Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence

by Dagmar Barnouw

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Adam Meek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dry as the Sahara Desert, Barnouw meditates on photos and eyewitness accounts of the first days of the Allied occupation of Germany in academic jargon, the last chapter deals with the Historikerstreit of the 1980s and Israeli reactions to the legacy of the Holocaust during the Intifada.

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tacked on to the end of Dagmar Barnouw's analyses of photographs taken during the immediate aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War II is a chapter on the Historikerstreit of the late 1980s and 1990s. It is by far the best chapter in the book, except for the forced exegesis of Amos Oz' Fima, which is tacked on to this tacked on chapter. It gets to the heart of the matter about which Barnouw was most concerned. Should the Holocaust be considered a sanctified historical event beyond all subsequent interpretation or historiographical study? Barnouw herself is firmly placed in what would be considered the revisionist camp. And her photographic analysis is case #1 in her argument.

Barnouw goes to great lengths to promote what she sees as an alternative to the traditional reading of postwar Germany and its people. She wants their suffering acknowledged and the common postwar reading of German attitudes as "arrogant, indifferent, and unvanquished" to be seen as "stunned, fearful, and unsure" of the future. How she goes about it is taking the postwar still photos of US Army Signal Corps photographers, professional celebrity photographers (such as Robert Capa and Margaret Bourke-White) and German photographers and re-visioning them to demonstrate her thesis. Unfortunately, in doing so, she takes an entirely subjective point of view in her analyses. Her examination of the photos can easily be read from a different perspective. And her formal analysis, which eschews the critical language of photographic analysis, is often simply wrong. The composition and line of sight and vectoring of photos does not lead where she says it does. And she inadequately deals with issues of foregrounding, perspectivism, vanishing points, depth of field, and off camera space, all of which are missing entirely from her work. Finally, she fails to examine just what drove, for example, US Army photographic units' rules of composition and framing. There was no exploration of army field manuals, technical manuals, or equipment manuals pertaining to Signal Corps photography. She does not seem to realize that the first army manual on this subject actually predates the Spanish-American War. Instead, Barnouw creates stories. Some of them are intriguing and appealing. But much of it is imagined in her head and present no place else.

A final word on the Historikerstreit. There seems to be some sort of consensus that the study of Nazi Germany has always revolved around the Holocaust, at least until the so-called conflict among German historians beginning in the mid 1980s. I think this is a misreading and that Barnouw is forgetting the initial studies on the topic that were dominant from the late 1940s until the mid 1970s, when, indeed, there was a shift to what Barnouw would call transhistorical centering on the Holocaust. But before that, historians such as Gerhard Ritter, Edmond Vermeil, Alan Bullock, Gordon Craig, Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Wolfgang Sauer, and even Ralf Dahrendorf and David Schoenbaum were concentrated on the How and Why of Nazism, not the Holocaust itself. Barnouw makes no mention of these historians or their positions and theses. For that, her work seems fundamentally flawed.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

But one thing was clear – the war had ended. Never again would anyone travel in the Third Reich. - Julia Boyd, Travelers in the Third Reich

The first image in this book is the cover of Life Magazine from May 7, 1945.
Like all of the more than 100 images in the book, it is uncaptioned – with the exception, in this case, of the magazine’s cover copy. Barnouw relies on her present-day readers to see the faces of the three “German people” as expressive of something like shock, resignation, or trepidation. Allowing the image itself to speak, she then quotes the cover caption from inside the magazine:

The faces of these three German civilians show they know at first hand the bitterness of defeat. For 84 hours they huddled with 7,000 others in a mine slag pile while Allied bombs wrecked Wehofen. They tried to hoist a white flag, and their troops Tommy-gunned them. These faces are unhappy but hard and arrogant. Not yet had these Germans, whose reactions to defeat are described on pages 69-76, been forced to see the atrocities (pp. 32-37) committed in their name. (22)

Barnouw tries to understand that reading of the facial expressions as “arrogant”, a discussion which leads into the book’s larger project of analyzing the controversial idea of collective guilt and punishment. One immediate explanation of the “arrogant” reading is the fact, alluded to in the caption, that the same issue of Life also contained some of the first published photos from liberated concentration camps, viewable here. (Click the link at your own discretion – there are horrifying images, albeit ones the editors of Life felt the American public needed to see.)

