German History Vol. 27, No. 2, pp.

271285

REVIEW ARTICLE
Visual Power? The Politics of Images in TwentiethCentury Germany and Austria-Hungary
David F. Crew
Visual History. Ein Studienbuch. Edited by Gerhard Paul. Gttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.
2006. 379 pp. 21,90 (paperback).
Die andere Front. Fotografie und Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg. By Anton Holzer. Darmstadt:
Primus Verlag. 2007. 368 pp. 39.90 (hardback).
Das Auge des Dritten Reiches. Hitlers Kameramann und Fotograf Walter Frentz. Edited by Hans
Georg Hiller von Gaertringen. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag. 2007. 256 pp. 39,90 (hardback).
Das Auge der Partei. Fotografie und Staatssicherheit. By Karin Hartewig. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag.
2004. 272 pp. 19,90 (paperback).
Die DDR im Bild. Zum Gebrauch der Fotografie im anderen deutschen Staat. Edited by Karin
Hartewig and Alf Ldtke. Gttingen: Wallstein Verlag. 2004. 238 pp. 32 (paperback).

In the twentieth century, images have played a crucial role in the construction and
reproduction of political power. Yet German historians have only recently begun to pay
serious attention to the politics of images. The five books under review here show that
visual power has operated in two major ways: first, through the production and circulation
of the right images1 of any specific historical event or period, which is the subject of
almost all the works discussed here, and second, through the direct observation and
surveillance of subjects considered by state authorities to constitute some kind of threat,
as in the use of photography by the East German Stasi analysed in Karin Hartewigs
pioneering study, Das Auge der Partei.
The first type of visual power depends upon practices which try to persuade viewers
that the message an image conveys is true. What makes those who produce and circulate
these images believe that they will achieve the desired effect? Is it the subject, the style,
the medium or the genre? Does it matter where and how viewers encounter these images?
Do officially approved pictures still contain messages that may allow viewers to read
them in subversive ways? Does the attempt to control images actually promote the
viewers visual desire to see what has not been shown in the right pictures? These are
some of the central questions which the books reviewed here address.
Gerhard Pauls excellent collection of essays, Visual History. Ein Studienbuch, shows that
understanding why certain images have been able to establish themselves as the right
pictures requires attention not only to what images show but how they show it. One of
the considerable strengths of this book is the close attention it devotes to different visual
1 Thomas Heimann, Bilder von Buchenwald. Die Visualisierung des Antifaschismus in der DDR (19451990) (Cologne,

Weimar and Vienna, 2005), p. 17.

The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.
All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghp007

272

Review Article

media and genres, as well as to the importance of the style, composition and aesthetics of
images. Jens Jgers discussion of pictures from Africa before 1918 shows, for example,
that the message an image conveys can be significantly affected by the technical
characteristics of the specific medium which produces that picture. Jger compares a
photograph and a colour drawing. The photograph of a police station in Lom (Togo)
was taken sometime between 1900 and 1914. It shows five men in uniform standing in
front of the building. Four of them are black Africans. The fifth is a white colonial officer,
himself dressed all in white. The second image is a colour drawing which circulated as a
humorous postcard. Here, black Africans and white sailors who have clearly been
drinking are shown dancing wildly arm-in-arm. The theme of both images is order and
discipline. Each relies upon specific qualities assumed to be associated with the different
medium that has produced it. The postcard exploits the fictional possibilities of a drawing
to warn, albeit humorously, of the dangers that result from undisciplined, uncontrolled
interactions between Europeans and Africans. The first image claims photographys
authority as a documentary medium to show the reader an authentic scene of racial
order and hierarchy.
Frank Beckers article on the picture-world of the Franco-Prussian War shows that
before 1914, war was painted or drawn more often than it was photographed. In
1870/71, long exposure times prevented action photos. Only painting could portray
actual scenes of battle. Yet, just as this war occupied a transitional location between the
military campaigns of the nineteenth century and the industrialized trench warfare of
World War I, so, too, the way the Franco-Prussian war was visualized looked backwards
and forwards at the same time. Although traditional forms such as the classical portrait
of the prince could still be found among paintings of this war, the most successful
adopted bourgeois visual approaches to their subjects. In Adolph von Menzels painting
Abreise Knig Wilhelms zur Armee am 31. Juli 1870, for example, the monarch appears
as a modest man of integrity; the real hero is the crowd of Berliners that has gathered to
cheer him on his way (pp. 1234). Painting shaped the visual memory of the war.
Drawings and prints, on the other hand, functioned as news media, transmitting images
of the war back to the families of the soldiers through mass circulation journals. Prints
and drawings, such as Otto Gnthers portrayal of Der deutsche Weihnachtsbaum in
den Ruhmeshallen von Versailles, which appeared in Die Gartenlaube in 1871, adopted
bourgeois genres to show the human side of the soldierly life (p. 126).
Christoph Hamann argues that we must also explore the selection, distribution and
collective reception (p. 285) of individual images if we are to understand how they have
come to be seen as the right pictures of a specific historical event. Using the example of
Stanislaw Muchas iconic photograph of the gatehouse at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Hamann
argues that in the canonization of only a few pictures from the endless number
pragmatic publication concerns (such as picture rights, picture research, issues of cost),
processes of social institutionalization (such as utilization in textbooks), and contemporary
viewing habits all play their roles. But perhaps most important is the social need for the
construction of meaning (p. 285). Like Habbo Knochs article in this same collection
on a photo-layout about the Eichmann trial, Hamanns discussion of Muchas
photograph shows that the structure and composition of an image could function as a
powerful vehicle of meaning. Muchas photograph was part of the Soviet attempt to
document Auschwitz after the camp was liberated by the Red Army. The Polish

