Neue Staaten - neue Bilder? Visuelle Kultur im Dienst staatlicher Selbstdarstellung in Zentral- und Osteuropa seit 1918 (review)

Since recorded history, states have made use of visual images—art and architecture—to impress on their subjects a sense of stability and power. Ziggurats in Babylonia and pyramids in ancient Mexico may have been temples to the gods, but they also served secular purposes of reinforcing the existing political and social order. This is even more true in the 20th century, in what Peter Kenez has call the "propaganda state." ¹ Surely the USSR and Nazi Germany were prime examples of states that expended enormous resources to project a certain image, but one may argue that in the 20th century all states had to become "propaganda states." At the very least, since 1918 states have worked hard on "self-advertising" directed both at their own citizens and at foreign powers. The 28 articles collected in the present work, the first in a series entitled "Historical Visual Culture," looks at the ways in which visual images have been used in states from Germany to the USSR. The essays are nearly all quite short, a dozen pages or less, touching on topics as diverse as humorous drawings mildly satirizing Albert Speer's plans for a grandiose Berlin to Yugoslav banknotes through the century to the symbolism of the Knesset building in Jerusalem to the mythic-symbolic use of earth (Erde) by popes, Habsburgs, and others. The essays range in topic, geographical focus, and approach so widely that I simply select several to describe in greater depth.

Just what is meant by the "visual turn" and "historical visual culture"? Reading these essays one could come up with a dozen somewhat overlapping definitions. In a sense, emphasizing the visual can be seen as an outgrowth of Pierre Nora's famous concept, the lieu de mémoire, which he defines as "any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community." ² For example, turning back to the volume under review, capital cities, Gdynia in the interwar Polish Republic, the Romanian king and queen Ferdinand and Maria, Posen (Poznań) under Nazi rule, the central building of the Polish communist party. Several scholars have developed these ideas, though not always with specific reference to Nora. Karl Schlögel's delightful and iconoclastic Berlin: Ostbahnhof Europas is one successful attempt to focus on buildings, train stations, and special individuals to show each as a kind of microcosm of the time. Schlögel concentrates more on the spatial than the specifically visual, but can the two be so easily teased apart? ³ Another excellent example of looking at architecture and city space to shed light on the "spirit of the age" is Gavriel Rosenfeld's volume on postwar Munich. ⁴ In both cases, physical objects are used as instruments that reveal broader attitudes and mentalities, something that is attempted but not always carried through (in part due to lack of space) in the essays gathered here.

The collection begins with an introduction by the editors. Bartetzky and Dmitrieva connect the work gathered here with what they term a "pictorial or visual turn" and the growth of "visual culture studies" (3). ⁵ These essays derived from a conference held in Leipzig in 2003 that asked participants to look at visual culture after the four historical breaks of 1918, 1933–39, 1945, and 1989–91. As the authors admit, the interwar period is somewhat over-represented and only three essays cover the postcommunist era: on postcommunist museums such as the "House of Terror" in Budapest, on treatment of monuments to the socialist past in post-1989 Bulgaria, and a look at the Internet site of the "Transdnistrian Dnestr...