World War Two and its (un-)profitability

The project focuses on historical narratives as they are depicted on YouTube. YouTube is a so-called attention-economy as its core asset is the attention of its audience, which they in turn sell to advertisers. This project aims to shed light on the production conditions and setting, how the necessity for selling a (historical) product shapes these narratives and how they relate to the dominant historical dispositifs.

The channel "World War Two" serves as a case study as it a) is by their own accounts the most comprehensive project ever on that conflict and b) focuses on World War Two, which poses a special difficulty because of the atrocities and war crimes committed by the National Socialists. Those are inherently incompatible with YouTube's community guidelines unless is explicitly serves educational purposes. The creators are additionally reliant on advertisement-revenue, while the Holocaust is completely unsuitable for advertisers.

This project aims to analyse and discuss the tension in which the Creators who want to talk about World War Two and the Holocaust must operate. By doing so I will shed light on the influence production conditions have on historical narratives, how they relate to and increasingly overshadow the academic field of history and what implications and/or threats the resulting narratives pose on German and Anglo-American Memory Culture.