Review Article 273

photographer took the picture from inside the camp. In the foreground, we can see
enamel and tin eating implements which the victims left behind when they arrived at the
selection ramp. However, when Muchas picture appeared in postwar publications, it
was often presented as if it were an exterior view of the camp. In this visual reversal of
the original perspective, the railway tracks now appear to lead from the outside world to
the gate house through which the victims passed into the camp. The viewer can only
imagine what lies beyond this gate which also means that the viewer is spared images of
the people who have been murdered (p. 290). Muchas photograph served the
emotional and political needs of postwar German viewers who acknowledged the
Holocaust but wanted to export it to a distant imagined space, far from the contemporary
realities of life in postwar Germany. By freeing postwar Germans of all moral or political
responsibility for the deaths of the victims, which were, in any case, not shown in this
picture, Muchas photograph became compatible with a variety of different uses and
hence acceptable to a number of different audiences.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, film has played an increasingly prominent
role in the production of the right pictures of the German past and present. Most
historians would probably agree with Gnter Riederers assertion in his contribution to
the volume edited by Gerhard Paul that the history of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries cannot be written without an analysis of their films (p. 103). Yet, few historians
of modern Germany integrate films into their analyses of the past. Riederer argues that
historians abstinent relationship with film is not just the result of disciplinary
demarcation or methodological insecurity. Historians, he suggests, are reluctant to enter
the terrain where the deeper significance of moving images can be foundthe world of
the imagination. Films allow viewers to create fictional worlds that may seem far more
real than any of the versions of the past that professional historians construct. To
understand how moving images work, historians must be willing to go beyond talking
about what any particular film shows to the ways in which it may respond to and interact
with the hopes, desires and fantasies of the movie-goer (p. 99).
Frank Bschs article, Holocaust mit >K<. Audiovisuelle Narrative in neueren
Fernsehdokumentationen argues that historical documentaries made for German
television have in recent years become the primary vector of popular visual
historiography.2 The visual narratives presented in the series Holokaust, produced by
Guido Knopp and shown on ZDF in 2000 in six parts, were moulded by particular
economic considerations and by the striving for high viewer ratings (p. 318). Even before
the series was aired, the unusual spelling of its title Holokaust with a k instead of the
usual cgrabbed media attention and provoked debate. Did this change in spelling
signal a new visual approach to the genocide of European Jews? Documentary films
have relied heavily and quite uncritically upon Nazi-era film footage, especially the
newsreels. Even when these Nazi images were integrated into a new narrative, their
aesthetic power remained intact (p. 324). In recent years, film-makers have become
more sensitive to the dangers of using these familiar newsreel pictures (p. 324) and have
begun to search for different images of the Nazi past. Bsch shows, however, that using
less familiar images does not necessarily produce new knowledge. Most documentary
film-makers appear only to be interested in the emotional impact of these new pictures.
2 Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford and New York, 1999).

274

Review Article

In these documentary films, what is said can be as important as what is shown. Since
the 1990s, the place once occupied by the narrator has been taken over by contemporary
participants and witnesses. Bsch argues that this growing use of the testimony of
witnesses encourages viewers to connect with the past primarily at an emotional level
(p. 321). Even the ways the witnesses are presented on camera encourages this emotional
response; they often appear against a black background which erases any connection to
their own pasts and focuses visual attention upon their facial expressions.

Photographing a Different World War I

The production and circulation of the images examined by many of the contributions to
Pauls collection were frequently driven by commercial considerations. Would these
pictures sell? Would viewers be interested in looking at them? And what factorsin terms
of their style, medium and genrewould convince viewers that these were indeed the
right pictures? Anton Holzers fascinating book concentrates upon one medium
photography. It examines a specific historical context in which photographers who wanted
to sell their pictures to illustrated publications had to deal with the demands imposed by
government authorities intent upon allowing the public to see only those pictures they
deemed acceptable. In the process of exploring the interaction of commercial imperatives
with the priorities of state propaganda, Holzer develops intriguing and challenging
arguments about the relationship between photography and the writing of history.
Pictures of the Western front dominate the collective picture-memory of World War I.
Anton Holzers book shows us a different warthe war in eastern and south-eastern
Europewhich has over the years slipped into the background of collective
consciousness. The propaganda unit of the Austro-Hungarian army collected a large
number of photographs of this other front of World War I, which are today housed in
the picture archive of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. For decades, historians
ignored these pictures. Using a sample of some 520 images from the Vienna archive,
Holzer shows that these photographs can tell us a great deal about the censorship and
propaganda activities of the Habsburg monarchy and about the popular experience and
perception of this other front of World War I.
Holzer suggests that one of the reasons why most historians still continue to approach
images as illustrations rather than as sources is that photography records separate, small
excerpts from the past (p. 323). Historians regard this characteristic of photography as a
deficit. Photos lack the ability to reconstruct the complex contexts and interrelationships
that help us to explain the past. Holzer argues, however, that the images in the Vienna
archive challenge researchers to understand how history has been constructed visually
and in what ways these visual narratives differ from the story as it has been told in words.
Instead of trying to integrate the photographs he discovered into the conventional model
provided by the existing histories of the war, he followed the photographers gaze, taking
seriously the themes, perceptions and messages presented in these photographs. The
result was, quite literally, views of the war that differed in significant ways from the textual
histories. Holzer concludes that
photos are connected with historical events in different ways from written documents. They are more intensively involved in the events, because the photographer must necessarily be on the spot. But what finds its
way into the history books generally does not happen where the photographer sets up his equipment (p. 325).

