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  • A Woman’s Petrified Gaze at the Dead: Uncovering the Troubled Ethics Behind an Iconic Image of Bombing War Against Nazi Germany
  • Christoph Weber (bio)

In 2003, the German historian Jörg Friedrich published the picture book Brandstätten: Der Anblick des Bombenkriegs (Scenes of Fire: The View of the Bombing War), a visual counterpart to his bestselling 2002 monograph Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (The Fire: Germany in the Bombing War 1940–1945). The gruesome photographs of charred and disfigured corpses in the chapter “Bergung” (rescue) sparked a controversy in Germany, as they had been presented without proper historical context. Reviewers jumped to the conclusion that Friedrich’s selection of shocking images constituted an attempt to balance “German crimes with German suffering,” thereby perpetuating “the myth of the Germans as Opfer.”1 For instance, Heinz-Peter Preußer argues that in Germany, “these photographs cannot be regarded without denoting the emblem of industrial mass killing, the destruction of European Jewry.”2 Viewed in isolation, without the critical reexamination of the historical circumstances that led to the destruction of Germany’s urban centers, the images of dead German civilians are vulnerable to misappropriation by revisionists and their accusatory claim that the Allies had perpetrated a “Bombing Holocaust.”3 This demonstrates the fundamentally problematic nature of showing violence in what John Berger calls “public photographs.”4 Because public photographs are “like images in the memory of a total stranger,” they “carry no certain meaning in themselves” and thus “lend themselves to any use.”5 With the easy access to and rapid proliferation of images on the internet, the question as to how photographed atrocities are being used in the service of an ideological standpoint becomes all the more pressing. David F. Crew concludes his analysis of online treatments of the bombing war in Germany since the 1990s with the remark that “numerous websites depend on inflammatory rhetoric, shock images, emotional appeals, and narrow perspectives to focus users’ attention exclusively on German suffering.”6 The “new emphasis on anger and outrage” informs the way these internet sites employ “[p]ictures of desolate ruins and gruesome [End Page 10] corpses” and ultimately “does not encourage viewers to think about the differences between the moral valence and the emotional impact of an image or series of images.”7

A possible strategy for blunting the emotional resentment and controversy that the photographs of the Allied bombardments are able to generate to the current day is to integrate them into what Berger has called the context of social and political experience: “The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images.”8 In fact, what has been barely explored in the debate about the ethical implications of publishing photographs of the German bombing dead is the context in which they were taken. Michael Kimmelman points out in his review of Brandstätten that “Mr. Friedrich is mysterious about their origin. They seem to have been amassed by the country’s efficient record keepers and collected in town archives.”9 Friedrich briefly mentions the involvement of unnamed professional photographers and officials with photo permits—fire officers, city architects, air raid wardens—in the documentation of the bombing war and who later in life donated their private photo collections to city archives.10 Yet it remains unclear what kind of socio-political forces pushed for the photographic documentation of the devastating air raids in the first place. Friedrich himself justifies the publication of atrocity images by stating that Joseph Goebbels “forbade these photos of our victims from the German papers” and “[i]n a way we’ve obeyed his orders until this day.”11 As the Allied bombings intensified, press directives issued by the Reich Ministry of Propaganda had indeed proscribed the newspaper publication of photographs of dead German civilians.12 However, the sheer volume of surviving images attests to a particular interest among Nazi officials in meticulously documenting the horrors unleashed by the so-called Anglo-American “terror attacks.”

Contrary to Friedrich’s polemical claim, photographs...

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