.

What do you think of this poster?

#Propaganda #Poster #Winter #Darkness #Light #IAmSophieScholl

19Many users readily play the game, but some criticise the absence of sources and the lack of historical contextualisation:

User 10. “This is a good idea BUT where is the historical context? I would like to have sources!”

User 11. “A great idea @ichbinsophiescholl maybe you could mark the original images you use as being original (in small print) as they appear alongside well-done ‘reconstituted’ images.”

User 12. “Sorry guys, but we want to teach kids at school to recognize true information from fake, I wonder which are the real SOURCES on which this is based? This gives us the impression of knowing exactly what Sophie Scholl thought, to lose ourselves in a fictional Sophie School, I am a bit sceptical about that.”

User 13. “To the team behind @ichbinsophiescholl Small remark: I think that there should be a sign in the stories when historic characteristics of the Nazi era are involved, for example: forms of greeting, signs, etc. to indicate clearly again that this is an adaptation/representation of history.”

20These comments call for the historic context to be taken into account better and for the difference between images from the period and reconstituted images to be clearly indicated. Many also highlight a public radio station’s duty to promote media literacy and provide information, recalling the importance of fighting against disinformation, especially for young generations who must learn to check sources. In an interview (Meyer, 2021), the head of the community management team, Suli Kurban, justified the account’s choice indicating a desire to maintain the pact of playful pretence with user-receptors: “Sophie can only speak about issues related to her environment and her time.” They also wanted to avoid overwhelming younger users with a barrage of footnotes, so that they could more easily identify with the heroine. And yet, as the journalist Nora Hespers (2022) points out, this leaves a large part of the work of critical analysis and re-contextualisation to young historians and educationists, active users of the platform, who on a voluntary basis reestablish the missing context, and interpret what is said, shown and drawn. The journalist explains how she herself entered the debate following a post in which Scholl confided about her love life; Hespers found it inappropriate and felt the need to recall that in that moment of history, millions of Jews were being deported, piled up in camps and gassed across Europe. Many users in turn pointed out to her that Sophie could not have known that in spring of 1942.

21One of the biggest criticisms made against the project concerns precisely this ambiguity that arises from the project’s polyphonic writing regime: to enact Sophie Scholl, the community management team uses a limited regime of truth given the state of knowledge on the war in 1942. But when users express the need for historical information and documentation, Scholl effaces herself to leave space for the editorial and research team, who, under the name “teamsoffer, propose tools for re-contextualisation, but in doing so also risk breaking the fictional pact.

User 14. “Despite everything, I am throwing myself into this experience pretending that I don’t know anything. Me, at least, I live in 1942 and I am getting to know Sophie on social media.”

User 15. “@ichbinsophiescholl I like it when you respond to comments, but maybe it would be a good idea to do it through a different account? If you respond with “her” account, “Sophie” goes totally out of character and it destroys the illusion. I find this project very interesting and the quality until now has been excellent. My compliments to all participants!”

4. The risk of revisionism and a novelised representation of history

22Some commentators illustrate how readers reappropriate Sophie Schollʼs discourse through the lens of their own interpretative filters and reception contexts. Evoking their experiences during the lockdown period and the obligation to wear masks imposed by the government, some readers compare instances of discrimination during the Nazi era to discrimination they experienced during the pandemic, setting off debate about the freedom of expression.

User 16. “@user17 you know that history repeats itself? People not wearing masks are shamed and people in good health excluded because they don’t want to get tested/vaccinated! History repeats itself! And you are still participating in it... The words that Sophie writes are in tune with our times. It’s time to wake up.”

Ich bin Sophie Scholl. “@user 16 #teamsoffer Comparing today’s situation to Hitler’s dictatorship is inappropriate. Such declarations are not only contrary to facts, they also show a lack of respect for victims of the period.”

23The comment from a user and the response from the community manager illustrate the controversies that arose from the reception of the work. Some users projected the health situation that prevailed in Germany at the time onto the fiction: the ambivalently received mask-wearing order, restrictions of individual liberties linked to the lockdown, and disputes over vaccines. It should be noted that Sophie Scholl, in addition to being a figurehead of the anti-Nazi fight, also became an icon in Germany of anti-mask movements affiliated with the far right who identified with her as a persecuted resistance figure. Statements by someone going by the name “Jana from Kassel” (Burghardt, 2020) from the antivax movement Querdenker affirming that they feel “like Sophie Scholl” elicited numerous comments on the “Ich bin Sophie Scholl” profile. This political co-option of an activist figure sparked heated debated which forced the community management team to take a stand, and momentarily cease to embody Schollʼs character and to regulate the discussion. The strong resonance with contemporary times, the Covid-19 and lockdown context, coloured the fiction, tinted it, even if it was conceived before the pandemic.