Review Article 275

The Austro-Hungarian authorities recognized that photographys claims to document

reality made it an invaluable propaganda instrument which could serve state interests.
Censors held back not only all those pictures they thought might be of military use to the
enemy, but also images that could in any way cause doubts about the inevitability of
Austro-Hungarian victory. Censorship was not, however, limited simply to the imposition
of prohibitions. Official censors tried to train the eye of the photographer to look at the
war in the right way (p. 89). Yet, Holzer shows that state-imposed restrictions did not
prevent photographers from deciding which subjects or motifs would appear in the
pictures they took: they documented what was expected of them. But they also
photographed what they found to be different, strange, unusual (p. 325). The commercial
imperative to offer the viewing public new perspectives on the war also generated an
intense competition for exclusive pictures which drove photographers to seek out
unusual images. To satisfy popular visual desires some pictures were even staged, such as
the photograph at the bottom of the books cover which seems to show soldiers going
over the top but was actually taken during a training exercise.
In a brilliant chapter, Holzer examines the photographic effort to visualize military victory.
This photographically staged triumph (p. 109) included pictures of destroyed buildings,
railway lines and bridges in enemy territory, and of enemy transport columns devastated by
artillery as they attempted to escape the Austro-Hungarian advance. Pictures of POWs
demonstrated Austro-Hungarian military superiority. Some of these images emphasize the
vast numbers that were capturedfor example, the astonishing picture on page 175 of a
large number of Italian POWs stretching off to the very top of the photograph.
The massive infrastructure that made this industrialized war possible received
considerable photographic attention. Photographers took pictures of the workers and
machinery in munitions factories; the images were supposed to demonstrate order,
precision and efficiency (p. 140). They photographed the transport lines that brought
munitions and supplies to the front. They took pictures of the ubiquitous barracks, close
to these rail lines, housing everything from repair shops to hospitals. Moving forward
with each military advance, the barracks became the prototypical building of the
industrialized war (p. 147). Photographs of these barracks-worlds behind the front line
made the war and its consequences appear controllable, manageable. Photographers
adopted the perspective of the military leaders which regarded soldiers, animals and war
materiel as logistical units of things in the hinterland of the front (p. 150). Even wounded
soldiers appeared to be just another type of war equipment which was to be repaired and
returned to service at the front efficiently and quickly.
One of the more unusual features of the Vienna picture archive is the large number of
photographs of civilians who were forced to flee the areas of fighting or who were
deported to serve as forced labour for the Austro-Hungarian army. Another series of
photographs reveals the violence inflicted upon the civilian populations by the occupiers.
Holzer examines pictures of the public execution in Trient (Trento) in July 1916 for
treason of two men who were subjects of the monarchy but who fought on the Italian side
during the war. The most disturbing aspect of these images is the large number of soldiers
and civilians who have assembled to witness the execution. Holzer points out that among
the curious onlookers, several have cameras and are taking pictures. Two pictures show
the dead body of one of the men, Cesare Battisti, which is being displayed for the camera
by the executioner who has a broad smile on his face. Members of the crowd look not at

276

Review Article

the body but at the cameramost of them are smiling as well. In Austro-Hungarian eyes
these pictures depicted a moment of triumph and revenge against a traitor. But the Italian
authorities quickly saw the possibility of turning the tables, and used some of these images
as political propaganda to demonstrate the brutality of the enemy occupiers.
Pictures of dead enemy soldiers put their corpses on display as trophies won in battle.
Some of these images were horrific; one showed a man who died of a head wound: his
skull is shattered, his brain lies next to him on the ground (p. 286). Many others, however,
aestheticized even the bodies of the enemy dead, suggesting that their deaths were
peaceful (p. 289). Curiosities attracted the attention of some photographers; for example,
the bodies of dead enemy soldiers that emerged from melting snow in the spring. These
Wiedergnger seemed to combine life and death, the beautiful and the hateful death in
one body and one picture. The Austro-Hungarians put their own dead on display only
when they felt it necessary to provide evidence of the brutality of the enemy. Otherwise,
the mangled and mutilated bodies of dead Austro-Hungarian soldiers were hidden from
view in coffins or in wartime graves. There were no pictures of mass graves, only of the
burials of individuals or small groups.
Photographs turned ruins of churches into icons of the war. If Christ figures or statues
of the Madonna survived the destruction of the church, they became the objects of
particular photographic fascination, symbolizing the possibilities of survival. Photographs
of these small miracles were transformed into secularized relics endowed with powers
beyond their simple capacity to document what the photographer saw. Such images were
often circulated as postcards which played an important role in the visual propaganda of
World War I, reaching huge audiences; the Austro-Hungarian military authorities were
reported to have issued fifteen million postcards during the war depicting between four
and five hundred subjects (p. 268). Photographers were fascinated by the ravaged
landscapes left behind by the battles of World War I. Over the course of time, the Isonzo
terrain was transformed from a battlefield like any other into absolutely sacred ground
(p. 302). The photographers were largely responsible for creating this mythological site. In
their pictures, there are no human beings in the landscape, the effects of the destruction
are visually exaggerated and a sacred atmosphere hangs over the site (p. 304). These types
of pictures, Holzer argues, functioned as icons of World War I in the 1920s and 1930s.
After 1918, photography played a prominent role in the intense political conflicts
between the left and the right about the meaning of World War I. Together with films,
photographic picture books were deployed in visual battles about the memory of the
war. From the huge repertoire of available photographs, only those pictures were
published which served the interests of the respective political camps. Before the end of
the 1920s, the conservative and nationalist associations succeeded in winning back
interpretive hegemony over the public memory of the war (p. 318). By 1934, when a
large exhibition of Austrian war pictures opened, the anti-war initiatives of the 1920s
had already been silenced. Remembering the dead was now synonymous with honouring
their heroic sacrifices for the nation.

