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

Above all, this book is an ethical reflection on the morality of bombing civilian populations and reflecting on such bombing aesthetically. Françoise Meltzer uses photographs taken in Germany by her mother, the French anti-Nazi resistance fighter Jeanne Dumilieu, as her starting point for these reflections, suggesting that any photograph of buildings or cities in ruins inevitably points viewers toward the act of destruction that created the ruins, in this case, specifically, the bombing of German cities during World War Two. Moreover, when one looks at pictures of piles of rubble, Meltzer insists, one also tends to think of the bodies that might lie buried underneath the rubble.

Jeanne Dumilieu was an amateur photographer, and Meltzer admits that art historians will easily spot flaws in her mother's work. The photographs are published for the first time here; for this reason alone, the book is a valuable contribution to the history of the postwar period in Germany. Dumilieu's photographs are fascinating documents, and the fact that they were taken by an amateur photographer in no way detracts from their authenticity. Some of the photographs have people in them, while others do not, but all of them show a Germany in ruins. Meltzer is not entirely sure why her mother took the pictures—whether for purely historical reasons, out of sympathy with ordinary Germans, or perhaps even out of a sense of Schadenfreude about what had happened to the Germans. Quite probably it was a mixture of all these motivations: "Photographing the devastation, she said, was completely exhausting, precisely because of these extreme, conflicting responses" (3). However the primary sense that one gets from reading Meltzer's book is one of sympathy: compassion for the suffering of others. Meltzer is ethically attuned to the problem of pity and its potential to shade into arrogance, and she discusses philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain Badiou in her reflections on the ethics of photography. Pity may have its ethical problems, but lack of pity can potentially be even worse, as Meltzer demonstrates eloquently in her discussion of the remarkable photographs created by Margaret Bourke-White for Life magazine and subsequently published in "Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly": A Report on the Collapse of Hitler's "Thousand Years" (1946). Bourke-White's primary attitude toward the Germans was vindictive and snarky, informed by the conviction that all of them shared collective guilt. For instance, one caption to a Bourke-White photograph showing a German civilian woman being forced to look at the horrors of the Buchenwald concentration camp reads: "You who cannot bear to look, did you agree about the Jews? Will you tell your children that the Führer was good at heart?" (27) By contrast, the Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman, in his postwar reporting from Germany, insisted on empathy, declaring that Germans were not "one solid block, irradiating [sic] Nazi chill, but […] a multitude of starving and fleeing individuals" (123).

Meltzer begins the book by discussing her own childhood in postwar Germany. She was the daughter of a French mother and an American father and grew up with three languages: the French and English of her parents and the German of the family's housekeeper Marta. Thanks to Marta, Meltzer "was steeped in German culture and tradition—not all of it very reassuring. For example, Marta read Der Struwwelpeter to me, probably the worst (and most engrossing) children's book ever produced" (xiii). Meltzer describes her own childhood playing in the ruins, and how ruins became a natural part of life for her: "Ruins were […] the scenery […] of my childhood. When we landed in New York Harbor in 1956, the first question I asked my mother was, 'Where are the ruins?'" (5).

Meltzer has been influenced by Werner Sollors's powerful study of postwar German and American culture, The Temptation of Despair (2014), in which Sollors, among other things...