Germany 1945

Dagmar Barnouw

Description

A photo essay on different perspectives of war-torn Germany in Allied and German photography and reportage

Photographers from the U.S. Army's Signal Corps were with the troops that drove back Hitler's troops and occupied Germany at the end of WWII. Soon photos of death camps and starving POWs shocked the home front, providing ample evidence of Nazi brutality. Yet did the faces of the defeated Germans show remorse? The victors saw only arrogance, servility, and the resentment of a population thoroughly brainwashed by the Nazis. In fact, argues Dagmar Barnouw, the photographs from this period tell a more complex story and hold many clues for a better understanding of the recent German past.

List of Illustrations
Introduction: Views of War and Violence
1. Views of the Past: Memory and Historical Evidence
2. To Make Them See: Photography, Identification, and Identity
3. The Quality of Citory and the "German Question": The Signal Corps Photography Album and Life Photo-Essays
4. What They Saw: Germany 1945 and Allied Photographers
5. Words and Images: German Questions
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Photographie
• Photographie
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• General officer
• World War II
• Photography
• History of Europe
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Germany
• Seconde Guerre mondiale
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 28 août 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9780253028426
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

1945
GERMANY
1945
GERMANY
VIEWS OF WAR AND VIOLENCE
Dagmar Barnouw
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington & Indianapolis
© 1996 by Dagmar Barnouw
All rights reserved
First paperback edition printed in 2008
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnouw, Dagmar. Germany 1945 : views of war and violence / Dagmar Barnouw. p.      cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–253–33046–7 (cl : alk. paper) 1. Germany—History—1945–1955. 2 Reconstruction (1939–1951)— Germany.   3. World War, 1939–1945—Germany. I. Title. DD257.25.B336 1996 943.087—dc20          96–11185
ISBN-13: 978–0-253–33046–8 (cl.) ISBN-13: 978–0-253–22043–1 (pbk.)
3  4  5  6  7       13   12   11   10   09   08
CONTENTS
 
Acknowledgments
Introduction VIEWS OF WAR AND VIOLENCE
1 To Make Them See PHOTOGRAPHY, IDENTIFICATION, AND IDENTITY
2 The Quality of Victory and the “German Question” THE SIGNAL CORPS PHOTOGRAPHY ALBUM AND LIFE PHOTO-ESSAYS
3 What They Saw GERMANY 1945 AND ALLIED PHOTOGRAPHERS
4 Words and Images GERMAN QUESTIONS
5 Views of the Past MEMORY AND HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 
 