Hitlers Cameraman
Walter Frentz was certainly in the business of producing only the right pictures of Hitler
and the Nazi leadership. Frentz had a keen sense of which pictures in which contexts

Review Article 277

were expected of him (p. 187). From 1939 to 1945, Frentz worked in Hitlers entourage
filming the Fhrer, mainly for the German newsreels. He also took large numbers of
photographs, for his own personal use, many of them in colour. Heinrich Hoffmanns
black and white photographs of Hitler have dominated the visual representation of the
Fhrer. In recent years, the producers of TV documentaries have increasingly turned to
Frentzs relatively unknown colour images in search of an antidote for the deadening
effects of the presentation, over and over again, of the same pictorial motifs from the
Nazi period (p. 211). However, the increasing use of Frentzs images has seldom been
accompanied by informed or critical consideration of their original propaganda
functions.
Frentz was born in 1907 in Heilbronn. Through the youth movement, he became
passionately involved in water sports, particularly kajaking. In 1929, on one of his water
sport excursions, a rich South-American student (p. 17) gave Frentz a 16 mm film
camera. This was the beginning of Frentzs career as a cameraman. He became a pioneer
in the use of the hand-held camera. Filming from his own seat in the kajak, Frentz gave
viewers the impression that they were actually taken along for the ride down rapids and
through rough water. These unusual camera techniques and perspectives made his first
publicly screened film, Wildwasserparadiese sterreich und Jugoslawien (1932), a pioneering
work according to one newspaper review. By the age of twenty-five, Frentz had gained a
reputation as a highly original documentary film-maker.
On the recommendation of Albert Speer, who knew him from their student days in
Berlin, Frentz was hired by Leni Riefenstahl as the cameraman on her film about the
Nazi party congress, Sieg des Glaubens. Frentz worked on Riefenstahls two most important
films, Triumph des Willens (1935) and Olympiade (1936). He brought to each of them his
unusual skills with the hand-held camera which gave his pictures of Hitler an
unprecedented dynamism. Frentz made an exceptional effort to construct striking
camera angles, at one point even having himself strapped to the running board of a car
so that he could film Hitler from below as the Fhrers own vehicle moved along the
street.
In the late summer of 1939 Frentz was summoned to work at the Fhrerhauptquartier. So
long as the war went well for the Germans, Frentz was kept busy supplying the newsreels
with an idealized, heroic image of the war whose dynamism and rhythm was
supposed to achieve the most realistic effects possible, but which, however, excluded the
gruesome reality (p. 91). Frentz specialized in showing the human side of the Fhrer,
using the dynamic movement permitted by the hand-held camera to circle around Hitler
and film him from a variety of different perspectives (p. 95). Frentz was responsible for
some of the most famous pictures of Hitler such as the well-known images during the
signing of the armistice conditions in the forest of Compigne on the evening of 22nd
June, 1940 (p. 23). But as the war dragged on and as the signs of Hitlers Parkinsons
Disease became more visible, Hitler rarely agreed to appear in the Wochenschau.
Frentz travelled all over occupied Europe during the war, filming and taking
photographs of the Atlantic Wall and of the production and the testing of V2 rockets in
Germany. Most of these later wartime pictures were not for public consumption but
were meant to serve as visual reports about the war for the Fhrer, who now seldom moved
outside of the Hauptquartier. It is these films and photographs that led Frentz to claim that
he had become the eyes of the Fhrer, enabling Hitler to see places that he would never

278

Review Article

visit himself. Yet this also meant that Hitler may have become the victim not only of his
own propaganda but also of Frentzs images. As Hitler had never visited the line of
bunkers and fortifications built along the Atlantic coast to stop an Allied invasion, his
impressions of this Atlantic Wall were heavily influenced by Frentzs photographs which
had been staged for their visual effect and were by no means purely documentary.
Frentz clearly understood what he should exclude from his pictures of the Third Reich.
None of the photographs he took during a trip to Minsk with Himmler in August 1941
directly permit any recognition of the murderous context of the journey (p. 186).
Although Himmler and his entourage witnessed a mass shooting while they were in Minsk,
the only pictures taken by Frentz that have survived portray Himmler as a friendly,
approachable leader figure (p. 188) talking with local inhabitants. Frentzs photographs of
the construction and testing of V-2 rockets exhibit this same exclusion of disruptive images.
Large numbers of prisoners died in the break-neck construction of the underground
facilities where the V-2 rockets were assembled. But Frentzs colour slides hide the mass
death, the terror imposed by the guards and the unspeakable hygienic conditions (p. 217).
Frentz was visually creative. His use of the subjective, mobile, hand-held camera
broke with the aesthetic and stylistic conventions of his time. His modernist film Hnde
am Werk demonstrated the influence of the Soviet avant-garde film-makers of the 1920s.
Yet Frentz employed visual power to suppress historical knowledge. The distinctive
aesthetic qualities of his images very effectively disguised the realities of the Third Reich
by evoking a heroic time with simple goals and simple solutions (p. 139). The problem
can be seen, for example, in Frentzs increasing use of colour. Frentz found colour more
attractive because, as a later commentator put it, colour simulates reality more
realistically than black and white (p. 156). Frentz believed that after the war had been
won, Germans would be able to see a colourful past in his colour pictures (p. 156).
The collection of essays on Frentz and the book by Holzer both emphasize the
distinctive and pivotal role played by photography in twentieth-century attempts to
produce the right pictures. The uses of photography have depended to no small extent
upon the persistence of a widespread belief in the documentary nature of photography.
What we see in a photograph is a real material trace of something that actually happened
in the pastthe person in the photograph once actually stood before the photographer.
Philipp Sarasin reminds us, however, that [p]ictures are always constructions of
reality, which means that we are called upon to reconstruct the technical, political,
economic, aesthetic, discursive and social conditions of production of these pictures.3
A photograph can only show that something or someone once existed in the past. Jrn
Glasenapp insists that anyone expecting more overestimates the power of photography.4
By itself, a photographic image cannot explain why the event it depicts happened or what
were the consequences of this event. To understand what an image actually shows and why
it is important, we depend upon the words that accompany it. Words attempt to anchor
images to specific interpretations. The interaction between the words and the picture will
lead the reader/viewer to certain meanings while marginalizing others. This does not
mean, however, that the power of an image is ever completely subordinated to the text.
Photographs may contain within their frames visual ingredients which can subvert the
3 Philipp Sarasin, Bilder und Texte. Ein Kommentar , WerkstattGeschichte, 47, Bilder von Krpern (2007), p. 77.
4 Jrn Glasenapp, Die Deutsche Nachkriegsfotografie. Eine Mentalittsgeschichte in Bildern (Paderborn, 2008), p. 30.

