hoelscher dresden a camera accuses
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‘Dresden, a Camera Accuses’: Rubble Photography and the Politics of Memory in a Divided Germany Steven HoelscherTRANSCRIPT
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‘Dresden, a Camera Accuses’:Rubble Photography and the Politicsof Memory in a Divided Germany
Steven Hoelscher
This article explores memory, photography and atrocity in the aftermath of war. Ittakes as its case study the controversies surrounding the February 1945 firebombing ofDresden. One photograph in particular has become the iconic image of the fire-bombing and of the devastating air war more generally – Richard Peter’s View fromthe City Hall Tower to the South of 1945. Although arguably less divided today than itwas during the Cold War, when the image became seared into local and nationalmemory, Germany’s past continues to haunt everyday discourse and political action inthe new millennium, creating new ruptures in a deeply fractured public sphere. Byexamining the historical context for the photograph’s creation and its disseminationthrough the bookDresden – A Camera Accuses, this article raises questions of respon-sibility, victimhood and moral obligation that are at the heart of bearing witness towartime trauma. Peter’s Dresden photographs have long intervened in that existentialdifficulty and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Keywords: Richard Peter (1895–1977), Dresden, Germany, cultural memory, rubble
photography, atrocity, ruins, World War II
The citizens of Dresdenmay be accustomed to annual protests marking the anniversary
of their city’s 1945 firebombing, but the scale and intensity of demonstrations in 2009
caught almost everyone off guard. An estimated six thousand neo-Nazis descended
upon the regional capital during a frigid Februarymorning, setting off street battles that
resulted in overturned and burnt automobiles, shattered store windows and hundreds
of broken bones. Only a heavy police presence prevented the largest far-right demon-
stration in Germany since the Second World War from taking an even great toll
(figure 1). Although outnumbered two to one by left-leaning counter-demonstrators,
the protestors made their presence felt as they marched through the city streets. Clad
mostly in black, many carried banners that read ‘Ehre, wem Ehre gebuhrt’ (Honour to
whom honour is due) and ‘Großvater, wir danken Dir!’ (Grandfather, we thank you).1
The so-called ‘Trauermarsch’ or ‘Trauermarsch fur die deutschen Opfer des alliierten
Bombenterrors’ (Grief march for the German victims of the Allied bombing terror) was
not an underground operation. Most of the annual ‘grief-march’ demonstrators in
recent years have come from the far-right National Democratic Party (NDP), which is
part of Saxony’s state parliament. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency may have
described the NDP as ‘racist, anti-Semitic, and revisionist’ and members of Germany’s
mainstream conservative partiesmight shun it, but the party enjoyed support within the
local governance structure.2 Consequently, NDP deputy leader Holger Apfel’s charac-
terisation of the allied bombing as ‘a unique Holocaust perpetrated on the Germans’
carried the weight of political legitimacy.
Equally weighty were the images carried by the far-right protestors and posted
throughout Dresden before the ‘grief-march’: photographs of Allied planes
I am grateful to the following people and
organisations for their kind support of this
article: Anke Ortlepp, Heike Bungert and
Malte Thießen for helping me begin to
understand the ongoing legacy of the air war
at the 2008 Deutscher Historikertag in
Dresden; archivists at the Stadtarchiv
Dresden, the Deutsches Historisches
Museum in Berlin, and especially the
Deutsche Fotothek of the Sachsische
Landesbibliothek – Staats- und
Universitatsbibliothek Dresden; the Harry
Ransom Center for funding research travel;
and David Crew, Sonja Fessel, Derek
Gregory, Mike Heffernan, Liam Kennedy,
Randy Lewis, Graham Smith, and Christina
Twomey for their feedback on earlier
versions.
Email for correspondence:
1 – Photographs of the Trauermarsch and
counter protest may be viewed online: http://
www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-
39765.html. All translations, unless
otherwise noted, are by the author. The 2009
Trauermarsch attracted considerable media
attention in Germany, including the
following: Cornelia Kastner, ‘Dresden wehrt
sich gegen den Missbrauch der
Erinnerungen’, Deutsche Welle (14 February
2009), http://www.dwworld.de/dw/article/
0,,4026560,00.html (accessed 15 February
2009); Veit Medick, ‘Wie Neonazis Dresden
zu ihrer Pilgerstatte machen’, Spiegel Online,
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/
0,1518,607669,00.html (accessed 15
February 2009); and Olaf Sundermeyer,
‘Marsch zuruck in braune Zeiten’, Die Zeit
(14 February 2009), http://www.zeit.de/
online/2009/08/dresden-demo-neonazi/
(accessed 15 February 2009).
2 – Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz, or The
Federal Office for the Protection of the
Constitution, noted in its 2006 annual report
(page 70) that the ‘agitation’ of the NDP is
‘rassistisch, antisemitisch, revisionistisch
und verunglimpft die demokratische und
rechtsstaatliche Ordnung des
Grundgesetzes’. The 2006
Verfassungsschutzbericht is available as a pdf
on the agency’s website: http://www.
verfassungsschutz.de/de/publikationen/
verfassungsschutzbericht (accessed 9
October 2010).
History of Photography, Volume 36, Number 3, August 2012
Print ISSN 0308-7298; Online ISSN 2150-7295
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unloading their high-explosive and incendiary bombs wedged between an icono-
graphy of destruction. Most people in Dresden recognised such images as emanating
from the ruins of the catastrophic firebombing. Such photographs may be familiar
sights in a city that has become a metaphor for German wartime suffering, but one
image in particular – showing a statue gazing down upon a rubble-strewn street –
stood out as omnipresent during the ‘grief-march’. The photograph circulated
widely on the Internet, as well as in leaflets and on advertising posters across the
region, in the months leading up to the ‘Trauermarsch’ (figure 2).
The image itselfwaswell chosen. It isone thathasbeenpartof theGermancollective
remembrance of war since that cataclysmic event’s fiery conclusion. In the hands of the
far-right protestors, sixty-four years later, the photograph seemed to present an unam-
biguous message of outrage and accusation. In this context, it was called upon to
condemnthewartimeatrocitydeliveredtothe innocentpeopleofanapparentlypeaceful
and artistic city. And, perhapsmost importantly, it served visually to bolster the NDP’s
efforts to ‘end the one-sided culture of victimhood inGermany,which only remembers
victims from other countries and ignores the suffering of Germans’.3
The politics of memory is rarely so straightforward, however; nor are the photo-
graphs that sustain it. Paradoxically, the image that marshalled neo-Nazi protestors to
the ‘grief-march’ and that many carried was also the one used by their anti-fascist
opponents only four years earlier (figure 3). With its aims to ‘strengthen democracy,
open-mindedness, courage, tolerance and plurality’, and to ‘counter xenophobia, anti-
Semitism, discrimination, racism, and violence’, these left-leaning activists comme-
morated the sixtieth anniversary of the Dresden inferno with a two-pronged appeal: to
Figure 1. Bjorn Kietzmann, Police
Restraining Protestors during the 64th
Anniversary of the Dresden Firebombing,
14 February 2009, Dresden, Germany.
Courtesy of Bjorn Kietzmann.
Figure 2. Unknown graphic artist, Poster
Advertising Upcoming Trauermarsch,
Dresden, Germany, November 2008.
Author’s collection.
3 – Holger Apfel, quoted in Ray Furlong,
‘Dresden Raid Still a Raw Nerve’, BBC News
(12 February 2005). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/
hi/europe/4257827.stm (accessed 9 October
2010).
