At the Crossroad of Public History: Mediating the Holocaust on the Internet EVA PFANZELTER 1 For memorials, museums and research institutions as well as for scholars and historians the Internet has become an indispensable tool for the dissemination of knowledge about the Holocaust. These representatives of a transnational and transcultural memorialization, however, are usually not at the forefront of an innovative, sometimes provocative usage of new information and communication technologies. They do, on the other hand, respond proactively to incentives from public historians with sometimes massive online activities and significant re-interpretations. Using examples from Wikipedia and Facebook these issues are discussed, while showing the fluid relationship between evolving social media technologies, our cultural memory and the representation as well as sometimes controversial forms of commemoration of the Holocaust on the Internet. Keywords holocaust, memory, Internet, Facebook, Wikipedia, public history Introduction In the early 1990s French cultural historian Pierre Nora spoke of a new “age of commemoration”, German historian Christoph Cornelißen labeled the development with the term “memory boom”, Harald Welzer and Claudia Lenz even spoke of a “memory-mania” 1 . All of these scholars tried to describe the accelerated increase of memorial sites, which was accompanied by a profound change in the culture of remembrance. At the end of the 1990s, the Internet joined in as a new field of presentation for memorial institutions. In the beginning it was used as an additional publicizing channel, but over the intervening years it has become an indispensable tool for the mobilization of different social groups and for politics of memory. This underlines the argument raised in 2002 by Jan-Werner Müller, who anticipated that the profound changes in the field of Eva Pfanzelter is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. In her publications, research and teaching she focusses on memory/politics of memory, European and regional contemporary history, migration/minority studies, and Digital Humanities. In one of her current major research projects she analyzes “Holocaust and Genocide Websites Between Media Discourse, Politics of Memory and Politicking”.