Visualizing War

Emotions, Technologies, Communities

Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Kathrin Maurer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315530635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Wars have always been connected to images. From the representation of war on maps, panoramas, and paintings to the modern visual media of photography, film, and digital screens, images have played a central role in representing combat, military strategy, soldiers, and victims. Such images evoke a whole range of often unexpected emotions from ironic distance to boredom and disappointment. Why is that? This book examines the emotional language of war images, how they entwine with various visual technologies, and how they can build emotional communities. The book engages in a cross-disciplinary dialogue between visual studies, literary studies, and media studies by discussing the links between images, emotions, technology, and community. From these different perspectives, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the nature and workings of war images from 1800 until today, and it offers a frame for thinking about the meaning of the images in contemporary wars.

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Part I

Equivocal Emotions

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1 Cropped Vision

Photography and Complicity in Women’s World War II Memoirs

Elisabeth Krimmer

Introduction

Many scholars have explored the valence of photography in the context of the Holocaust in order to elucidate the experiences of the victims, witnesses, and survivors of the National Socialist genocide. There are also a number of scholars who dealt with the perspective of perpetrator photography.¹ However, there is as of yet not much that deals explicitly with the photographic legacy of the large number of women who worked for the German army in various functions and who can be categorized as complicit bystanders. In the following, I argue that this group, albeit not directly involved in frontline fighting or the execution of the Holocaust, was crucially important to the functioning of the regime. They made significant contributions to the war effort by providing logistical, administrative, communicative and medical support, and, in doing so, witnessed aspects of the Nazi genocide, such as public hangings, executions of so-called partisans, and rounding up for deportations, particularly if they were deployed to the Eastern front. Thus, like so many others, they were in a position to comprehend the full extent of the regime’s cruelty, but chose to look the other way. It is this cropped vision evident in both narrative strategy and visual record that lies at the heart of their complicity with a murderous regime.

In order to elucidate how these female bystanders conceptualized their own role in the Third Reich, this article investigates the affective deployment of photography in two memoirs by army nurses: Ingeborg Ochsenknecht’s As if the Snow Covered Everything: A Nurse Remembers Her Deployment on the Eastern Front, and Erika Summ’s Shepherd’s Daughter: The Story of the Frontline Nurse Erika Summ.² As I will show, the emotional register evident in these texts is more subdued than one might expect. It would seem that both Summ and Ochsenknecht shielded themselves from the full force of the crimes they witnessed and the trauma they experienced by cultivating an emotional distance. While this ‘coolness’ helped them deal with the terrifying experience of the war and the Holocaust, it also implied a psychic splitting that facilitated their complicity in Nazi atrocities. But before I turn to an analysis of Summ’s and Ochsenknecht’s memoirs, I would like to discuss the nature of these particular photographs, that is, photos taken by and/or included in memoirs of army auxiliaries and nurses, as well as the theoretical and ethical challenges posed by them.

The Civil Gaze

Anybody who peruses memoirs by women who served the German army in various functions will quickly notice that the photographs included in these texts follow a predictable iconography. Frequently, the memoirists begin with a number of images that depict their childhood and/or lives before the war. Taken as a whole, these images signify normalcy and innocence and are clearly designed to evoke sympathy with the author. Furthermore, in the context of the Holocaust, they serve an additional function that exceeds the traditional captatio benevolentiae. If we agree with Susan Sontag’s assumption that “sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan,”³ then these pictures have a significant power to widen the gap between what we see in the images, namely the quotidian nature of the author’s pre-war existence, and what we know about National Socialist politics of extermination. In other words, these photos of childhood innocence effectively create an emotional distance between the memoirists and the Holocaust.