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remember the lives lost, but also to ‘stand up against the abuse of memory’ by
Germany’s neo-Nazis. In February 2005, more than ten thousand candles held by
silent residents lit the city’s central plaza, including a large group whose candles, when
seen from the historic opera house, spelled the words ‘Diese Stadt hat Nazis satt’ (This
city is sick and tired of Nazis).4 An Iron Curtain separating the two German states may
no longer exist, but, as the annual protests in Dresden demonstrate, a contested realm
of cultural memory still divides the country.
My central argument is that photographic images such as these have long animated
the politics of memory in post-war Germany. The particular photograph in question –
the picture that anti-fascist protesters hoped, with ten thousand candles, would ‘go
around the world’ but that neo-Nazis also solicited for their cause – has achieved the
status of cultural icon in Germany and beyond. It has been mobilised for all kinds of
ideological work and retains the power to evoke intense emotions. It stands at the centre
of contemporary debates about German memory of the war, just as it provided a
platform for early conversations about the immediate post-war experience. Although
arguably less divided today than it was during the Cold War, when the image became
seared into local and national memory, Germany’s ‘unmasterable past’ continues to
haunt everyday discourse and political action in the newmillennium, creating ever new
ruptures in a deeply fractured public sphere.5 Exploring the contested terrain of mem-
ory, photography and atrocity in the aftermath of war is the focus of this article.
Figure 3. Unknown graphic artist, 10.000
Kerzen fur Dresden: ein Bild geht um die Welt.
Photograph by Walter Hahn, Courtesy of
Sachsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und
Universitatsbibliothek Dresden, Abt.
Deutsche Fotothek.
4 – Aktion Zivilcourage, ‘’Gehdenken in
Dresden!’, http://www.aktion-zivilcourage.de/
Start_GehDenken_in_Dresden.42d757s2459/
(accessed 10 January 2012). The image was
distributed by hand and published on a full
page in a local newspaper, the Dresdner
Amtsblatt 6 (10 February 2005), 4.
5 – Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past:
History, Holocaust, and German National
Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press 1998. See also Bill Niven,
Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the
Legacy of the Third Reich, New York:
Routledge 2002; Richard Ned Lebow, et al.,
eds, The Politics of Memory in Postwar
Europe, Durham, NC: Duke University Press
2006; and A. Dirk Moses, German
Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 2009.
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‘Memory Demands an Image’
Thestrugglesovermemory inDresden–whetherbyneo-Nazispittedagainst anti-fascists
in the twenty-first centuryorbetweenadversariesoneither sideof theEast–WestGerman
borderduring theColdWar–relyonphotographytostake theircompetingclaims.There
is a good reason for this. Our ability to remember the past depends on a wide range of
mnemonicmedia, including visual images.Whether those images appear in the form of
cinema, television, painting, commercial advertising, sculpture, postcards or websites,
scholars such as Raphael Samuel attest to the heavily visual bias of collective remember-
ing. From antiquity to the age of the Internet, Samuel notes, the media of memory are
characterised by ‘the primacy of the visual’.6 Visual imagery closes the gap between first-
handexperienceandsecondarywitnessing,as it stands infor the largereventorpersonit is
askedtorepresent. ‘Memory’,BertrandRussellobservedsuccinctly, ‘demandsanimage’.7
The primacy of the visual in collective or cultural memory is due, at least in part, to
the dependence ofmemoryon themediaor technologies thathelp create and circulate it.
Rather than existing purely in the mind, cultural memory exists in the world – it has
texture, which contains both tactile and emotional dimensions.8 The texture ofmemory
is critical to the constitution of collective remembrances. Cultural memory, Marita
Sturken argues, is produced through images and representations: ‘these are the technol-
ogiesofmemory,notvesselsofmemoryinwhichmemorypassivelyresidessomuchasthe
objects through which memories are shared, produced, and given meaning’.9 Images,
whether sculpted in stoneorprintedonpaper, are technologies of remembrance through
which people construct the past and givememory its texture. Nomodern technology or
medium ismore associatedwithmemory than the photograph. Photographs arrest time
andappear toholdmemory inplace as theyprovide an immediately accessible vehicle for
collective remembrance. Indeed, so effectively do photographs aid in the recall of events,
peopleand things that theyhavebecome theprimarymarkersofmemory itself. ‘Nonstop
imagery (television, streaming video,movies) is our surround’, wrote Susan Sontag, ‘but
when it comes to remembering, the photograph has deeper bite.Memory freeze-frames;
its basic unit is the single image’.10
If memory itself is transient, photographs’ ability to create a mnemonic frame – to
freeze a moment for collective remembrance – points to something else. Unlike the rich
complexity of narrative, photographs are necessarily ‘conventionalized, because the
image has to be meaningful for an entire group’. They are also, James Fentress and
ChrisWickhamnote, ‘simplified,because inorder tobegenerallymeaningfulandcapable
of transmission, the complexity of the imagemust be reduced as far as possible’.11 This is
not to say that the shared response to amemorable photograph is necessarily common-
place,or that the image itself isundemanding; rather, jointlyheld imagesactassignboards
or markers, directing people to preferredmeanings by themost direct route.
Nowhere is the social nature of memory more evident than with the act of bearing
witness tohistorical traumageneratedbywar,which, asBarbieZelizerwrites, ‘constitutes
a specific form of collective remembering that interprets an event as significant and
deserving of critical attention’.12 Bearing witness, Zelizer maintains, ‘offers one way of
working through the difficulties that arise from traumatic experience by bringing indi-
viduals together on their way to collective recovery’.13 ‘Trauma’ initially referred to the
physical wounds that cause pain and suffering, but it now suggests an array of cognitive-
emotional conditions inflicted by anguish and existential pain. Individual sufferingmay
be the lynchpin of most traumatic experiences, but scholars speak of public trauma or
historical trauma as a particular type of cultural memory.When large-scale cataclysmic
events such as war and genocide occur, customary notions of ethical behaviour are
shatteredandpeople looktothecollective–whetheratthe family, communityornational
levels – for assistance in recovery. Indeed, it is precisely ‘the function of public memory
discourses to allow individuals to break out of traumatic repetitions’.14
Bearing witness to public trauma necessarily moves memory into the political
sphere. It forces one to investigate what Elizabeth Jelin calls the ‘labours of memory’:
when people are ‘actively involved in the process of symbolic transformation and
6 – Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory,
London: Verso 1994, viii.
7 – Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind,
London: Allen and Unwin 1921, 96.
8 – James E. Young, The Texture of Memory:
Holocaust Memorials and Meanings, New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1993.
9 – Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The
Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the
Politics of Remembering, Berkeley: University
of California Press 1997, 7.
10 – Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of
Others, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2003, 22. See also Barbie Zelizer,
Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory
through the Camera’s Eye, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press 1998, 5–13; and
Sturken, Tangled Memories, 9–12.
11 – James Fentress and Chris Wickham,
Social Memory, London: Blackwell 1992,
47–8.
12 – Barbie Zelizer, ‘Finding Aids to the Past:
Bearing Personal Witness to Traumatic
Public Events’, Media, Culture, and Society,
24 (2002), 697–714, 698. For a more recent
statement, see Barbie Zelizer, About to Die:
How News Images Move the Public, New
York: Oxford University Press 2010.
13 – Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 268.
14 – Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban
Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory,
Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003, 9.
See also: Paul Antze and Michael Lambek,
Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and
Memory, New York: Routledge 1996; Cathy
Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory,
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press 1995; Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the
Memory of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 2003; and Ruth Leys,
Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press 2000.
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elaboration of meanings of the past’.15 A city like Dresden, after all, does not tell its
own past; rather, as Italo Calvino observed, cities contain their pasts, ‘like the lines of
a hand’, waiting for people to read them.16 Active agents, in the form of memory
workers, map those lines and create a cognitive cartography of the past, rendering it
open for interpretation.
