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  • After the Fact:El libro negro, Traumatic Identities, and the War on Fascism1
  • Sara Blair (bio)

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Figure 1.

El libro negro del terror Nazi en Europa (Mexico City: El Libro Libre), 1943, second edition. Cover

In 1943, a group of writers and artists working in Mexico City, many in exile, published an anthology of responses to the terrifying realities of the new global disorder. The volume, titled El libro negro del terror Nazi en Europa (The Black Book of Nazi Terror in Europe), appeared in two editions of ten thousand copies. It included testimonials, manifestos, and other texts by more than fifty writers—including Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, Russian novelist Alexei Tolstoy, and Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch—hailing from sixteen countries across Europe and North America (Figure 1.)2 Its publishing house, El Libro Libre, had been founded in Mexico City in 1942 by communist exiles from Hitler's Germany, including publisher Hannes Meyer, the former director of the influential Bauhaus school of art and design. The publishing venture has been called "perhaps the most important émigré publishing firm in the world" during the tempestuous wartime era.3 The volume was sponsored (patrocinada) by the presidents of Mexico, Peru, and Czechoslovakia, the latter of whom was in exile.4 Self-evidently, El libro negro embodies the life and career of internationalism, and more specifically, the urgent project of identification across color lines, national borders, and social boundaries following the demise of the Popular Front and the grim march of world war.

Less obviously, however, El libro negro also embodies key issues defining the afterlives of documentary imaging as a cultural practice. An initial glimpse at its pages may well tempt readers to think of the volume as a predictable, socially conscious project, conducted in an expressive register in which commitments [End Page 111] to documentary authenticity and to sympathetic social action were made problematic by the realities of state propaganda. Printed on cheap paper for cost-effective and timely distribution, emphatically "gray" in its use of conventional journalistic photographs, organized in visual configurations reminiscent of daily newspapers, offering itself, so it would seem, under the sign of the evidentiary, as an illustrated catalogue, an "encyclopedi[a]," even, of Nazi terror and atrocities: Everything about the volume suggests the aim of providing an irrefutable account of Hitler's domination of Europe as a persuasive argument for antifascist action.5

But El libro negro contained not only, as its title page notes, testimonios de escritores (writers' testimonials), it also included 164 photographs and reproductions of some fifty drawings and prints, produced both by Mexican-born artists affiliated with the post-revolutionary Mexican state and by well-known internationalist or leftist artists whose work was borrowed or recycled from other political contexts for inclusion in the volume. El libro's graphic sensibility was informed both by the iconography of the Mexican Revolution—in particular, of the insurrectionary period from 1910 to 1920 and the significant aftershocks of the late 1920s and '30s—as well as the emerging practices of European and Mexican modernisms. Its visual materials take the form of lithographic and linocut reproductions within the body of the text and photographic materials organized in distinct portfolios spread throughout the volume. The conjunction of these distinct representational forms and modes of production complicates El libro's bid to document social experience; the uses of text and visual materials in service of that aim are far from straightforward. Indeed, the relationship between and among the visual materials in the volume mimics that between the Mexican- and European-, and the Mexican- and Jewish-inflected iconographies and visual modes deployed throughout its pages. In its self-consciousness about these relations and this analogy El libro negro does work worthy of closer attention: it aims to generate new forms of identification, new modes of photographic meaning, and new states of identification across linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries.

Recognition of this aim depends on engagement with the complexity of the volume as a compilation. The list of contributing writers, included as an appendix to the book, has been described as a "who's who of German leftist authors"—even...

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