Review Article 279

message they want to convey. Holzer suggests that photographs always capture something
more and something different from [what] the photographer consciously wanted to
picture (p. 325). Christopher Pinney concludes that a photograph is amenable to a range
of different interpretations because however hard the photographer tries to exclude, the
camera lens always includes. The photographer can never fully control the resulting
photograph, and it is that lack of control and the resulting excess that permits recoding.5
The broader discursive and cultural context in which a photograph was encountered
might also influence how it was read. Alan Sekula shows, for example, that two
photographs of the same subjectcentral European immigrants on a trans-Atlantic
shipwere presented to contemporaries in very different ways. Stieglitzs The Steerage
(1907) quickly earned a reputation as an outstanding example of the claim that a
photograph could be a work of art. Commentary focused upon the aesthetic qualities of
the photograph and upon the extraordinary craftsmanship that had produced the image.
Scarcely any attention was paid to the photographs value as a social document. Lewis
Hines Immigrants going down gangplank, New York (1905) was, on the other hand,
prized as a visual contribution to political discussions of contemporary social problems.
The discourses which framed the reception of each of these photographs ensured that
contemporaries were no more likely to have regarded Hines picture as an aesthetic object
than they were to have thought of Stieglitzs photograph as a political statement.6 The
documentary status of the photographic images of the bombing of German cities that
appeared in postwar publications served a political purposeto counter-balance Allied
photographs of the liberated concentration camps with images of German suffering and
to provide visual documentation of the claim that Germans, too, were victims of Hitlers
war. Yet, the artistic qualities of some of these photographs of ruins has allowed them to
function in an aesthetic register which may divert attention from their political message.7

Visual Power in the GDR

What we have been discussing up to this point can be described as a type of soft visual
power. The second major type of visual power is clearly much harder in its practices and
consequences. Visual surveillance is a weapon in the fight against subjects the state
considers to be dangerous. Producing images of the people and places they wanted to
control was clearly a high priority for the East German secret police. Karin Hartewig
observes that the Stasi left behind a mountain of pictures, including 1.3 million positive
photographic images, negatives and slides, as well as some 3,750 films (p. 9). Why were
these images produced? Hartewig argues that the Stasis use of photography and film
reflected its commitment to preventive surveillance which would neutralize the enemy
before crimes against the state could even be committed. The Stasis belief in the unlimited
availability of the information preserved in photographic images encouraged phantasies
5 Christopher

Pinney, Introduction. How the other half, in Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Peterson (eds),
Photographys Other Histories (Durham and London, 2003), p. 7.
6 Alan Sekula, On the Invention of Photographic Meaning in Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography (London,
1982), pp. 84109.
7 This example is drawn from my own current research on the ways Germans used photography after 1945 to depict
the bombing of German cities during World War II, forthcoming as Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of
Germany, 1945 to the Present.

280

Review Article

of omniscience within the surveillance bureaucracy. In his fascinating contribution to the

