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Focus on Strangers — Photo Albums of World War II ······································································································ Petra Bopp, Sandra Starke Somewhere between what has been forgotten and repressed and what has been stored and borne along into present consciousness, our collective cultural memory contains many photographic traces which preserve individual recollections of World War II. Pictures were taken both by amateurs who looked to professional and artistic photography for inspiration, and by owners of the small, easy-to-operate cameras developed from 1900 onward and permitting the production of souvenir photos in great numbers. Already during World War I, soldiers made photographs which they compiled in war albums; after 1933, however, snapshot-taking became a highly popular form of mass recreation in the Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”). To begin with, there are the images of the triumphant Wehrmacht soldiers advancing on Poland, France, the Soviet Union and the Balkans. The members of the occupying forces reassured themselves of their own identity and superiority by looking at the native population from a perspective ranging from touristic to ethnographically curious to racist. In the process, they took as their orientation familiar nationalistic stereotypes as well as the verbal and visual conceptions of the enemy invented and propagated by National Socialism. Even in the context of picture-taking for private purposes, the photographer exercised power over his subjects: prisoners and civilians alike became objects at the mercy of his lens. Snapshottakers and camera buffs had a predilection for photographing from an elevated position: the colonial troops of the French army, peasants in the wooden houses of Russian villages, veiled women in the Muslim areas of Yugoslavia. Their commentaries in the captions moreover convey a wide spectrum of negative assessments: “The Saviours of the Grande Nation”, “This is how it looks in stupid Russia”, “Jews are at home there too”. But what was the essence of the ‘differentness’ perceived by a society of which the majority believed in its own racial and cultural superiority? How do the photographic images of German soldiers, prisoners of war and the civilian population differ from one front to the next? Against the background of these questions, the exhibition shows a new, sharper picture of the personal experience of war. Private war albums are the individually constructed memorial spheres of an entire generation. Memories are incomplete and always historically imprecise. Nevertheless, they provide presentday viewers with access to the visual testimonies of a generation, its perspective on the war, its mentality. The multifaceted nature of private photography with regard to intention, motif and meaning distinguishes it from the images of professional war photographers, who had ideologically clear assignments to carry out. The pictures taken at the frong (for example) by snap-shooting soldiers perhaps do not show a more authentic view, but their perspective is more highly differentiated than that of the official photojournalists in the service of the propaganda units. Already in the situation they were photographing, the soldiers determined the future memory of the instant. The process of pasting the photos into albums in certain arrangements and annotating them then served to charge each individual picture with additional private meaning. Some scenes were to be remembered, others deliberately not – almost as if what wasn’t photographed had never taken place. It remained concealed in the depths of the mind. Many soldiers obeyed the orders prohibiting them from taking pictures of war crimes such as executions and hangings. Such pictures nevertheless exist. In order to dissociate themselves from the perpetrators, the soldiers’ families occasionally removed them from the albums later on. Captions and traces of the paste remain, pointing to the horror with all the greater intensity. Continue reading >