Exposed Memories: Family Pictures in Private and Collective Memory

Incongruous Images: “Before, During, and After” the Holocaust

 I. The Photo Donation (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., 1998) In the summer of 1998, our parents/in-laws, Lotte and Carl Hirsch, visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) photo archive, where they had been invited to donate some of their family pictures from Czernowitz, the East European city where they were born, grew up, and survived the Holocaust.1 The photos were intended to enhance the museum’s small archival collection of images from that city and the Bukowina province of which it had once been the capital. Selected pictures would be cataloged by date, place, and type, and labeled with additional information provided by the donors. Some of the photos, Carl and Lotte were told, might be chosen for display on the museum’s Web site. Incongruous Images “Before, During, and After” the Holocaust Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer  An earlier version of this article was published in Exponált emlék: családi képek a magán- és közösségi emlékezetben, ed. Zsófia Bán and HedvigTurai (Budapest: Hungarian Chapter of International Association of Art Critics, 2008), the Hungarian language edition of this volume. This version also appeared in History and Theory 48 (December 2009) with a thoughtful response by Geoffrey Batchen. 4 INCONGRUOUS IMAGES It has been the goal of the museum’s photo curators to document and display Jewish life in Europe broadly, before, during, and after the Holocaust, balancing the archive of atrocity photos that dominate the museum’s permanent exhibition . Over the years, the museum archive has thus acquired many photographs through private donations as well as from images scanned from books and collected holdings in other institutions. In Washington, we observed Carl and Lotte’s donation, and the oral history interview that accompanied it, with close interest, because we wished to gain some sense of how such a photographic archive is constructed, and of the assumptions and presuppositions that shape its development. Since both of us viewed the Washington D.C. museum as a site where an “official story” of the Holocaust (and of the Jewish life that was destroyed by it) was displayed for public consumption and archived for scholarly study, we wanted to learn more about how that story takes form, and about the role that visual images play in shaping it. According to what questions and suppositions are images selected for the archive, both by individual donors and by the archivists who receive, catalogue, and display them? And what role do private family photos play in the archive’s composition? 1. Cernăuţi, Herrengasse, 190s 2. Cernăuţi, Herrengasse, 195 INCONGRUOUS IMAGES 5 Lotte and Carl approached the donation with divergent interests and investments . Carl, an engineer by profession, was systematic. He had researched the archive and its mission and carefully read the instructions sent to potential donors. At home, he had searched through his albums and photo boxes and chosen images that he believed would be of interest to the museum—a very small number. He picked out the only remaining, somewhat torn and faded, portrait of his parents— their wedding photo from circa 1910; a picture of his mother and her sisters dating from the 190s; some school photographs from the elementary and high schools he had attended; and a few pictures of his labor Zionist youth group, Hashomer Hatzair—portraits of members as well as informal snapshots of summer outings and trips.2 He selected no pictures of his brother and two sisters, or of other family members, and no informal snapshots of himself. He did, however, bring some twenty additional images to the museum, all of them connected to his institutional affiliations, schools, and job before the war. He labeled each photo with a brief description, dating it carefully , and identified all the depicted persons he could remember. Lotte was much more hesitant, almost resistant. Why would a museum be interested in some poor-quality snapshots of her friends and relatives? Or in school pictures of her class in the Hoffmann Gymnasium? Who would ever care to look at what after all were private images, meaningful only to her and her family and friends? At home, she had gone back and forth examining the photo albums and boxes, choosing, discarding, but also considering backing out of the donation altogether. She did have just one photo she believed to...