volume edited by Hartewig and Alf Ldtke, Axel Dossmann provides an extreme example
of this Allmachtsphantasie, but also of the Stasis intense anxiety about the enemy within.
For the Stasi, the transit Autobahn from West Germany was a security nightmare because it
created a kind of dangerous internal border that ran through the heart of the GDR.
Dossmann shows that the Stasis visual surveillance of the Autobahn went so far as to include
photographs of a completely empty stretch of the highway on which no human subjects
at all were to be seen. The Stasi report identified this site as a potential (that is, imagined)
crime scene where the enemy might very soon attempt to do damage to the regime by
helping GDR citizens to flee the socialist republic. The paranoid vision of the Stasi
allowed it to see in a photograph things that were simply not there. But paranoia is not the
only reason for the existence of such photographsthey also provided evidence of the
Stasis vigilance. Stasi agents could demonstrate to their superiors that they had identified
a prospective crime scene and were present at the site even before the enemy. They could
also reassure themselves that they were doing everything possible to protect the state.
As a means of producing useful knowledge about its targets, photographic surveillance
played an uncertain role in the construction of state power. The value of photography as
an instrument of surveillance appeared to derive from its objectivity. Photographs
seemed to be able to correct the observers own perceptions, to serve as a means of selfregulation (p. 32). Photographs were increasingly employed as independent records of
reality, rather than as mere illustrations of or appendages to written notes. Hartewig
reminds us, however, that visual surveillance always ran up against two limits: the
impossibility of keeping tabs on all of the GDR population and the limits of visibility
itself. In its everyday practices of visual surveillance, the Stasi was quickly forced to
confront one of the central problems of any attempt to analyse the meaning of an image:
what the photograph showed did not by itself reveal the truth of what had been captured
in the image. A photograph was only an indirect sign of realitybehind the apparently
convincing evidence of the visible there seemed to lie a mysterious reality (p.30). It was
generally not possible to make sense of what could be seen in a photograph without other
information, derived from spoken or written words, which could help the observer to
push beneath the flat surface of the image itself to deeper layers of meaning, motivation
and intent. At the same time that it was coming to rely more and more on photographs,
the Stasi recognized that it must encourage its operatives to expand the written record.
Words appeared to be the final test of the value and truth of the visual evidence.
Ironically, surveillance photography appears to have been most effective when it was
least secretive. Making clear to the targets that they were under close and constant visual
observation could certainly exert a chilling effect on their behaviour. Stasi photography
was also used in direct, crude and inhumane ways to humiliate subjects and give Stasi
agents the perverse satisfaction of inflicting visual violence upon GDR citizens who were
unfortunate enough to have been arrested by the Stasi. Both Hartewig and Dossmann
discuss what can only be described as trophy shots, pictures taken of GDR citizens
guilty of attempting to flee the republic (Republikflucht) whom the Stasi actually forced to
reenact their crimes for the camera.
Photography did not initially play a significant role in East German attempts to control
its border with the West. By the 1960s, however, the Wall had become a site of intense
photographic activity. Anything that happened at the Wall might be significant and

Review Article 281

should be documented with a photograph. The Stasi took pictures of political

demonstrations and happenings on the western side of the Wall, as well as of individual
West Germans who came to the Wall to register their protest or simply to mourn.
Photography became a weapon in its own right in the symbolic confrontations which
were acted out at the Wall. Border guards on both sides photographed each other, and
tried to gather personal details about their counterparts. The Stasi also used photography
to document (for itself and its masters) each of the measures taken to perfect the border
regime, to plug holes in the Wall through which East Germans might still escape.
Yet Stasi photographs could not capture images of East Germans who did manage to
escape to the West. The East German authorities first learned about successful escapes
from the pictures and stories published in West German newspapers. If the Stasi did take
photographs of the East Germans who were wounded or killed while attempting to escape,
these images have now disappeared. In his epilogue to the volume that he and Hartewig
have edited, Alf Ldtke points out that, unlike Nazi Germany, the GDR left behind few of
the shock pictures which confront us directly with the physical violence employed by the
regime against its victims (p. 229). The best-known pictures of violence at the borderthe
shooting of a young East German during an escape attempt in 1962, for examplewere
taken by Western news media before East German guards removed their victim from
the no-mans-land between the two border fences where he lay bleeding to death.
What images of the Wall were East Germans allowed to see? In her contribution to
the volume edited by Hartewig and Ldtke, Elena Demke shows that photographs in
East German publications certainly did not portray the wall as a site of danger and death.
Most of these pictures did not even show the Wall itself. In one of these East German
Wall pictures, a group of armed workers from a Kampfgruppe stands in front of the
Brandenburg Gate in August 1961. Their weapons at the ready, these workers in uniform
are prepared to defend socialism against all threats from the West. There is no sign of the
Wall itself. Demke traces the different ways this basic image circulated in the GDR after
1961, including as a graphic illustration in school history textbooks between 1964 and
1971 (the actual photo was not used). She argues that the everyday experiences of
ordinary East Germans and the images they could see on Western TV restricted the
regimes ability to establish a monopoly over the interpretation of such pictures. Official
attempts to control the production and circulation of Wall pictures might even generate
a desire to see or even to photograph what had not been shown. Harald Neumann, an
engineer and amateur photographer, lived close to the Wall. Frustrated by the obvious
contradiction between officially-approved images of the border and what he could see
from his own apartment window, Neumann took a series of illegal photographs of the
fences, the Wall and the death-strip in front of his house (p. 103). Despite harassment by
the Stasi and the threat of prison, Neumann continued over a period of several decades
to challenge the visual construction of reality dictated by the regime.
By the 1970s, the Stasi realized that it would have to focus its cameras upon subjects
that, according to the official rhetoric, should not actually existdomestic political
dissidents. For years, the regime had attributed all signs of political unrest within the GDR
to spies and saboteurs from the West. The case of Robert Havemann was the first major
challenge to this self-serving political narrative. Havemann was a chemist and a
Communist who had been involved during the war in resistance to the Nazis. Although
arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and sentenced to death, he managed to survive until