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In addition to images that depict the author’s pre-war life in often idyllic terms, memoirs of army nurses, as well as those of auxiliaries, also typically feature photographs from the various frontlines of the war. These wartime images tend to center on three groups of motifs: First, women who were deployed to the Western front, in particular to France and Italy, such as Ilse Schmidt, author of The Bystander: Memories of a Member of the German Army,⁴ include traditional tourist snapshots of scenery and landmarks.⁵ One of the perks of becoming an army auxiliary or a nurse consisted in the opportunity to escape the narrow confines of traditional domesticity and parental authority, and the photos provide ample evidence that these women were eager to travel and see the world.

Second, these memoirs tend to feature a significant number of group shots taken during various outings and vacations, including joyful gatherings on beaches and in cafes and restaurants. Frequently, the figures in these images smile at the camera in ways that are difficult to reconcile with both the memoirist’s textual emphasis on the harsh conditions of life on the Eastern front and the contemporary viewer’s historical knowledge of this era in general and of the persecution of Jews in particular. It would seem that the effect of these smiles is best captured by Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum, a seemingly irrelevant photographic detail that pierces and attracts the viewer and that “paradoxically, while remaining a ‘detail,’ . . . fills the whole picture.” Barthes also credits the punctum with a certain liminal status when he claims that “it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless there.”⁶ The notion that something is added that is already there perfectly captures this peculiar dynamic: it is not the smile or the photograph in and of itself that is troubling but their incongruity with our knowledge of mass murder on the Eastern front. In their liminality, the smiles of these auxiliaries and nurses and the quotidian nature of their photographs of everyday life evoke a different version of that which “remained unremembered yet cannot be forgotten”⁷: not the crushing guilt of the perpetrator, not the traumatic suffering of the Holocaust survivor, but the complicity of the bystander who was present but failed to act.

In trying to define the nature of the complicity implied in these images, I found myself reminded of John Berger’s analysis of the iconic photo of Che Guevara’s dead body, which Berger endows with a moral dimension: “His foreseen death ‘will be the perfectly natural result’ of all that he has lived through in his attempt to change the world, because the foreseeing of anything less would have meant that he found the ‘intolerable’ tolerable.”⁸ To be sure, Berger raises the moral bar so high that it will not only remain out of reach for most of us but would entail annihilation if heeded. And yet, his call for a total commitment to the fight against injustice sheds light on a sense of opprobrium that adheres to these images: in their focus on the mundane and the ordinary, these photos implicitly suggest that the memoirists found the intolerable nature of the Nazi regime quite tolerable. As Berger reminds us, all “photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation . . . I have decided that seeing this is worth recording.”⁹ Thus, we cannot but wonder about the choice to highlight outings, social gatherings and vacations amidst a general environment of slaughter and genocide.

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While the memoirs of nurses and army auxiliaries include images of the authors’ social and professional lives, they contain no visual record of the Holocaust. This should not surprise us. After all, the Nazi regime had issued an order that forbade taking pictures of public executions and violence against civilians (albeit an order that was violated by many).¹⁰ The Nazi policy of censorship, however, does not explain the textual elision of mass murder in memoirs that were frequently written decades after the war. Moreover, it bears mention that, although the Holocaust is excluded from the visual record, German suffering is not. Tellingly, the third group of photos in these memoirs, and the only one that directly acknowledges the context of the war, tends to highlight German victimization. The authors’ empathy for their male comrades in arms is evident in the numerous images of wounded German soldiers, soldier’s graves, and soldier’s funerals, thus creating a clear dichotomy between those whose life is grievable and those who are excluded from the community of mourning.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag argues that

there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it … or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs.¹¹

Sontag’s claim that images of manmade atrocities position the viewer as either activist or voyeur is convincing but it does not address the emotional responses set in motion by the pictures of complicit bystanders. Clearly, there is a wide range of possible reactions to these images. In some viewers, the oblivious enjoyment of these seeming wartime idylls may incite a sense of resigned melancholy (what’s past ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Visualizing War
• Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Equivocal Emotions
• PART II Emotional Technologies
• PART III Building Emotional Communities
• List of Contributors
• Index