It is significant that memory work owes allegiance to no one political perspec-
tive. On one hand, the labours of politically motivated left-leaning groups, human
rights activists, historians, archivists and forensic anthropologists have sought to
overcome the trauma-induced silences and the ‘organized forgetting’ so often pro-
pagated by political elites.17 Such progressive grassroots ‘memory workers’ in
Germany, for instance, challenged the denials and ‘normalization’ of historical
state-perpetrated violence by public officials. Their activist commitment to
Erinnerungsarbeit (labours of memory) during the 1980s and 1990s led not only to
the creation of a vast array of challenging memorials, including Berlin’s Topography
of Terror and the recently built Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, but also
to a new understanding of the social responsibilities of being German. On the other
side of the memory divide are the far-right demonstrators in cities such as Lubeck,
Hamburg, Frankfurt, Chemnitz and, most notably, Dresden, which call striking
attention to an intensifying politics of memory.
Rubble Photography and the Texture of Memory
Those memory politics centre increasingly on the air war and attendant German
suffering. As Stefan Berger wrote in 2006, ‘for several years now the Germans have
been rediscovering themselves as victims of the Second World War. They remember
one of the most gruesome bombing wars ever waged against a nation-state’.18 Mary
Nolan puts it somewhat differently, as she paraphrases the German novelist Gunter
Grass, arguing instead that the ‘German preoccupation with the Nazi past, with
issues of guilt, responsibility, and victimization [. . .] ‘‘doesn’t end. Never will it
end’’’. This anxiety over the past, Nolan continues:
manifests itself in ever new forms, as different parts of the past, which may ormay not have been repressed, come to the fore and are painfully reconstructed,tentatively probed, and reluctantly and often only partially accepted. Each newperspective on the past reorders, sometimes even shatters the previous mosaic.19
Since about 2002, German suffering, alongside German guilt, has become a principal
theme in discourses about the past. W. G. Sebald’s essay Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air
War and Literature), Grass’s novel Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk) and, especially, Jorg
Friedrich’s history Der Brand (The Fire) have played major roles in shaping the
current texture of German memory to one that includes victimhood.20 At the centre
of these debates – of a changing memory regime in Germany – stands the city of
Dresden.
It is not hard to see why. Dresden, before the war, was a magnificent city – a
tourist centre well known to Germans and foreigners alike as a place where the arts
flourished amid stunning architecture. This gave rise to the myth that the city was of
no military or industrial importance, which was exploited to perfection by the Nazis
in one last great flourish of propaganda. This was clearly not the case, but like the
inflated number of deaths during the firebombing – a number first concocted by
Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels and accepted uncritically by many thereafter –
Dresden’s invention as a militarily innocent setting remains stubbornly intact.21
And, in one apocalyptic night and the following day, its historic heart was destroyed,
first by British and then by American aircraft armed with 4,500 tons of high explosive
and incendiary bombs. Memorably, if hyperbolically, described by Kurt Vonnegut as
‘the greatest massacre in European history’, the firebombing decimated a city largely
spared earlier ravages of war. On 13 and 14 February 1945 the city became, in
Vonnegut’s words, ‘one big flame [that] ate everything organic, everything that
15 – Elizabeth Jelin, ‘The Minefields of
Memory’, NACLA Report on the Americas,
32:2 (1998), 23–9. See also Karen E. Till, The
New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
2005, 18.
16 – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans.
William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich 1974, 11.
17 –Milan Kundera, ‘Afterword: A Talk with
the Author by Philip Roth’, in The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting, ed. Philip Roth,
New York: Penguin Books 1980, 229–37.
18 – Stefan Berger, ‘On Taboos, Traumas and
Other Myths: Why the Debate About
German Victims of the SecondWorld War Is
Not a Historians’ Controversy’, in Germans
as Victims: Remembering the Past in
Contemporary Germany, ed. Bill Niven,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006,
210–75. On the role of the airwar in creating
collective memories in a divided Germany,
see Malte Thießen, ‘Gemeinsame
Erinnerungen im geteilten Deutschland: Der
Luftkrieg im ‘‘kommunalen Gedachtnis’’ der
Bundesrepublik und DDR’, Deutschland
Archiv 41:2 (2008), 226–32.
19 – Mary Nolan, ‘Air Wars, Memory Wars’,
Central European History, 38:1 (2005), 7–40,
quote on page 7.
20 – W. G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur,
Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag 1999; published
in English as On the Natural History of
Destruction, New York: Random House
2003. Grass, Im Krebsgang, Gottingen: Steidl
2002; and Jorg Friedrich, Der Brand:
Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945,
Berlin: Propylaen 2002. It is significant that
both Sebald and Friedrich make important
use of photographs. Jorg Friedrich,
Brandstatten: Der Anblick des Bombenkriegs,
Berlin: Propylaen 2003; and Lisa Patt, ed.,
Searching for Sebald: Photography after
W.G. Sebald, Los Angeles: Institute of
Critical Inquiry 2007. The literature on
German victimhood in the wake of Sebald,
Friedrich, and Grass, in both English and
German, is enormous. Among the works I
have found useful are: Laurel Cohen-Pfister
and Dagmar Wienroder-Skinner, Victims
and Perpetrators, 1933–1945: (Re)Presenting
the Past in Post-Unification Culture, Berlin:
W. de Gruyter 2006; Volker Hage, Zeugen der
Zerstorung: Die Literaten und der Luftkrieg,
Frankfurt amMain: S. Fischer 2003; Andreas
Huyssen, ‘Air War Legacies: From Dresden
to Baghdad’, New German Critique 90
(2003), 163–76; Lothar Kettenacker, Ein Volk
von Opfern?: Die neue Debatte um den
Bombenkrieg 1940–45, Berlin: Rowohlt 2003;
Eric Langenbacher, ‘Changing Memory
Regimes in Contemporary Germany’,
German Politics and Society, 21:2 (2003),
46–68; Bill Niven, ed., Germans as Victims:
Remembering the Past in Contemporary
Germany, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
2006; Nolan, ‘Air Wars, Memory Wars’;
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would burn. [. . .] Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals’.22 The
devastated area amounted to thirteen square miles and cost the lives of an estimated
25,000 people.23 In very short order, ‘Dresden’ – at least in Germany – became a
byword for the horrors of modern war. Like Hiroshima, ‘Dresden’ stained American
and British claims to have a fought a ‘good war’ against fascism.
Beginning in 1946 and continuing to the present, citizens of Dresden and
Germany have marked the firebombing as a singularly traumatic experience, one
that was both avoidable and that caused meaningless suffering. Significantly, the
mayor of Dresden, Walter Weidauer, initially blamed the disaster on the Nazi regime
for having started the war and on Germans themselves for insufficient resistance to
Hitler. He ignored the national identity of the bombers. But soon the memory
politics of a divided Germany shifted attention to the Americans and British. In
the official discourse produced by the East German state, the German Democratic
Republic (GDR), the bombing of Dresden was conceived as a criminal act perpe-
trated by the Western Allies against the German people and the Soviet Union. A flyer
printed for the fifth anniversary, immediately after the GDR’s founding, described
the bombing as a ‘terror attack’, and by the tenth anniversary the bombing was
labelled a ‘war crime’, with the American and British perpetrators equated with Nazi
criminals. Especially ironic is the fact that the socialist state’s condemnation of the
British and American ‘terror attack’ almost perfectly reproduced the Nazi propa-
ganda that appeared immediately after the February 1945 bombing.24
Photography of the rubble-strewn landscape was vital to constructing this
complex texture of memory in Dresden and throughout the defeated nation.