282

Review Article

liberated by the Red Army. After 1945, Havemann became a professor at Humboldt
University and a deputy in the Peoples Chamber (Volkskammer). An outspoken critic of
the development of the atomic bomb in the USA, Havemann was celebrated as an
exemplary anti-fascist. Yet, in 1963 Havemann became one of the sharpest critics of
the [regimes] ideological dogmatism (p. 96). Once a symbol of the socialist project,
Havemann now became an enemy of the state. In 1964, the Stasi began its surveillance
and harassment of Havemann and anyone who came in contact with him. The documents
assembled eventually filled no fewer than one hundred volumes and included many
photographs. Despite repeated sanctions, Havemann refused to recant. In 1975, the
Politbro decided, after one final warning, to strip Havemann of his GDR citizenship and
deport him to the West, but he died in April 1982 before this sentence was put into effect.
Even at his funeral and at subsequent anniversary commemorations at his grave, the Stasi
was there, taking pictures. By the time Havemann died, he had become the patron of the
younger socialist opposition (p. 107). The Stasi committed substantial resources to the
surveillance of this new generation of dissidents, even going so far as secretly to
photograph the entire daily routine of a single individual or family. When the Stasi could
not gain direct access to the more intimate regions of the dissident sub-culture, it could
rely upon the services of friends or associates it had recruited as informants. They were
able to take souvenir snapshots of private gatherings without arousing suspicion.
Political dissidents were not the Stasis only targets. Photographs of the devotees of
every form of counter-cultural practice in the GDR from the 1960s to the 1980s found
their way into the Stasi archivespictures of Beatles fans, of blues and trampers, of
punks and skinheads. Between 1983 and 1985, for example, the Stasi compiled a list of
the names of thirty illegal punk bands that performed in private or semi-public spaces,
such as the Erlserkirche in Berlin-Lichtenberg (p. 128). Visual access to this punk scene
was sometimes supplied by members whom the Stasi had recruited as informants.
The Stasi understood the uses of photography in asserting state power over political
dissidents and cultural non-conformists. But the secret police were also well aware that
photographs could be employed very effectively to undermine the power of the SED
regime:
therefore the Stasi made every effort to suppress all forms of ironic, critical or social-documentary photography and to silence the people who took such pictures the Ministry for State Security fought a neverending battle against ideologically false pictures (p. 137).

One particularly troublesome West German photo-journalist was even enticed into East
Berlin, arrested and sent to jail in the GDR. Roland Jahn, an East German photographer,
was also sent to jail in 1983 for his visual provocations of the regime. Albrecht Wiesener
shows that the pictures of Halle taken by another East German photographer, Helga Paris,
were condemned to official oblivion simply because they showed buildings and people in
the city as they really were. In Pariss photographs, taken over a period of several years,
buildings in the Halle Innenstadt were dirty and decayed, crumbling into ruin from neglect
and the effects of pollution from the local chemical industry: the pictures of people in their
urban surroundings also clearly showed signs that they [too] had been worn down (p. 63).
This kind of social documentary realism threatened the official visual monopoly which
presented only idealizing photographs of happy people (Bernd Lindner, p. 189). When
Paris tried to mount an exhibition of her photos in 1986, it was forbidden by the local Halle

Review Article 283

party leadership. Attempting to show that which was in the GDR was an obvious way for
a photographer to ensure that their work would never be exhibited in public.
Supplying the East German public with an endless stream of ideologically correct
pictures was just as important to the authorities as preventing the circulation of false
images. Katharina Klotzs article on Sichtagitation shows that every major political
campaign and every significant change of course was announced by mass-produced
posters. East Germans encountered these posters everywhere they wenton the street
and in the workplace. This visual propaganda drew heavily upon the model of SPD and
KPD election posters from the 1920s and early 1930s, which privileged strong gestures,
such as a balled fist or a raised hand. One of the most widely circulated visual motifs was
the famous handshake between Grotewohl and Pieck, sealing and symbolizing the union
of the SPD and KPD to form the SED in 1946. This Handschlag became a lasting image
in the GDR. The article by Klotz, and the essay by Astrid Wenger-Deilmann and Frank
Kmpfer, both in the volume edited by Gerhard Paul, show that the long history, reaching
back even to the Roman Empire, of picturing this gesture gave GDR images of the
handshake a unique symbolic power. Stylistically, GDR Sichtagitation favoured the type of
photomontage developed in the 1920s and 30s by John Heartfield. Photomontage was
regarded not just as a technical procedure but as a method of expressing socialist realism
par excellence (p. 47). As a symbolic form of the Weimar Republic and as a paradigm of
modernity, photomontage suggested that the GDR was continuing the revolutionary
project that the Weimar KPD had begun in the 1920s and early 30s.

Images of Everyday Life: Private Photography

In her contribution to the volume edited by Gerhard Paul, Marita Krauss acknowledges
that historians generally tend to think that private family photographs are historically
irrelevant (p. 57). In recent years, however, the organizers of historical exhibitions,
documentary film-makers and the publishers of historical picture-books intended for a
general audience have discovered these private photographs. It has been tempting to
imagine that they might provide new views of the past that challenge the published
images with which we are now so familiar. Alf Ldtke cautions against this assumption:
This claim is not substantiated by the accidental selection of material from the realm of amateur photography that we have at our disposal. Quite the contrary: here, [the influence] of the social (and cultural) framework appears to be particularly formative (Hartewig and Ldtke, p. 233).

Yet, Krauss does suggest that private photographs can reveal new perceptions (p. 60)
that are seldom to be found in the public picture world. She compares an official
propaganda picture of Nazi guards standing watch at the Ehrentempel in Munich with a
private photograph depicting this same site as a tourist attraction. Krauss suggests that
this private picture offers another view which probably comes closer than a propaganda
image to the perspective of an ordinary Munich pedestrian (p. 70). It is precisely the
normality, the ordinariness of such a private photo that can disrupt our established
sense of how Nazi Germany looked.
In the GDR, private photographs seldom directly challenged the visual priorities of
the SED regime. At times, private photography might even be instrumentalized by the
state; we have already seen, for example, that the Stasi used private photographs to gain

