She stresses that the Allied photographers’ aim was to demonstrate through the seemingly objective eye of the camera that the Germans got what they deserved. These pictures were published in Life and mounted for a traveling exhibition, “Lest We Forget.” “These images were to shape Allied and German perceptions of the German collective guilt, perceptions that are still powerfully present half a century later,” Barnouw writes.īarnouw contends that photographs taken by Allied photographers – especially American photographers – tended to depict Germans, often described as “stone-faced,” as immune to the horrors of the concentration camps. Photographs show Germans, brought to the concentration camps by the Allied troops, viewing Nazi atrocities in order to accept and repent their complicity in these acts. This was a war of total destruction with a different concept of the chain of order.”īarnouw’s investigation of the photographic record, as well as journals written by German citizens after the war, shows that raging debates about the “German question” have overlooked the actual conditions in which postwar German memory was first forged.īarnouw examined hundreds of pictures of concentration camps, women, children, battered army soldiers and devastated cities to argue that Allied photographers saw what they expected to see: a sullen and resentful people. “But I’m assuming that of course German civilians and draftees were at the mercy of this war and were, in that sense, victims. “The scenario has been that Germans got what they deserved,” Barnouw said. Though not sharing nationalist claims, Barnouw’s book begins with this assumption and builds an argument that is even more provocative. The message was that Germans, too, were victims of a total war. For instance, two years ago, a group of German nationalists published an appeal in a German newspaper called “Against Forgetting.” Creating a furor, the appeal stated that the end of World War II marked the beginning of division in Germany rather than the liberation of the German nation. Germany 1945 is a thorough sojourn through this intellectual debate, which is as alive today in Germany as it was 50 years ago. “I have approached the enduring ‘German question,’ which was first posed in reaction to views of Germany in 1945, as a question of perception and representation,” she writes. Holocaust Museum and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, among other archives. Army Signal Corps photography units, were found by Barnouw in the National Archives, the U.S. We are guilty.’ “ĭocumentary photographs – many previously unpublished – as well as spoken and written documentation are the focus of Barnouw’s study of postwar Germany and the battle over history, memory and the German past. The Americans wanted them to say, ‘Yes, that’s what we did. “When the Allies came into the concentration camps and saw the piles of corpses, they were understandably appalled and set out to confront the German population.

“The question was then and still is: How could this possibly have happened?” Barnouw said.

In her new book, Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (Indiana University Press, 1996), Dagmar Barnouw, professor of German and comparative literature, takes a fresh look at the issue of German guilt and remorse, and tackles the so-called “German question” using documentary photographs as the launch point. Were they to blame? Should ordinary citizens have known about and done something to stop the war crimes being committed in the concentration camps? Should they confess some sort of collective guilt? Historian Dagmar Barnouw writes: “I have approached the enduring ‘German question,’ which was first posed in reaction to views of Germany in 1945, as a question of perception and representation.”įor half a century, the German people have struggled to come to terms with the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime during World War II.

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