Professional and amateur photographers appeared on the scene of almost every
destroyed city and took thousands upon thousands of photographs that cumula-
tively developed into a genre known as Trummerfotografie (rubble photography or
the photography of ruins). Hermann Claasen, August Sander, Henry Ries, Edmund
Kesting, Kurt Schaarschuch, Walter Hege, Herbert List and Richard Peter are some
of the better-known professional photographers, but Germans were not the only
ones taking photographs of war-induced ruins. American-based photographers like
Robert Capa and Margaret Bourke-White, and Capa’s European colleagues Werner
Bischof, David ‘Chim’ Seymour and Ernst Haas joined the host of local photogra-
phers who also pictured the ruined cities. As a genre, rubble photographs typically
depicted a ruined landscape devoid of people. Rarely are dead bodies part of the
landscape; instead, death is generally implied by absence.25
Apocalyptic, eerie and silent: rubble photography became the most widespread
visual symbol of what Germans suffered and lost during the bombing war. They found
a ready distribution outlet in dozens of books published throughout both the Federal
Republic of Germany and the GDR, and they became a crucial visual backdrop to both
the working-through process of personal trauma and the ideological work of state-
sanctioned collective memory.26 Today, with the resurgence in memory of the air war,
rubble photographs are returning to prominence, with a peculiar mixture of kitsch
and politics, nostalgia and trauma. At the same time that both far-right and anti-fascist
activists deploy them for political activity, vendors in cities such as Cologne sell them
as tourist postcards, and contemporary German publishers such as Wartberg produce
rubble picture books for nearly three-dozen cities and towns (figure 4).
A distinctive problem faced by the publishers of such books was that all rubble
photographs started to look alike.27 Whether photographers pictured destroyed
cityscapes in Koblenz, Leipzig, Lubeck, Mainz, Nuremberg, Berlin or Hamburg,
they inevitably produced similar images of rubble-strewn streets, shattered buildings
and gutted churches. Heilbronn, in the photograph by American combat photo-
grapher Harold W. Clover, bore an eerie resemblance to pretty much any German
city in 1945, a point not lost on local inhabitants (figure 5). In a country where
attachments to local place run deep and where specific historical buildings and
landmarks are central to that identity, the destruction of entire cityscapes led to
paralysis. Residents who had lived their entire lives in a city were unable to recognise
Helmut Schmitz, A Nation of Victims?:
Representations of German Wartime Suffering
from 1945 to the Present, Amsterdam: Rodopi
2007; and Susanne Vees-Gulani, Trauma and
Guilt: Literature of Wartime Bombing in
Germany, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2003.
21 – This is an immensely controversial point
that has persisted for the past 65 years.
Among the many sources that engage the
controversy, Frederick Taylor seems most
persuasive. He writes that, given the
extraordinary damage of the city, it is easy to
forget that ‘Dresden was [. . .] a functioning
enemy administrative, industrial, and
communications center that by February
1945 lay close to the front line’. He concludes
that, while severe and morally questionable,
there were clear military reasons for the
bombing: Frederick Taylor, Dresden,
Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York:
HarperCollins 2004, 416. See also Tami Davis
Biddle, ‘Dresden 1945: Reality, History, and
Memory’, Journal of Military History, 72:2
(2008), 413–49. In addition to Taylor and
Biddle, one book has been especially useful in
presenting the historical context of Dresden’s
firebombing and its texture of historical
memory: Oliver Reinhard, Matthias
Neutzner and Wolfgang Hesse, Das rote
Leuchten: Dresden und der Bombenkrieg,
Dresden: Edition Sachsische Zeitung 2005.
22 – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, or,
the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with
Death, New York: Dial Press 2009 [1969],
quotes on pp. 128 and 227. Vonnegut, of
course, was a prisoner of war in Dresden and
an eyewitness to the historic firebombing.
His meditations on the atrocious event
became his bestselling novel, Slaughterhouse
Five. For a recent study of Vonnegut’s
witness-bearing novel, see Ann Rigney, ‘All
This Happened, More of Less: What a
Novelist Made of the Bombing of Dresden’,
History and Theory, 47 (2009), 5–24.
23 – Like everything about the Dresden
firebombing, the death count is profoundly
divisive. Numbers as high as 250,000 have
been offered, and strategically utilised by
Germany’s far right, to relativise atrocity.
Kurt Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse Five, cited
130,000 dead, using the notorious Holocaust
denier, David Irving’s, calculations. In 2008 a
multidisciplinary team of some of
Germany’s most distinguished historians
and forensic anthropologists produced the
results of a four-year scientific investigation
into his issue. Drawing on archival sources,
many never previously consulted, on burial
records, on hundreds of eye witness reports
and oral testimony and on street-by-street
archaeological investigations aided by a
powerful GIS application, the scientists
estimated the likely death toll at
approximately 25,000. Importantly, this long
awaited and extremely important report,
although convincing in its triangulating
scientific methodologies, has not resolved
but only added to an extremely controversial
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it in the bombing’s aftermath. Hans Erich Nossack described how, upon his return to
Hamburg, one day after his hometown’s 1943 destruction, ‘what surrounded us did
not remind us in any way of what was lost [. . .] In areas I thought I knew well, I lost
my way completely’.28
Rubble photography thus threatened to reproduce this sense of profound dis-
orientation. If it was to be at all helpful in assisting Germans make both political and
personal sense of the ruins that encompassed their lives, some sort of visual resolu-
tion to the problem of sudden placelessness was necessary.29 Very early on, publish-
ers of the photography of ruins determined that aiming the viewfinder both back in
time and forward to the future would offer such a solution.
Bilddokument Dresden, 1933–1945, one of the first such rubble photography
publications, appeared shortly after the end of the war and is representative of the
genre. Published by the Dresden City Council in December 1945, the large-format
book was comprised almost entirely of before-and-after photographs of the city’s
many famous landmarks such as the Zwinger, Altmarkt, the Rathaus and the
Frauenkirche. The City Council utilised the historical and contemporary images of
local photographer Kurt Schaarschuch to illustrate the book, which contained very
little text apart fromminimal captions. That text, although brief, suggestively hints at
the intended message of the book. Written by Kurt Liebermann, a local official in
charge of the Dresden News Authority, the four-sentence preface notes that the:
picture of our city, which for centuries bestowed its own unique appeal, shallnot be understood only through loss and damage, and through an increasingknowledge of the Nazi warmongers, but it shall also spur active and ongoingcollective effort.30
Blame for the Dresden atrocity is levelled at the Nazi regime, while hope for the
future is found in memories of landscapes past and in plans for their rebuilding,
already underway.
One photographic pairing illustrates Schaarschuch’s approach – and shows the
book’s strengths and weaknesses. It depicts the monument toMartin Luther, standing
Figure 4. Steven Hoelscher, Rubble
Photographs for Sale as Postcards in Cologne,
June 2003.
matter. The massive-scale 2009 far-right
protests were launched after the book’s
publication. Rolf-Dieter Muller, ed.,
Historikerkommission zu den Luftangriffen auf
Dresden zwischen dem 13. Und 15. Februar
1945 (Dresden Commission of Historians for
the Ascertainment of the Number of Victims
of the Air Raids on the City of Dresden on 13/
14 February 1945), Dresden, Rat der Stadt
Dresden 2008.