 
For their support of the research and writing of this book I thank the Getty Grant Program and the University of Southern California. I have had generous help from the staffs of many photographic collections, especially the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica; the International Center of Photography, New York; the National Archives; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC; the Military History Institute, Carlisle; the Hoover Institution, Stanford; the Ruhrland Museum, Essen; the Archiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz and the Landesbildstelle, Berlin; and the Imperial War Museum, London.
PHOTO CREDITS
Unless noted below, all images reproduced in this book are the property of the National Archives, Still Pictures Archive, College Park, Maryland.
Archiv der Stadt Pforzheim: 2.17
Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: 4.6; 4.7; 4.10; 4.13; 4.18; 4.19; 4.20; 4.21; 4.22; 4.23; 4.24; 4.25; 4.26; 4.32; 4.33
Bourke-White, Margaret. “ Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly . ” A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s “Thousand Years.” New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946: 3.1; 3.2; 3.3; 3.6
Capa, Robert. Sommertage, Friedenstage. Berlin 1945 , ed. Diethart Kerbs. Berlin: Dirk Nishen: 3.10; 3.16; 3.17; 3.20
Courtesy of Ray D’Addario, Holyoke, Massachusetts: 2.16; 3.39; 4.1
Hoover Institution, Stanford, California. From the Foto Willinger Collection: 1.24; 1.25; 1.26. From the Lewis Anderson Frederick Collection: 3.27; 3.28
Imperial War Museum, Department of Photographs, London: 1.4; 1.17; 2.4; 3.18
Landesbildstelle Berlin: 3.11; 4.9; 4.11; 4.12; 4.14; 4.15; 4.16; 4.17; 4.28; 4.29; 4.30; 4.31
LIFE Magazine . Reproduced from the 9 April, 7 May, and 15 October 1945 issues: Introduction; 2.20; 2.21; 2.22; 2.24; 2.26; 2.27.
Fotoarchivs-Ruhrlandmuseum der Stadt Essen: 4.2; 4.3; 4.4; 4.5; 4.8
U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania: 3.4; 3.5
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.: 1.1; 1.2; 1.6; 1.16; 1.18; 1.19; 3.8; 3.9
INTRODUCTION
VIEWS OF WAR AND VIOLENCE
Verbal eyewitness reports on Germany’s collapse in 1945 differed in their approach to the moral and political implications of “the German question,” but they tended to agree on the near impossibility of seeing the situation clearly. German cities were reduced to rubble; a highly evolved culture had regressed to stone-age living conditions; chaotic, large-scale migrations pushing in different directions seemed to mark the final loss of all order, security, and civility. And, perhaps most difficult to understand, the revelation of German “atrocities” signified what might be called a rewinding of civilization back to barbarism. Extreme cultural dissociation had created enormous obstacles to “objective” observation and recording.
The difficulties of observing and forming views at the end of that total war, when the destruction of German culture had also disrupted conventions of seeing, are intimately connected with the troubled symbiosis of witnessing, memory, and historiography in postwar Germany. I am interested not so much in revisiting the meanings of that “German catastrophe” as in looking at expectations about how Germans as a group could or should cope with it. Stated from a variety of positions in abstract and often contradictory terms, and questioned only rarely, these expectations had a profound impact on German culture in general and on the politics of the Federal Republic of Germany in particular. In instructively different ways, they are clearly reflected in both the Allied and the German photodocumentation of that collapse. I did not gather the images reproduced here as reminders of what happened half a century ago. Reminded abundantly ever since, Germans have experienced difficulties remembering; viewers looking at these events through the victors’ perspective, too, have remembered selectively and exclusively. Rather, I have approached the enduring “German question,” which was first posed in reaction to views of Germany in 1945, as a question of perception and representation. Verbal documents, of primarily American, British, and German provenance (reports, letters, diaries, essays, and memoirs), are enlisted to help anchor and clarify but also to question the meanings of the images—just as the images help to focus, enlarge, and question the verbal documents.
The inversion of private and public morals that is characteristic of all states of war, in which killing and destruction become cultural values, was particularly pronounced in the state of total warfare in Germany after 1941. In 1945, the resulting psychological and physical chaos meant that the ways in which to look at and to select what was to be seen were restricted both for the vanquished and the victors. I am not interested here, or only marginally, in questions of German or Allied censorship and propaganda, but in a limitation of perspective that goes further and deeper.
The invention and technological development of photography was, until recently, firmly connected with a quintessentially modern desire for objectivity; the belief was that the camera does not lie, the camera eye is impartial. The Second World War was an eminently modern war, not only because of the technological sophistication responsible for a new level of physical destruction, but also because of the heavy involvement of photography for documentary purposes. The collapse of Germany was brought about by outside rather than inside forces—a fact of crucial importance for postwar German identity—and for the most part it was photographed from the position of the victors. Despite the control this position exercised over perspective, it was by no means uniform with regard to its general political and cultural attitudes. And from the beginning it differed with different subjects: children, young women, and sometimes old women and old men, as opposed to young and middle-aged men, especially in any kind of uniform. Moreover, the victors’ perspective changed over time, often dramatically so, through closer contact with the German population.
Most of the Allied documentation came from the U.S. Army Signal Corps photography units instructed in the documentary ethos of the Farm Security Administration photographers. Charged with showing the culture of poverty in America “as it was,” the photography of the Farm Security Administration had been shaped by the dichotomy of hidden and revealed truth. What had been hidden, invisible, in the vast remoteness of the richest, most privileged country in the world was now revealed in documentation for all to see and accept as their responsibility. We have come to admire increasingly the precise beauty of those sharp, clean images, elevating them to the status of art objects. We have also become aware of serious problems regarding the belief in unfailing objectivity that underlies the documentarists’ desire to reveal the full and only truth of what was previously hidden. In the much more extreme situation of Germany’s physical, political, and moral collapse, this desire could express itself in terms so stunningly literal as to obscure rather than to illuminate reality. Penetrating that German chaos, invading enemy territory, young Army photographers saw themselves as liberators. Everything they photographed—Allied troops, weapons, vehicles, ships, airplanes, bombs—was given the attribute “liberating” in the official captions. Liberation was predicated on invasion—invasion was absolutely justified by the desire to liberate. Fighting their way to the best, most telling “shots” of this military-moral mission, Army photographers were faced with the particularly powerful dilemma of great visual clarity and obscure meaning. After all, nothing was more clearly visible than the devastated, broken German army, cities destroyed and transformed into moonscapes, ghostlike people living in ruins, and the brutalized victims of the concentration camps. But what exactly did it mean, this absolute military and moral defeat of the Germans and victory of the Allies? Understandably, Signal Corps photographers tended to accept as truthful the visual clarity of what appeared in their images