Photography and Place

Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945

Donna West Brett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138597907
• eBook ISBN: 9781317565635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

As a recording device, photography plays a unique role in how we remember places and events that happened there. This includes recording events as they happen, or recording places where something occurred before the photograph was taken, commonly referred to as aftermath photography. This book presents a theoretical and historical analysis of German photography of place after 1945. It analyses how major historical ruptures in twentieth-century Germany and associated places of trauma, memory and history affected the visual field and the circumstances of looking. These ruptures are used to generate a new reading of postwar German photography of place. The analysis includes original research on world-renowned German photographers such as Thomas Struth, Thomas Demand, Michael Schmidt, Boris Becker and Thomas Ruff as well as photographers largely unknown in the Anglophone world.

1 Ruin Gazing

The Disorienting View

The ruin’s dialectic between absence and presence, fragment and whole, is also one between the visible and the invisible. Close, detailed description seems to suit the representation of this visible remnant just as photography seems to be its main medium.

—Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, 2010¹

Photographs of ruins are intricately linked to the visual and psychological trauma experienced in the physical engagement with fractured and disorienting urban landscapes. The continued rupture of the urban topography in Germany during the twentieth century had a fundamental effect on the way in which ruined cities were experienced physically, philosophically and psychologically; most particularly in terms of the visual field which is doubly mediated, firstly through the dramatic destruction of place and secondly through the camera lens. In both instances, the mediated view creates a disorienting and distancing effect and yet offers ways to engage with the complexities of memory, history and in ruin aesthetics. This chapter explores topographical and visual rupture through contemporaneous written accounts of the destroyed landscape and through specific examples of ruin photography.² Such photographs engage the ruined landscape in the traditions of the classical romantic ruin found throughout Europe and Britain. This chapter also questions how the scopic regime of Nazi Germany, through the vision of Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer’s Theory of Ruin Value, contributed to what Julia Hell refers to as ruin-gazing.³ What emerges from this analysis is a fissure between the reality of the scenes of devastation and the ability of observers to fully represent them.

The disturbing and disorienting nature of ruins and ruination in postwar Germany is made particularly poignant through photographic representations of the city. Photographs of the ruined and empty city do not only record an urban landscape in constant flux, but also delay the ruin in an unending state of ruination.⁴ Photography has a natural predilection for capturing the enigmatic qualities of the ruin, responding to its compounding dialectic of absence and presence, fragment and whole, the visible and invisible.⁵ This perceived alliance is predicated on both the ruin and the photograph having an affinity with the past and with history, and this ability to document ruin functions as a way of compensating for the experience of losing the past while preserving what remains.⁶ Photography’s affinity with the ruin and also with history, as elucidated by Siegfried Kracauer, reflects a mutual temporality that is subject to remembering and forgetting, and yet each bear traces of what has come before.⁷ It is in the ruin according to Walter Benjamin that “history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay.”⁸ Monuments and ruins in the process of decay, he continues, cause the events of history to shrivel up and to become absorbed into the site of an event.⁹ Although sites of violence and trauma in the ruins of cities such as Berlin, Cologne, Dresden and Hamburg were created by disaster and not romantic neglect, such sites of historical events are forever marked through traces in the landscape, in written accounts and in photographic representation.

The connection between photography, place, memory and history will be considered throughout this book. It is an issue that presents challenges for scholars in terms of the indexical nature of photography; what traces remain of the past and how photography can or cannot record such traces. While some commentators claim that photographs make the past accessible because it is less selective than memory, others acknowledge photography’s representative limitations.¹⁰ For example, Hermann Glaser considers that ruin photography has a significant flaw in that it neglects the task of coming to terms with the reasons for the devastated landscape as an outcome of the National Socialist regime and its mass murderers.

