TWENTY YEARS AFTER the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the spectacle and specter of the dead continue to haunt the public spheres of mourning within that country. The official depiction of the genocide by the Rwandan state media presents the reconciliation between the perpetrators and the survivors as a model for overcoming cycles of violence and for returning communities to a semblance of normalcy. This essay explores the forms of remembering the dead in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide through digital means, with particular attention to the continuing primacy of digital testimonies, whose form, in part, resemble models of narration and framing prevalent in digital Holocaust testimonies, especially those sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation. In contrast to Holocaust testimonies, first recorded in an organized fashion in 1981 with the funding of the Yale Fortunoff Foundation by scholars versed in psychoanalytical modes of witnessing, the recording of survivor testimonies in Rwanda began within a decade of the 1994 genocide. With the advent of mobile digital technologies and the influx of aid directed toward documentation of the genocide, the narratives of Rwandan survivors are being recorded in some cases by the survivors themselves, who feel the urgency to tell the stories of their dead loved ones before the rapid economic development in Rwanda and collectivized commemorative practice diminish the presence of their stories.

In this essay I argue that the use of digital testimonies in Rwanda complicates the idea that a particular narrative framework and structure can be simply transferred from one genocidal experience to another. Thus, rather than view a universalized framing of genocide survival as globalized through the export of digitized Holocaust testimonies, we may turn the tables and ask how scholars within German studies, for example, might recognize the value of revisiting Holocaust testimonies based on the particular local oral traditions evident in recent recordings of and by Rwandan survivors of the 1994 genocide. I suggest that the representation of the Holocaust across transnational vectors in the digital age is only one point of departure for scholars in German studies. I argue here that the narrative structures of Holocaust testimonies, so often studied within fields as disperse as diaspora studies, memory studies, narrative studies, translation studies, trauma studies, and German-Jewish studies, circulate globally in ways that may suppress local approaches to remembering atrocity.