Allied occupiers, reporters, and photographers in 1945 Germany, willing or not, were placed in a position of judgment over the people they found there: it was felt essential to distinguish the “good Germans” from the “bad Germans”. The difficulties inherent in this were felt even by native Germans who had emigrated. Hans Speier, an émigré returning from 12 years of exile, is quoted as finding himself confident only of people he knew personally before his exile. In one of the book’s many implicit ironies, this judgment was in many cases initially, and in some cases enduringly referred, in a kind of reverse logic, to the guidance of Nazi jurisprudence: those Germans liberated from concentration camps were the “good Germans” and, with few exceptions, those outside the wire who authorities over the past 12 years never considered worthy of incarceration were the “bad Germans”.

It’s hard to look at the pictures in this book and see “bad Germans” in the shocked, hungry, and miserable survivors pictured. Indeed, even an image of the Volkssturm taken under Nazi auspices seems, despite the weaponry, more comic than threatening.
One such ”bad German” is a female professor in Cologne met by photographer Margaret Bourke-White and Life reporter Percy Knauth. Barnouw tells about their impression of the woman, but does not quote at length the opinions which makes Knauth see her as “dangerous”:

Yet she thinks the war started “because Germany wanted a small strip of territory which was the Polish Corridor and everybody agreed that it was ridiculous and unnatural to separate East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Then the Poles started to kill Germans, many of them, and Hitler finally had to protect them and then England came in.”

She says, “In America I found people everywhere discussing racial problems and I was very gratified because I was sure then that it was all right to discuss them in Germany, too.” She says that she was never forced to join the Nazi Party and that she never had to do anything against her conscience. She says that Americans must feed the German people because otherwise the whole country will go Bolshevist, and she complained bitterly because the Germans have been put out of their homes to make room for the American occupation troops.

The absence of captions makes it necessary to read extensively in the book’s text to understand the context of the photographs; this produces a work in which words and pictures are particularly well-integrated. The author looks carefully at each picture, trying to capture what the photographer intended to communicate, what contemporary viewers saw, and what additional or contradictory evidence might be seen in the photographic image by a modern viewer.

But the text is not just commentary and explication of the photographs; Barnouw quotes extensively from contemporary accounts in articles, books, and diaries. These selections are artfully chosen: they start with accounts from Allied occupation forces and their accompanying photographers and journalists, move on to testimony from German exiles returning to the country in the immediate aftermath of the war, and conclude with diary entries from Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, who lived in Berlin throughout the war as a member of the Resistance. This progression over four chapters has the effect of taking the viewpoint of the opening image and gradually shifting it from that of the victorious Allies to that of the defeated Germans.

This feat of textual construction brings up a parallel between documentary photography and the book itself, with implications for other history writing as well: the author presents us with documented facts, but chooses the framing of these facts and the angle from which they are presented. Germany 1945 should have ended after the fourth chapter, leaving this unstated structural reflection on the nature of historical understanding to work in the reader’s mind.

Instead there is a fifth and valedictory final chapter which seems to come from another work entirely. The only chapter with no photographs, it is a summary of arguments made by German and Jewish historians in the late 1980s and early 1990s about the idea of collective guilt and the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The chapter closes with a lengthy analysis of Amos Oz’s novel Fima (Barnouw is a professor of German and Comparative Literature). These discussions reflect back on the book’s themes, but Barnouw seems to make the mistake that, because they are taking place “now”, a half century after the events (the book was published in 1996), that they are somehow more definitive or come from a more privileged perspective than the analyses offered by others in preceding years.

[Carl Larsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the easiest book to read, but for someone intressed in the subject the book is very interesting, mainly because of the information it conveys.