24 – On the anniversary commemorations of
the Dresden firebombing, see Matthias
Neutzner, ‘VomAnklagen zum Erinnern: die
Erzahlung vom 13. Februar’, in Das rote
Leuchten, 128–63. Also useful are several
important articles by Gilad Margalit: ‘Der
Luftangriff aus Dresden: seine Bedeutung fur
die Erinnerungspolitik der DDR und fur die
Herauskristallisierung einer historischen
Kriegserinnerung im Westen’, in Narrative
der Shoah: Reprasentationen der
Vergangenheit in Historiographie, Kunst und
Politik, ed. Susanne Duwell and Matthias
Schmidt, Paderborn: Schoningh 2002, 189–
207; ‘Dresden and Hamburg: Official
Memory and Commemoration of the
Victims of Allied Air Raids in the Two
Germanies’, in A Nation of Victims?:
Representations of GermanWartime Suffering
from 1945 to the Present, ed. Helmut Schmitz,
Amsterdam: Rodopi 2007, 125–40; and
‘Dresden und die Erinnerungspolitik der
DDR’, http://www.bombenkrieg.
historicum-archiv.net/themen/ddr.html.
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and then fallen, before the city’s principal landmark, the Frauenkirche. In the
‘before’ photograph, Schaarschuch positions his camera well below Luther, and,
with an impressively large depth of field, he leads the viewers’ eyes skyward and
to the Frauenkirche, which looms directly behind the Reformation leader
(figure 6a). The ‘after’ photograph depicts Luther, lying flat on his back,
prostrate and staring glassy-eyed to the sky (figure 6b). The Frauenkirche is
still there, but only partially so, and is reduced to one more pile of rubble. Only
dates serve as captions for Schaarschuch’s photographs: 1933 in the ‘before’
picture, and 1945 in the ‘after’. The intervening period – the rise of the Nazi
regime and its accompanying terror and war – is not commented upon but is
clearly somehow responsible for this decline and fall. This ‘before’ and ‘after’
pairing might very well be the most striking in the book, and it successfully
conveys a strong visual sense of the city’s loss. But loss, for Schaarschuch’s
Bilddokument Dresden, is limited in its focus on high culture, elite architecture
and Christian piety.
Roughly three years later, a local publisher, the Dresdner Verlagsgesellschaft,
wanted to reissue the photograph book, which, by then, was out of print. This plan
was met with important opposition, however. Despite its impressive sales, which
numbered in the tens of thousands, by 1949 local officials and city administrators did
not consider Bilddokument Dresden to be a publishing success. For one thing, the sole
photograph of efforts at rebuilding the city seemed insufficient. More importantly,
the book did little to fuel the emerging sense of moral outrage in the GDR. Its
perceived flatness and dispassionate approach, one that emphasised architectural
heritage but had little to say about human loss, made it seem dated. This, combined
with the revelation that Schaarschuch had illustrated a Nazi-published book in 1937,
further eroded the credibility of his rubble photographs.31 Much more in step with
the changing political climate was another Dresden photographer, Richard Peter.
While Schaarschuch’s images have virtually disappeared in a sea of rubble photo-
graphs, Peter’s have endured to such an extent that for many people they have come
to define the 1945 firebombing. Viewers might not recall Richard Peter’s name, but
they remember his photographs.
Figure 5. Harold Clover, Heilbronn in a
Panorama, April 1945. National Archives and
Records Administration, ARC identifier:
559236.
25 – This is not to suggest, of course, that
photographs of bodily ruin were absent from
the visual archive of the air war. As I indicate
below in the case of Dresden, photographs of
corpses were extremely important. However,
as a genre, landscape photographs
dominated and circulated more widely.
Although long neglected, the photography of
ruins has attracted scholarly attention in
recent years. I have learned much from two
scholars in particular: Ludger Derenthal,
Bilder der Trummer- und Aufbaujahre:
Fotografie im sich teilenden Deutschland,
Marburg: Jonas Verlag 1999; and Jorn
Glasenapp, ‘Nach dem Brand: Uberlegungen
zur deutschen Trummerfotografie’,
Fotogeschichte, 91:24 (2004), 47–64; and Die
deutsche Nachkriegsfotografie: eine
Mentalitatsgeschichte in Bildern, Paderborn:
Wilhelm Fink 2008. The examples of postwar
photobooks that used rubble photographs
are legion. For a useful introduction to the
kind of books produced at this time, see
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, ‘Memory and
Reconstruction: The Postwar European
Photobook,’ in The Photobook: A History,
vol. 1, London: Phaidon, 2004, 186–231.
Two typical examples are Werner Gauss and
Arthur Gloggler, Alt-Heilbronn, wie wir es
kannten und liebten, Heilbronn am Neckar:
Gauss-Verlag 1952; and Willi Ruppert, . . .
und Worms lebt dennoch, Worms: Wormser
Verlagsdruckerei 1955.
26 – Derenthal, Bilder der Trummer- und
Aufbaujahre, 87–98.
27 – David Crew, ‘Mourning, Denial,
Celebration: The Visual Work of West
German Reconstruction after 1945’, in
Wiederaufbau der Stadte: Europa seit 1945,
ed. Georg-Wagner Kyora, Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner Verlag 2012.
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Dresden, a Camera Accuses
One photograph in particular has become the iconic image of the firebombing and of
the air war (figure 7). By all measures, Peter’s photograph –‘Blick vom Rathausturm
nach Suden’ (View from the City Hall Tower to the South) of September 1945 – is a
cultural icon of the first order. Following the work of Robert Hariman and John
Louis Lucaites, I mean something quite specific by the term ‘icon’:
those photographic images appearing in print, electronic, or digital media thatare widely recognized and remembered, are understood to be representations ofhistorically significant events, activate strong emotional identification orresponse, and are reproduced across a range of media, genres, or topics.32
Although a number of images meet some of these criteria, very few images meet them
all. In the context of the United States, Hariman and Lucaites point to such images as
Dorothea Lange’sMigrant Mother (1936), Joe Rosenthal’s Raising of the Flag on Iwo
Jima (1945), Nick Ut’s Accidental Napalm (1972) and Stuart Franklin’s Tiananmen
Square (1989) as examples of photographs that are at once aesthetically familiar, are
capable of performing a role in shaping public discourse, are complicated enough to
be open to multiple and often inconsistent perspectives, can trigger an affective
response in their viewers, and are resources for the mediation of social conflicts.33
Peter’s image has been reproduced in countless print sources, beginning with
Axel Rodenberger’s 1951 Der Tod von Dresden (Dresden’s Death), David Irving’s
inflammatory 1963 The Destruction of Dresden (subtitled The Most Appalling Air
Attack of World War 2), multiple German editions of Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse Five, as well as more recent popular and academic histories, including
the cover of Der Spiegel’s 2003 special issue on the air war (figure 8).34 Dozens of
Figure 6. (a, b) Kurt Schaarschuch, 1933 and 1945. Courtesy of Sachsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek Dresden, Abt. Deutsche
Fotothek.
28 – Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg
1943, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
2004, 37, 41. This book, a classic in the air
war literature, was first published as Der
Untergang: Hamburg, 1943, Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag 1948.
29 – Or, perhaps more accurately, ‘place
annihilation’. Kenneth Hewitt, ‘Place
Annihilation: Area Bombing and the Fate of
Urban Places’, Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 73:2 (1983), 257–84.
30 – Kurt Schaarschuch, Bilddokument
Dresden, 1933–1945, Dresden: Hrsg. vom Rat
der Stadt Dresden 1945, 1.
31 – Derenthal, Bilder der Trummer- und
Aufbaujahre, 67.
32 – Robert Hariman and John Louis
Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic
Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal
Democracy, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press 2007, 27.
33 – Ibid., 29–37.
34 – Two recent English-language books that
use an unattributed photograph of this scene
(actually, byWalter Hahn) are: Paul Addison
and Jeremy A. Crang, Firestorm: The
Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago: I.R. Dee
2006; and Marshall De Bruhl, Firestorm:
Allied Airpower and the Destruction of
Dresden, New York: Random House 2006.
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Figure 7. Richard Peter sen., Blick vomRathausturm nach Suden, 1945. Courtesy of Sachsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und UniversitatsbibliothekDresden,
Abt. Deutsche Fotothek.