The radicalism that characterized the photographs of Allied reporters, for example, who also sought out and photographed concentration camps, has been deferred; in its preference for ‘genre painting’ ruin photography evaded true mourning.¹¹

Glaser’s comments implicate ruin photography in the contemplation of the romantic eye, or with Hell’s ruin gazing, caught up with recording what Glaser refers to as the miracle of re-emerging life rather than casting a critical eye over the fields of rubble and ruin. Indeed, in his explication of certain ruin photographs Glaser acknowledges the aesthetic quality of much of these images and how they provide access to compelling historical moments of everyday life. The prevailing mood, as Willy Brandt (who would later become mayor of Berlin and Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany) observed on his return to Bremen from exile in 1945, was one of hopeful survival, commenting that, “in those September days I experienced how close human misery and human greatness lie, and how forgetting is a both a curse and a blessing.”¹² The photographs in this chapter would be subject to Glaser’s criticism in their romanticisation of the scenes and in the preoccupation with recording everyday life. In fact, Friedrich Seidenstücker’s photographs of this period in particular are mostly concerned with recording everyday life in Berlin and he is famously known as a Momentknipser for good reason.¹³ But I consider that his photographs of empty ruinscapes featured in this chapter, although taken with what one might think of as a romantic lens, can also be read as contemplating the devastation from a position of displacement, disorientation and in an attempt to evade reality. The genre of rubble photography generally avoided the inclusion of figures unless they were recording the rebuilding as in the case of Seidenstücker, yet rarely were dead bodies included in the landscape, rather death was intimated by its absence.¹⁴ Omitting the human wreckage in this way is what turned rubble photography into ruin photography.

The Battered Face of Germany¹⁵

During the Second World War and in the immediate period after its conclusion, international press photographers, members of the occupation forces, US Army Signal Corps photographers and German civilians took a vast number of photographs.¹⁶ At the end of the war, photographers representing Life magazine or the New York Times, for example, joined official Army photographers in documenting the concentration camps, the rounding up of remaining German soldiers, Nazi and SS officers, returning prisoners of war, refugees, local inhabitants; and the seemingly endless rubble and ruins of Germany’s cities and towns.¹⁷ Indeed photographs of destroyed European cities were available for public consumption and propaganda purposes immediately after the war began such as those taken of Poland.¹⁸ But, as photography historian Ludger Derenthal notes, although bomb damage in Germany was extensively photographed and initial attacks on Cologne in 1942 were reported in the Nazi press, image coverage was subsequently censored and such photographs were generally not available until after the war.¹⁹ Similarly, individuals recorded the events in diaries and letters, and authors wrote of their experiences of the bombing raids, which were only published after 1945.²⁰ The distribution of ruin photography through publication, as Stephen Hoelscher claims, provided the most widespread visual symbol of suffering and loss for German citizens.²¹ From the plethora of such images scholars have drawn various conclusions about how these photographs, whether published at the time or retrieved from the archives, challenge the way in which we see events of war and trauma.²² For example, Dagmar Barnouw sees the aerial photographs taken by the American Life photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White in the weeks following the fall of Berlin as revealing merciless retribution, whereas Derenthal describes Walter Hege as developing a photographic aesthetic that enhanced the impact of the destroyed buildings, an argument we could extend to the photographs included here.²³ While photography was vital in constructing the complex texture of memory it also compounded the sense of loss and disorientation because of the overriding ruin aesthetic that negated individual experiences.

With the capitulation of Germany on 8 May 1945 (or Victory in Europe day), a reported 131 German cities and towns lay in ruins, with over 3.5 million homes destroyed and six hundred thousand German civilians killed in the air raids.²⁴ As one historian noted, “the US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that 42% of Berlin’s 1.5 million dwelling units were completely destroyed and another 31% damaged to a lesser or greater extent; German sources estimated that they removed 98 million cubic yards of rubble from the city.”²⁵ The emptiness of Berlin was largely due to the destroyed buildings but also to the lack of inhabitants; the population of Greater Berlin in 1943 was almost four and a half million, but with the added effect of evacuations in 1945, this was reduced to almost half.

Figure 1.1 Richard Peter Sr. Blick vom Rathausturm nach Süden mit der Allegorie der Güte, 1945. SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek, 88950028.

In one photograph by Richard Peter Sr. Blick vom Rathausturm nach Süden mit der Allegorie der Güte (View to the South From the City Hall Tower) taken between 17 September and 31 December 1945 of the shattered remains of Dresden, the human figure is placed back into the tragi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Photographing History: Germany and its Recent Past
• Introduction: Photographing Place in Germany After 1945
• 1 Ruin Gazing: The Disorienting View
• 2 View From the Edge
• 3 After the Fact: Late Photography and Unconscious Places
• 4 Afterimage: Rephotography and Place
• 5 Aftermath: Absence and Place
• 6 Der Wald: Memory and Landscape
• Afterword: Photographing History After Demand
• Bibliography
• Index