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Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3.4 (2000) 677-679



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Book Review

Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye


Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye. By Barbie Zelizer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998; pp. viii + 292. $27.50.

In July 1944 Russian armies on the Eastern front liberated a German concentration camp at Majdanek, where half a million people had been put to death. Seven hundred starving prisoners were found alive. In the months that followed, the Russians liberated camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. In January 1945 the Russians came upon Auschwitz, where fewer than three thousand survivors, most of them Jews, remained alive. In Auschwitz alone, more than a million people had been killed by the Germans. In April and May 1945 the British and American armies liberated camps at Ohrdruf, Nordhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and Bergen-Belsen.

Barbie Zelizer's Remembering to Forget analyzes the production, distribution, and historical uses of the photographic records of Nazi concentration camps created by the press and the armed services in the period of liberation. She traces the initial reception of the photographs as a form of bearing witness to incomprehensible atrocity, creating the basis for a collective memory of the Holocaust that has always run the risk of failing to comprehend, of simply forgetting, or of remembering in such a way as to "neutralize our ability to attend to contemporary atrocities" (13). Zelizer analyzes in detail the liberation photography of the concentration camps through an initial period in which the photographs crucially shaped understandings of the Holocaust. The first period of widespread attention lasted for about five years, but was followed by thirty years of "amnesia," which were in turn succeeded, from the end of the 1970s, by renewed and intensive use of photography to shape public memory of the atrocities.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower first encountered the horror in the camp at Ohrdruf on April 12, 1945--the day President Franklin Roosevelt died. Eisenhower [End Page 677] at once commanded that arrangements be made for mass witnessing of the camps by military, press reporters, and photographers. Zelizer quotes Eisenhower's ordering, "Let the world see" (86). Eisenhower's immediate insight that the camps required the world to bear witness formed a central theme of the liberation-era response to the Holocaust and helped to create the conditions that caused photography to bear the chief burden of communication.

Print reporters, taking for granted in the journalistic world of 1945 that words were the fundamental element of factual and interpretive reporting, found themselves struggling to bear witness, but writing in ways that strained the power of writing. Reporters emphasized the role of factual, eye-witness reporting of scenes of horror that challenged their own powers of belief, and which, they seemed to understand, would surely be difficult for readers to credit, given the years of war propaganda to which they had been subjected. They found themselves conducting verbal tours of the camps, walking among skeletal survivors and stacks of rotting corpses, past barbed wire and through barracks, death chambers, and crematoria. Over and over, they emphasized their own firsthand, visual witnessing of the camps. The print reporters and their editors also violated typical expectations of "news," in which a story, once reported, is finished. In the case of the camps, repetition gave depth and seemed to guard against anticipated reluctance by readers to believe that this could have happened. Zelizer also seems to detect a ritual and psychological element in the act of bearing witness.

U.S. Representative Clare Boothe Luce admitted, "I am one person, and among many others, who will be able to say that she has seen examples of these atrocities with her own eyes." There appeared to be a curious strength in numbers of people validating the same details--curious because it worked against journalistic objectives of "scooping" the opposition. Yet reporters appeared to find solace in producing additional reports to confirm earlier ones. This was because a focus on witnessing helped authenticate the broader aim of...

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