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other German photographers have, over the years, followed Peter’s steps up the city
hall’s stairs to re-photograph his celebrated image. Among those was Dietmar Alex,
whose photograph of August 1961 suggests a telling sequence of Dresden’s post-war
rebirth (figure 9). Interestingly, a contemporary of Richard Peter, the Dresden-based
photographer Walter Hahn, seems to have been the first photographer to record this
view. The Deutsche Fotothek archive in Dresden contains a 1928 image by Hahn
from the City Hall (‘Blick vom Rathausturm’). With a statue framing the right
foreground, the view shows the city below with a zeppelin circling above. More
strikingly, Hahn also photographed the exact scene made famous by Peter at roughly
the same time. His 35 mm transparency depicts the ruined city in landscape
orientation from the same vantage point on the city hall tower. But what really
distinguished this photograph from Peter’s is the red swastika painted directly onto
the ruins, suggesting a clear line of responsibility for the destruction (figure 10).35
Peter’s photograph is everywhere. It has been called the ‘icon of the German
rubble photography’, and that is certainly true, especially considering the powerful
affective role of such images.36 For the German art criticWolfgang Kil, Peter’s images
were ‘landscapes of the soul’, pictures that, for an entire generation, found their
experience of the war visually preserved and, indeed, constructed. Another German
art critic, Richard Hiepe, describes how the photograph is ‘burned into the con-
sciousness of modern humanity’.37
With a view over the shoulder of the nearly intact statue looking down over a
landscape of ruins, the photograph achieves its power through the profound juxta-
position of order and disorder, light and darkness, harmony and dissonance, proxi-
mity and distance, and personified virtue and death. Many viewers read the statue as
an angel (cultural critics are quick to point out that it reminds them of Walter
Benjamin’s famous reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus),38 but in fact it depicts the
allegorical figure Goodness (Allegorie der Gute), a symbol of good government
positioned near the top of the city hall. The precise identity of the statue seems to
matter less than the way it stands in for the photograph’s imagined viewer, reaching
out, as it were, to the ruins below.
As powerful as such visual binaries are, they represent only a portion of what
makes the image iconic. A second consideration must emphasise what it does not
show; or, put somewhat differently, what it does not say. Although seemingly trying
to communicate, Goodness herself is silent. Are viewers supposed to hear a lament or
an accusation? If this is an accusation, who is responsible for the destruction below?
Hitler and the Nazi regime that took power in 1933? Those who abetted the regime
during the years leading up to the war? Or the Anglo-American bombers who
delivered their arms with chilling effectiveness? Could the statue’s gesture downward
be a form of finger-pointing of indictment, or reaching out to the thousands upon
thousands of lives lost? Is it a warning of the disastrous consequences of human
hubris? Or is it a visual metaphor of human sin? Because the ‘Angel of Dresden’ is as
mute as the stone it is made of, every viewer can hear what he or she wants.39
Such questions point to the multiple interpretations inherent in this extraor-
dinary image. Richard Peter’s ‘Blick vom Rathausturm nach Suden’ does what
especially powerful photographs invariably do: it suggests clarity but resists one-
dimensional understandings. This is made all the more ironic by the photograph’s
time and site specificity. Originally, it was just a picture, one of many, made by a
dedicated and persistent photojournalist. Here is how Richard Peter described his
project:
Thousands of pictures were part of single-minded and tireless work. At the timeI did not know what would eventually come of them. I only knew that in timethey would become valuable historical documents and would be used: used asdocumentation of the time, as symbols of absolute evil and the celebration ofinfernal triumph, and as evidence of the effects of a megalomaniac and theinfected group of disciples who followed his madness.40
35 – Little is known about the superimposed
symbol and questions immediately are raised
about responsibility or timing of the act.
Wolfgang Hesse, email to the author, 20
October 2010.
36 – Derenthal, Bilder der Trummer- und
Aufbaujahre, 68; Christoph Hamann, ‘Der
‘‘Engel’’ der Geschichte: Das kanonische
Bild’, Praxis Geschichte, 4 (2004), 48–9; and
Martin Kemp, Christ to Coke: How Image
Becomes Icon, New York: Oxford University
Press 2011, 202.
37 – Wolfgang Kil, Hinterlassenschaft und
Neubeginn: Fotografien von Dresden, Leipzig
und Berlin in den Jahren nach 1945, edited by
Werner Wurst, Leipzig: Fotokinoverlag
1989, 20–1; and Richard Hiepe, ‘Aus der
Kriegsfibel (uber Richard Peter)’,
Arbeiterfotografie, 47 (September/Oktober
1985), 2–5.
38 – See, for example, Michael Neumann,
‘Genealogie einer Geste: ‘‘. . . Eingebrannt in
das Bildbewußtsein der modernen
Menschheit’’’, in Die Zerstorung Dresdens:
Antworten der Kunste, ed. Walter Schmitz,
Dresden: Thelem 2005, 159–70, 160.
39 – Wolfgang Hesse, ‘Der glucklose Engel:
Das zerstorte Dresden in einer Fotografie
von Richard Peter’, ForumWissenschaft, 22:2
(2005), 30–5.
40 – Richard Peter, Richard Peter Sen:
Erinnerungen und Bilder eines Dresdener
Fotografen, edited by Werner Wurst, Leipzig:
Fotokinoverlag 1987, 58.
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Figure 9. Dietmar Alex, Blick vom Rathausturm, 1961. Courtesy of Sachsische
Landesbibliothek – Staats- undUniversitatsbibliothekDresden, Abt. Deutsche Fotothek.
Figure 8. Cover, Der Spiegel, 6 January 2003. Courtesy of Spiegel
Verlag Rudolf Augstein GmbH.
Figure 10. Walter Hahn, Blick vom Rathausturm mit einmontiertem Hakenkreuz, 1945, 35 mm transparency. Courtesy of Sachsische Landesbibliothek –
Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek Dresden, Abt. Deutsche Fotothek.
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The transition from documentary evidence to national icon is, in many ways, an
unfortunate one, since the photograph’s historical context is largely forgotten. That
context, however, is vital to a deeper understanding of this remarkable photograph.
Richard Peter was a photojournalist and member of the Communist Party
before the war. Characterised as an ‘engaged documentary photographer’ who read-
ily took on issues of political importance, he was a frequent contributor to Die
Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Worker’s Illustrated Magazine), or AIZ, an influential
German weekly that was well known for its anti-fascist commentary.41 Although
barred from working as a press photographer when the Nazis rose to power in 1933,
he continued his anti-fascist work, smuggling out photographs to the exiled AIZ in
Prague, including some rare images of Reichskristallnacht in 1938. Although his
activities during the war are not clear, according to his autobiography, Peter returned
to post-war Dresden in September 1945, after spending time as a prisoner of war
among the American military. Upon his return, seven months after the inferno, the
photographer found the city and his own photographic archive completed deva-
stated. ‘When I emerged from the skeleton-like train station,’ he remembered:
my eyes wandered over a desert of grotesque ruins, wrecked houses, andtowering stumps of junk. Over there, where the chaos of unending debris waslost in the gray haze, between the torsos of what remained of staircases and eerietowering chimneys, back there was the grave of all efforts of decades of my life.42
Using a borrowed Leica, he set out to record the devastation. This project lasted four
years and produced several thousand images: urban ‘canyons’, car wrecks, shattered
buildings of all varieties; corpses from failed air raid shelters and the refugees flood-
ing into the city; and, finally, the city’s efforts to rebuild. Peter’s photographs of
ruins, which he donated to the regional archive, culminated in what has become one
of the most-discussed German publications of the post-war period: Dresden – eine
Kamera klagt an (Dresden, a Camera Accuses).43
‘Every German should have this book,’ its advertising poster claimed (figure 11),
and there is evidence to suggest that many did. With an astonishingly large initial
print run of fifty thousand, Peter’s book served as witness to the effects of the
firebombing and indictment against so-called ‘Bombenterror’ (initially Hitler’s
Figure 11. Advertising poster,Dresden – eine
Kamera klagt an, ca. 1950. Courtesy of
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin,
Bildarchiv.
