Review: Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany

> From: Jerome Kuehl <[email protected]>
>
> *Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany*.  Frances
> Guerin. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis MN. ISBN
> 978-0-8166-7007-9  $27.95
>
>  Visual Studies is often for filmmakers, of which I am one,  not a lush
> intellectual  pasture  on which we can profitably graze, but  a barren and
> forbidding  field, and Frances Guerin’s  latest work is unlikely to  change
> that. She manages to  invoke her title:*Through Amateur Eyes* 29 times in
> her first 35 pages, but when it comes to telling her readers what an
> Amateur is,  she  solemnly  announces: ‘the amateur is a contested notion,
> and due to the idiosyncrasy of my  use of the term it behoves me to clarify
> what it means within my discourse’ (p19) She goes on to ‘clarify  what it
> means’ by saying ‘What distinguishes  amateur from professional? Indeed
> what defines the amateur image in general, and what makes those discussed
> here amateur? In return, what can we make of, and how do we place the
> amateur image that was taken by a Wehrmacht soldier that was subsequently
> published as official propaganda? Was this amateur image transformed into a
> professional object?’(p19) This turgid prose  may contain weighty questions
> but they’re not helped by Ms Guerin’s ponderous  conclusion that ‘…it is
> primarily for discursive purposes that I distinguish the images in this
> book as amateur. In short, they were taken by filmmakers and photographers
> for purposes other than the commercial’(p20).  In other words ‘amateur’
> means, in effect,  ‘not  commercial’. Whew.
>
> There are other indications that  Ms Guerin’s work has been, perhaps
> unwittingly,  inspired by Alan Sokal’s celebrated ‘Transgressing the
> Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’
> published in Social Text in its Spring/Summer edition of 1998.
>
> She believes that ‘imbrication’ which the shorter OED defines as ’the
> dropping of water from roof tiles’ while secondary meanings are ‘or  a
> covering with tiles’ or ‘an overlapping as of tiles’  is a helpful way to
> understand Saul Friedländer’s remarks on Nazis and Jews: ‘to grasp the full
> history, implementation, and  impact  of  the crimes committed by the Nazi
> regime and the Jewish experience of these crimes it is necessary to
> understand their mutual imbrication’(p11)   or again on the very next page
> ‘…eminent scholars such as Dora Apel, have reinforced the contemporary
> openness to accepting the inevitable imbrications of perpetrator and victim
> histories’ (p12).   She later claims ‘…although as noted in chapter 2,
> Poland and other Eastern countries were considered not to be foreign lands
> but to belong to greater Germany. The imbrication of film camera, soldier
> and the opportunity for mobility expanded the already growing notion of the
> leisure industry and its contribution to definitions of modernity.’(p183)
>
> Just to be clear, ‘ Greater Germany’   (*Grossdeutsches Reich,*) * *was* *a
> term not officially  used until 1942 at the earliest.  It never included
> Poland which was ruled by a ‘General Government’ (*Generalgouvernement*),
> nor other ‘eastern countries’ like the  protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
> (*protektorat Böhmen und Mahren*), nor Slovakia, Hungary, Romania or
> Bulgaria. This was because of the biological imperialism practised by the
> Nazis.  The* **Grossdeutsches Reich* included Austria, the Sudetenland,
> Memelland, Danzig, the Warthegau, enlarged East and West Prussia (*
> Ostpreussen* and *Westpreussen)*, and Upper Silesia (*Oberschlesien*).
> These were all deemed to be suitably Aryan, and could therefore form part
> of the  *Grossdeutsches Reich.* Slavs, e.g. Poles, Bohemians, Bulgarians,
> Romanians, Moravians, or Russians on the other hand were  foreign and
> inferior, if not subhuman.