284

Review Article

visual access to the intimate spheres of dissident life. Yet, photographic practices and
sensibilities normally considered to be private could also be imported into the
production of official, public pictures. Petra Clemens argues that in a collection of GDR
industrial photographs she has explored, photographing for private and for factory
purposes are not sharply demarcated from one another. (pp. 16970). Most of these
pictures were taken by the first archivist of the plant archive, Erich Fabian (19021993)
(p. 171). Fabian was a passionate amateur photographer who saw the photos he took on
the shop-floor not only as a propaganda instrument in cultural and educational work,
but as a medium of memory (p. 171). Fabian contributed some of his own private
pictures to the official archive. He also sold copies of some of these pictures to workers as
souvenirs. In the photographic exhibitions that he staged, pictures were organized as
they would have been in a private photo album. Fabians transgressions of the boundaries
between private and industrial photography were certainly at odds with the
pronouncements of SED functionaries on the cultural tasks of photography under
socialism. It is not surprising that in 1960, local SED authorities complained that
comrade Fabian indulges his own passion too much (p. 178). Yet, Fabians
photographic practices and sensitivities may have been more effective in promoting an
emotional connection between the workers and their factory than many of the officially
approved images that these men and women were likely to see.

Writing the History of Visual Power

In the twentieth century, the political projects of both dictatorial and democratic regimes
have depended to no small degree upon their ability to produce the right pictures. Yet
political authorities have discovered that it is difficult to achieve complete control over
the production, circulation and reception of images. Holzer insists, for example, that
even though they were embedded in the military, war photographers were not merely
mechanical tools of (official) propaganda (p. 325). Certainly, they did what was expected
of them, taking pictures of subjects and motifs that they knew (or at least hoped) would
be approved by the authorities and by the publications from which they had received
their commissions. Yet at the same time these war photographers also engaged in a
version of the eigensinniges Fotografieren (self-assertive photography), to which Alf Ldtke
draws attention in his conclusion to the volume on the GDR that he and Karin Hartewig
have edited. Austro-Hungarian war photographers aimed their cameras in accordance
not only with their clients guidelines but also with their own curiosity, their own subjective
interests (p. 325). The tension between eigensinniges Fotografieren and war photographers
attempts to produce the right pictures, which would be approved by the authorities,
created an excess of meaning which keeps the picture open (p. 325). Holzer argues
that this excess and variety of possible meanings, which has often unnerved historians
and made them unwilling to explore the possibilities of images as historical sources,
should in fact be seen as an advantage: Photographs do not tell just one story; they
bundle several stories together. They let the official commission show through, they
retain traces of private curiosity, they preserve contemporary ways of seeing (p. 325).
Most of the studies under review here show that historians must be concerned not only
with what images did or did not show. They should also pay close attention to the aesthetic
qualities of specific images. Medium, genre, style and composition could all affect the

Review Article 285

ways that viewers might engage with images. Historians need also to think more about the
relationship between words and pictures. Bernd Lindner shows, for example, that GDR
authorities distrusted images, recognizing that the potential meaning of a picture was less
stable than that of the written word (Hartewig and Ldtke, pp. 18992). Stefan Schweizers
article on the iconic cycling champion, Tve Schur, shows that journalists made sure to
embed pictures of Schur in texts which they believed would control their meanings. Schur
was presented not as an individual sportsman but as a representative of the GDR who
embodied the very character of the socialist state. His victories were depicted not as
individual triumphs but as the result of the collective efforts of his team and indeed of the
entire GDR population (Hartewig and Ldtke, pp. 7786). Whether words could actually
stabilize the meanings of an image might, however, depend upon the wider universe of
images and everyday visual experiences that Germans brought to their contemplation of
any specific picture. Alf Ldtke suggests that these other pictures in their heads (Bilder in
den Kpfen) could encourage self-assertive ways of looking (eigensinnige Blickweisen) which
allowed viewers to recode the meanings of the images offered them by the regime.
These five books also suggest that future research should pay close attention to the
often tense relationship between visual power and visual desire. In his Camera Lucida:
Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes claimed that a compelling image could launch
desire beyond what it permits us to see.8 If true, Barthes insight might suggest that even
when political regimes or commercial image producers were able to supply their viewing
publics with the right images, they might still fail to limit or contain the visual desires of
ordinary Germans. Indeed, the very attempt to control the production, circulation and
reception of images might stimulate the desire to see what was not shown, especially
when the images offered conflicted with what could be seen in everyday life. We are only
just beginning to understand how this tension between visual control and visual desire
has produced the picture worlds that Germans inhabited in the twentieth century. The
books reviewed in this essay show why it is important to place this problem squarely on
the agenda of future research in the visual history of the twentieth century.

Abstract
In the twentieth century, images have played a crucial role in the construction and reproduction of political
power. Yet German historians have only recently begun to pay serious attention to the politics of images.
The five books under review here show that visual power has operated in two major ways: first, through the
production and circulation of the right images of any specific historical event or period, which is the subject
of almost all the works discussed here; and second, through the direct observation and surveillance of subjects considered by state authorities to constitute some kind of threat, as in the use of photography by the
East German Stasi analysed in Karin Hartewigs pioneering study, Das Auge der Partei. What makes those who
produce and circulate images believe that they will achieve the desired effect? Is it the subject, the style, the
medium or the genre? Does it matter where and how viewers encounter images? Do officially approved
pictures still contain messages that may allow viewers to read them in subversive ways? Does the attempt to
control images actually promote the viewers visual desire to see what has not been shown in the right pictures? These are some of the central questions which the books reviewed here address.
Keywords: Visual history, photography, Hitler, World War I, Stasi, GDR

The University of Texas at Austin

dfcrew@mail.utexas.edu
8 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York, 1982), p. 59.