41 – U. Breymeyer, ‘Der engagierte
Dokumentarist: Richard Peter, sen, 1895–
1977’, in Fotografen in Deutschland um 1945,
ed. K. Honnef und U. Breymeyer, Berlin
1995, 184–7. Andre�s Mario Zervigon,
‘Persuading with the Unseen? Die Arbeiter-
Illustrierte-Zeitung, Photography, and
German Communism’s Iconophobia’,
Visual Resources, 26:2 (2010), 147–62. The
best source to-date on Richard Peter is his
autobiography: Peter and Wurst,
Erinnerungen und Bilder eines Dresdener
Fotografen. Also extremely useful is the
website of the Dresden-based Deutsche
Fotothek, http://www.deutschefotothek.de.
The Deutsche Fotothek is home to the Peter
photograph archive, which numbers more
than 6,500 images.
42 – Peter, Erinnerungen und Bilder eines
Dresdener Fotografen, 55–6.
43 – Ibid., 58. Richard Peter, Dresden, eine
Kamera klagt an, Dresden: Dresdener
Verlagsgesellschaft KG 1949. The book has
gone through several subsequent editions,
including 1980, 1982 and 1995, and remains
in print today with Fliegenkopf Verlag. For
background on the book, see: Wolfgang
Hesse, ‘Der ‘‘Engel’’ von Dresden.
Trummerfotografie und visuelles Narrativ
der Hoffnung’, inDas Jahrhundert der Bilder,
ed. Gerhard Paul, Gottingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht 2009, 730–37; Derenthal, Bilder
der Trummer- und Aufbaujahre, 67–74;
Glasenapp,Die deutsche Nachkriegsfotografie,
121–32; and Christiane Hertel, ‘Dis/
Continuities in Dresden’s Dances of Death’,
Art Bulletin, 82:1 (2000), 104–10.
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term) wrought by Britain and by the United States. Among the many books that
documented the destruction of German cities,Dresden – eine Kamera klagt an stands
out for its long-term influence. Only Hermann Claasen’s 1947 book on Cologne –
Gesang im Feuerofen – matches its impact.44 During the Cold War, the photographic
book became ammunition in the global ideological struggle, a point quickly dis-
covered by reporters from the magazine Life. When the staff photographer Ralph
Crane visited Dresden in 1954 to include the city in a special issue devoted to German
reconstruction, an East German official told him: ‘you will find that the people of
Dresden do not like Americans’. Crane’s journalist companion wrote: ‘what differ-
entiates Dresden from other bombed cities in Germany – and several were bombed
more heavily and more often – is the hatred cultivated in the ruins’. Visitors to
Dresden, the Life journalist reported, ‘are thoughtfully given a book of photographs,
The Camera Accuses, which shows the chaos after the bombing as well as bodies being
incinerated in the streets’.45
This accusatory tone is set forth at the beginning of the book with a prose poem
by the socialist writer Max Zimmering. Serving as the book’s preface, the brief poem –
entitled ‘Dresden’ – attempts to fix a particular, highly charged meaning. Dresden, the
poem begins: ‘the radiance that was once in your eyes, lit bymusic and painting, had to
give way’. And who was responsible for this ‘shame’?: ‘it goes by the name Wall
Street’.46
Such textual defamation is rare in Peter’s book, however, as words are kept to a
minimum. Instead, the argument is presented visually. The book’s 104 photographs
are laid out on eighty-six pages with minimal text, apart from a handful of captions
and chapter titles. There is a clear narrative structure to the book, muchmore so than
in Schaarschuch’s, beginning with three full-page nocturnal views of pre-1945
Dresden, when life and the city remain intact. Immediately following this prologue
is the first substantial section of the book, which consists of sixty-nine photographs
of the three distinct components of loss: the bombed and destroyed city, the dead and
survivors. The second part of the book displays thirty-two images of post-war
reconstruction, or, in the language of the GDR, Aufbau (construction), which is
meant to signify the construction of buildings, infrastructure and institutions, as well
as the new socialist state.47
Peter’s iconic image appears at a crucial point in the book, for it marks the first
andmost important transition zone of the visual narrative. After three pages showing
lovely views of the peaceful city at night (figure 12), the next image makes a stunning
impact. On opposite pages are a night view of Dresden as it sleeps and Peter’s View
from the City Hall Tower to the South. The cumulative effect is striking. Using only
visual images, Peter’s message is plain: a once sleeping, ‘innocent’ and peaceful city
became a sea of ruin.
In the pages that follow, readers see destruction in a multitude of forms. Peter
may have captioned one early image, also taken from the city hall tower in the
opposite direction to the north, as ‘overall the same picture’, but that is not quite
accurate (figure 13). His photographs document a vast range of ruinous landscapes:
churches, train station, castles, marketplaces, beer halls, government buildings,
coffee houses, homes, factories, offices and monuments. Some photographs are
distant, panorama views of streets and buildings blown to smithereens, while others
offer detailed, magnified images of clocks, rubble and fractured statues. Ranging in
approach from view photography to the extremely sharp close-ups of Neue
Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), Peter documented the destroyed city in multiple
perspectives; he photographed everything he saw while walking the city’s streets,
ducking into rubble-strewn interiors and climbing its crumbling towers.
Sandwiched between images of the destroyed cityscape and a section on survi-
vors or ‘people after the destruction’ is a section that stands out within the genre of
Trummerfotografie. It begins with another famous Peter image,Der Tod uber Dresden
(Death above Dresden), one of the few photographs to receive a title in the book
(figure 14). In the photograph, the silhouette of a pacing skeleton stands before a
44 – This is a finding of both Derenthal,
Bilder der Trummer- und Aufbaujahre; and
Glasenapp,Die deutsche Nachkriegsfotografie.
45 – ‘Bombing U.S.S.R. Sought is Turned
AgainstU.S.’, LifeMagazine (10May 1954), 50.
46 – Peter, Dresden, eine Kamera klagt an.
Interestingly, whether out of embarrassment
for the poem’s blatant and wooden appeal to
emotions or out of its political datedness in a
post-Cold War world, Zimmering’s short
contribution is no longer included in the
book’s current edition.
47 – Karl Gernot Kuehn, Caught: The Art of
Photography in the German Democratic
Republic, Berkeley: University of California
Press 1997.
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Figure 12. Richard Peter sen., Dresden, Zwinger mit Kronentor und
Sophienkirche, 1932. Courtesy of Sachsische Landesbibliothek –
Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek Dresden, Abt. Deutsche Fotothek.
Figure 13. Richard Peter sen., Blick vom Rathausturm nach Norden, 1945. Courtesy of
Sachsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek Dresden, Abt.
Deutsche Fotothek.
Figure 14. Richard Peter sen., Der Tod uber
Dresden, 1945. Courtesy of Sachsische
Landesbibliothek – Staats- und
Universitatsbibliothek Dresden, Abt.
Deutsche Fotothek.
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damaged window frame, which, in turn, opens a vista to the ruined Frauenkirche and
city hall. Peter gives no indication of where the photograph was taken from, instead
allowing the frightening image, along with its suggestive title, to speak for itself.
Death is seen not from ‘above’ the ruined landscape, but next to it, suggesting that
the ‘above’ refers to the historical airstrike that brought death to the once peaceful
town.
