Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945 by Françoise Meltzer (review)

An esteemed scholar of religious studies and comparative literature, Françoise Meltzer is also the daughter of an American father and a French mother who lived in postwar Germany from 1945–1956, initially in Berlin. Meltzer was born and raised in a trilingual household: a nanny taught her German, and Meltzer became her mother's translator at a very young age. The introduction to her book, Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945, offers striking insights into Meltzer's childhood experiences as a foreigner in a defeated land, but this all too brief section then gives way to the primary purpose of the book: the exploration of a set of ruin photographs taken by her mother, Jeanne Dumilieu, in 1945.

Meltzer was so used to playgrounds surrounded by ruins that, on arriving in New York in 1956, she asked her mother, "where are the ruins?" (5) Her mother is not named again; she becomes "the photographer." Meltzer remarks that her mother's generation was famously "tight-lipped" about their wartime experiences (Dumilieu's participation in the Resistance, and disdain for those who merely claimed to have done so, is briefly noted); the author feels it is appropriate to do the same (2–5). The scholar takes over from the daughter as Meltzer seeks the appropriate lens through which to view her mother's images.

The book is elegantly written and cogently argued. Chapter 1 compares contemporary witnesses' accounts of the destruction caused by Allied bombing in major German cities and life amid the ruins, including Hannah Arendt, W.G. Sebald, Marie Vassilichikov, Irmgard Hunt, Friedrich Reck, Margaret Bourke-White, Stig Dagerman, and Gertrude Stein. Meltzer distinguishes autobiographical writing from reportage, but it's not clear why she chose these examples over others, when only one is a photographer and other rich sources (Alexander Kluge, Hans Erich Nossack) are only briefly discussed. She is interested in the role of atrocity description, seeing it as an abstract protagonist in each of the narratives, serving the fictive role of allowing the reader a sense of "being there."

Throughout the book, Meltzer considers the Romantic gaze at ruins and the experience of the sublime. She is concerned about the viewer who might be attracted to the photographs' eerie beauty without taking responsibility for the presence and absence of victims and perpetrators. Meltzer believes that the Holocaust is an absent presence in the photographs and worries that viewers might miss this; she also cannot know how "the photographer" felt about this. In chapter 2 her discussion of ruin paintings by Anselm Kiefer and Karl Hofer focuses on the relationship between representation and description, how to make the unbearable real and visible. She shifts her gaze to photography in chapter 3, with a longer discussion of a few of the photographs (all beautifully reproduced), to consider the ethics of revenge and forgiveness; then in chapter 4 she turns to suffering and victimization. Meltzer glosses the Romantic fascination with ruins as a given, but seems not to have considered, as they did, how those same ruins (for instance, the Gothic) were damaged in warfare; or how the sublime experience always required temporal distancing, a delay, before efforts to preserve its ephemerality in words or images.

Meltzer is more familiar with French scholars on the war and the Holocaust than with the English-language scholarship. She doesn't read Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Anne Fuchs, Rudy Koshar, David Crew, or Michael Meng, to name a few, who have written about living with postwar ruins or consideration of that photography. The perspective of an outsider to the field, as with Inge Clendinnen's Reading the Holocaust (1998), can bring valuable fresh insights, but as Clendinnen knew, it's an uphill slog, and Meltzer's overarching concern is moral, rather than historical: she wants to consider how it is that anyone can ever look at atrocity photography, with ruin photographs often harboring invisible human remains. What does this do to...