24Other comments pointed at gaps in historical exposition and biographical elements kept silent. For example, at no time was it revealed that Scholl belonged to the BDMs (Bünd Deutscher Mädel), the German League of Young Girls. This blindspot is denounced by users who regret that less glorious aspects of Scholl’s character are made invisible, as if the project’s aim was to participate in turning a mediatic historical figure into a heroine.

User 18. “What do you have to say about her problematic past as a committed BDM member?”

User 19. “It’s a pity that you start the story when she is already in Munich. How she evolved from a staunch supporter of National Socialism to a resistance fighter is in fact super interesting. Her Nazi past should not be kept silent, it is a part of her heroic story and only makes her character more significant.”

User 20. “It’s well done from the point of view of craft, but the goal of explaining to young people German culpability is failed by the fact that ichbinsophiescholl, not only appeals, through its title, to our desire to paint ourselves as innocents. 90% of viewers, for whom the video simply does good, have great-grandmothers who were absolutely not innocent. Historians know it: Germany was not Sophie Scholl. German women were not Sophie Scholl. Scholl is that needle in the haystack, ostracised or unknown before 45, suddenly brandished after 45.”

25In the same vein, Scholl sharing archival images from the Eastern front elicited commentary from many users who shared their family narratives and recounted the suffering of grandparents enrolled by force or made prisoners of war. The community management team thanked those who shared such stories and testimonies, a response which risked glorifying a victimised narration of the past and spreading the idea that most Germans belonged to the group of victims. The historian Max Czollek points out the ethical problems linked to such a treatment of history, which tends, in his view, to stylise the heroes and heroines of the German resistance with the risk of propagating revisionist ideologies. In a tweet dated 7 May 2021 he wrote “the celebration of people with dubious ideologies, like Sophie Scholl or Stauffenberg always reveals the extent to which resistance against Nazi Germany was in actuality absent and the extent to which we latch onto the few examples that are available. #unpopularopinion” (translated from German by the author).

Conclusion: what prospects for historic fiction profiles?

26As we have seen, the memorial practices conveyed through historical fiction profiles are embedded in the participatory culture of digital social networks: community managers and users co-construct a space of exchange and discussion where each person becomes a producer of memory and participates in the creation of a collective culture of remembrance. In the case of Sophie Scholl, this participatory memorial culture nonetheless raises ethical questions given how it revives a past that is sensitive, difficult to accept, and which still has many shadowy parts. The user comments on Instagram illustrate the tension between a desire to participate in the writing of a collective fiction, whose playful pretence codes are shared—users interact as if they are play-acting being in conversation with Scholl—, and the need to not forget the important role that such initiatives should play in promoting media literacy and citizenship education.

27In this sense, digital fiction profiles could be leveraged in educational contexts: studying them can be a way to address the issues of disinformation, verification of sources, emotional engagement, and incite reflection on the more or less fictional identities that we ourselves invent on social media. A study by Spiegel (Borh, 2022) carried out on 1250 pupils in Bavaria, Saarland and North Rhine-Westphalia revealed that many pupils believed that the Sophie Scholl on Instagram was the real Scholl and that she still lived. Such findings highlight how urgent it is to develop information and media competencies among young people and to create content that resists the call of digital platforms to aestheticize and decontextualise.

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Notes

1 This research was undertaken as part of the project “Study on fictional profiles” funded by the École Universitaire de Recherche [graduate school] ArTeC (ANR 17-EURE-0008) and led by Alexandra Saemmer.

2 The profile “Léon Vivien”: https://www.facebook.com/leon1914/.
“Poilu” is the nickname given to the french Word War I soldiers.

3 The account @Abdoudiouf1993: https://www.instagram.com/abdoudiouf1993/.

4 The account @eva.stories: https://www.instagram.com/eva.stories/.

5 Translation: “I am Sophie Scholl.” Account @ichbinsophiescholl: https://www.instagram.com/ichbinsophiescholl/?hl=fr.

6 All comments cited and all the excerpts that follow from the @ichbinsophieschool account have been translated from the original German by the author of the article, with the assistance of the machine translation tool DeepL.

7 Privacy: A Manifesto [in the French version titled “The Glass Citizen”] is an essay by Wolfang Sofsky (2011) that speaks about the emergence of new practices of surveillance that threaten civic liberties.

8 See the post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CYvxxLAMSu3/ (accessed 18 July 2023).

9 See the post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CYZkVnOM-3t/ (accessed 18 July 2023).

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Nolwenn Tréhondart, « Embodying memory and sensitive pasts: »Hybrid [En ligne], 14 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 novembre 2025, consulté le 10 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/5760 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1568m

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Auteur

Nolwenn Tréhondart

Nolwenn Tréhondart is a lecturer in information and communication science at University of Lorraine and a member of the CREM laboratory. Her work centres on social semiotics of cultural and media industries, with a focus on present-day transformations of the publishing sector driven by the rising use of socio-digital platforms and networks.

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