Some viewers might have recognised the location as the interior of the Dresden
Art Academy, and some might know that the skeleton was used by students as a
model. Some viewers might even recognise the vantage point as one also used by the
art photographer Edmund Kesting in his contemporary series ‘Totentanz Dresden’
(Dresden’s Death Dance) of 1945–46. Kesting, a former student of the Art Academy
who specialised in photomontage and surrealist art, arranged the skeleton in at least a
half-dozen positions to produce a series of haunting images that would seem to have
more in common with the collages of Kurt Schwitters than documentary photo-
graphy of Richard Peter. Whether they recognised the location of the photograph or
its avant-garde heritage, viewers of Peter’s Death above Dresden see an image that is
quite distinct from his more typical ‘straight’ photography, one that provocatively
opens the door to the book’s most troubling section.48
This photograph faces one showing a house wall covered in chalk graffiti, search
messages by survivors, new addresses, and anxious questions: ‘where is Frau
Braunert?’, ‘Heinrich Singer lives’, ‘P. Frey is now living at Robert-Koch Straße 6’,
‘Clara is among the rubble’ (figure 15). These graphic, hand-written messages over-
whelm the enamel plaque from the pre-attack days advertising ‘piano, voice, accor-
dion on third floor’.49 The caption on this page – itself a clear articulation of an
emerging Cold War ideology – refers not to this image but to the next three that
follow: ‘The tragedy of the opened basements may not be withheld from mankind
confronted with the question of conscience – war or peace’.
In a challenging articulation of what might have become a tedious genre, Peter
then changes the thematic register of rubble photographs from destroyed urban
space to the fate of its inhabitants. After dozens of pages of landscape ruins, the ones
that immediately follow – of bodily ruins – are shocking. The first two show full-page
portraits of corpses who suffocated in basements: on the left a woman and on the
right a man with a swastika armband, the sole indicator in the entire book of a Nazi
presence in Dresden (figure 16). The next two pages show a full-page image of a dead
German soldier and, on the right side, two half-page captioned images by Peter’s
fellow Dresden photographer, Walter Hahn, representing the incineration of corpses
in the city’s Altmarkt Square.
It is not entirely clear whether Peter himself wrote the Cold War-inflected
caption that introduces these images, but the effect of what he saw in the ‘opened
basements’ clearly made a deep personal impression. For several years after the
February 1945 bombing, recovery teams (‘Bergungskommandos’) searched the
failed air raid shelters throughout the city, finding the remains of people who
suffocated in their basements. Peter describes how he was kept constantly up to
date, ‘always on the alert’, with the recovery efforts so that he ‘hardly missed a chance
to record the indescribable horror in the air raid shelters’.50
Making stunning use of photographic narrative, Peter constructs a visual argu-
ment that, in death, all are equal – woman, Nazi, soldier, the anonymous mass – and
all are victims. Any possibility that victim may also be perpetrator is foreclosed. Such
a foreclosure may not be explicit in the images themselves, but it is made necessary by
the book’s erasure of Dresden’s political culture during the Nazi years. Critical here
are those first three nocturnal images. Before the dreadful night in February 1945,
Dresden, Peter’s book implies, was characterised by the high culture of Gottfried
Semper’s neo-Baroque opera house and the Gemutlichkeit of tavern life, devoid of
the toxic politics that condemned the city to its ruin.
After these gruesome images of the dead, a new chapter of survival begins,
including the fate of the many refugees who had flooded into Dresden and the
48 – Klaus Werner, Edmund Kesting: ein
Maler fotografiert, Leipzig: Fotokinoverlag,
1987, especially pp. 26–41. An example of
Kesting’s series may be viewed online: http://
www.deutschefotothek.de/obj32024333.
html.
49 – Peter’s photograph and those of other
photographers documenting the hand-
written messages in the rubble of
catastrophic ruin bear striking similarity to
those found in lower Manhattan after the
9/11 terrorist attacks and in New Orleans
after Katrina. For a provocative account of
the latter, see Richard Misrach, Destroy this
Memory, New York: Aperture 2010.
50 – Peter, Erinnerungen und Bilder eines
Dresdener Fotografen, 57.
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Figure 15. Richard Peter sen.,
Suchmeldungen an einemWohnhaus Dresden,
Winckelmannstraße, 1945. Courtesy of
Sachsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und
Universitatsbibliothek Dresden, Abt.
Deutsche Fotothek.
Figure 16. Richard Peter sen., Totenkopf und
Leiche in Uniform (mit Hakenkreuz-Binde am
Armel) in einem Luftschutzkeller, 1946.
Courtesy of Sachsische Landesbibliothek –
Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek Dresden,
Abt. Deutsche Fotothek.
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collective efforts at rebuilding the ruined city. These photographs seem oddly
perfunctory. True, pictures of the city’s reconstruction are essential to a narrative
of hope on which the book must conclude. But, of all the photographs in Dresden –
eine Kamera klagt an, the civilian armies of men and women working in unison to
remove rubble are the least memorable andmost easily interchangeable with those of
nearly any other German city in the immediate post-war years (figure 17).
Conclusion
The playwright Gerhard Hauptmann, himself a survivor of the February 1945 fire-
bombing, wrote shortly thereafter what has become a literary shorthand for the
catastrophic event: ‘Wer dasWeinen verlernt hat, der lernt es wieder beimUntergang
Dresdens’ (Whoever has forgotten how to cry will remember how to do so at the
sight of Dresden in ashes).51 The photographs by Richard Peter have become the
visual culture equivalent – a powerfully compressed technology of memory that
continues to trigger public feelings across a vast spectrum of political actors. Indeed,
Peter’s photographs in conjunction with the various writings that have accompanied
them have played an especially important role in shaping historical memory. ‘The
photograph’, Sontag wrote, ‘is like a quotation, or a maxim, or a proverb. In an era of
information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending some-
thing and a compact form for memorizing it’.52 Peter’s rubble photographs have
provided, for countless people, the ‘sight’ of Dresden in ashes and the quickest way of
apprehending the events of February 1945.
Apprehending something, however, is not the same as understanding, and, for
all its emotional impact, its mnemonic qualities and its widespread dissemination,
Peter’s image sheds little light on the important questions of responsibility, victim-
hood and moral obligation that are at the heart of bearing witness to wartime
trauma. Perhaps inadvertently – for Richard Peter was no friend of the Nazis – this
combination of a denied past and shared victimhood paved the way for all subse-
quent conversations about the controversial firebombing. If W. G Sebald over-
estimates the sense of collective amnesia in post-war Germany, he was certainly
correct in emphasising the supreme struggle to make sense of those ruins or of ‘the
existential difficulty of recognizing the ruined landscape as the product of human
action’.53 Peter’s Dresden photographs have long intervened in that existential
difficulty and, if the ongoing struggles over memory are any indication, will continue
to do so for the foreseeable future.
Figure 17. Richard Peter sen., Einwohner
verlegen ein Gleisjoch auf Trummerschutt fur
die ‘Trummerbahn’, ca. 1946. Courtesy of
Sachsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und
Universitatsbibliothek Dresden, Abt.
Deutsche Fotothek.
51 – Hauptmann, Samtliche Werke, Band XI,
Frankfurt am Main: Propylaen 1974, 1205.
52 – Sontag, Regarding the Pain, 22.
53 – Derek Gregory, ‘‘‘Doors into Nowhere’’:
Dead Cities and the Natural History of
Destruction’, in Cultural Memories: The
Geographical Point of View, ed. Mike
Heffernan, Peter Meusburger and Edgar
Wunder, Heidelberg: Springer 2011, 249–86.
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