>
>  Many of Ms Guerin’s  further remarks sound as if they too, were written
> by Alan Sokal himself:****
>
> ‘Indeed, if the amateur films and photographs are allowed to see for
> themselves, if they are placed in the foreground of the recycled narrative
> as an interpretation as opposed to overwhelmed by other elements of
> narration, we are able to mobilize them for future discourses on memory, on
> witnessing, on modernity.’ (p18)****
>
> Or****
>
> ‘From the outset, these images remain unable to be pinned down, an evasion
> that I refer to as a form of anonymity. To reiterate, the precise form of
> the maker’s absence from the image hermeneutic, and therefore its role in
> processes of witnessing varies from one set of images to the next.’ (p28)*
> ***
>
> Or****
>
> ‘Similarly I argue that if we suspend the imperative to see through the
> lens of the identity of the photographer and approach the images through
> the optic of the amateur, we have the option to put them into other
> contexts, for example, conceptions of the relationship between industrial
> modernity and representation.’(p39)****
>
> Or****
>
> ‘However, before discussing this issue further I want to focus briefly on
> W.G. Sebald’s vivification of  [Walter] Genewein's images for the  reader’s
> imagination in *The Emigrants*. The placement of the images and the
> ekphrastic form they take are powerful.’ (p148)****
>
> Or****
>
> ‘My impulse to look more closely at the color film is again fueled (sic)
> by the often invisible traces of  the Nazi ideological agenda in the
> images…’(p165)****
>
> Or****
>
> ‘Thus, typical of amateur images, these color film fragments can be seen
> from a variety of perspectives, for the multiple ways they make meaning
> and, as always, the inconsistencies between these interpretations is the
> source of their power and agency. ‘(p165)****
>
> Or****
>
> ‘My discursive or interpretive shift between the specific images of a
> single woman as subject and their representation of their social world more
> generally is made thanks once again to the fluidity of the amateur image
> and its commonly accepted status as the product of bourgeois familial
> relations.’ (p219)****
>
> So is Ms Guerin’s work just another example of Visual  Studies being its
> own worst enemy?  Not quite.  When she emerges from her Sokal mode, she
> does have useful things to say about how amateur photography and film
> making was encouraged by the National Socialists:  In 1938 Agfa developed
>  a new  super-8 film camera, while Germans owned 7 million  still cameras
> in 1939 and when the war broke out, the Nazi party promoted photo albums in
> which families were encouraged to  keep pictures of loved ones serving in
> the armed forces.  According to Ms Guerin some 100,000 troops had cameras,
> and it was thanks to them that  a priceless visual record of German
> behaviour during the second world war exists.
>
> She is interested in three  principal subjects: the eastern front; still
> photographs  in colour, especially those taken  in the Lodz ghetto; films
> and photographs made elsewhere in Europe; and Eva Braun.
>
> So far as the eastern front is concerned,  Ms Guerin was much taken with
> an exhibit shown in Germany by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research,
> *Verbrechen  der Wehrmacht* (Crimes of the Wehrmacht) about the
> participation of the German Army in atrocities on the eastern front.  This
> showed indisputably that the  German Army and not simply the Waffen  SS
> killing squads  (*Einsatzgruppen*) was involved, and it didn’t please
>  many  visitors one little bit. She explained  it was ‘the perfect arena in
> which to ignite a creative process of memory’ (p 90) This chapter does not,
> by the way,  ‘examine photographs taken by soldiers, officers, accomplices
> and bystanders on the eastern front in the late 1930s and early 1940s’
> (pxix) since the Germans did not have an eastern front in the ‘late
> 1930s’.  The eastern front  began on June 22,1941, when Germany and its
> allies invaded the Soviet Union.
>
> She makes no mention of an extraordinary film  taken on the eastern front
> by  Kurt Finke, a Wehrmacht soldier inside the Stalingrad pocket (*Kessel*
> )* *in December 1942.   (Indeed there is no mention of the battle for
> Stalingrad at all) which was used in the*World at War*. The series was
> first broadcast in 1973—so much for the suggestion that amateur film  was
> persistently neglected until the enlightened 1980s and 90s.  As Ms Guerin
>  boldly begins: ‘Until the past ten years, the films and photographs I
> discuss in these pages have been more or less ignored—forgotten  or
> rendered inconsequential or invalid—in the ongoing urge to write the
> history of World War II and the Holocaust.’ (p1)
>
> Walter Genewein, who was the Nazi’s chief accountant,  photographed Jewish
>  life in the Lodz ghetto.  Ms Guerin’s account of Agfa’s—a subsidiary if
> I.G. Farben—development of colour photography is brisk but useful, as is
> her discussion of  colour film in her next chapter.  Nazis encouraged  the
> use of both colour film and photography as a way of bringing the nation
> together, or uniting the *Volksgemeinschaft*, a term for which Ms Guerin
> has little use (she mentions it  only once when she  quotes remarks by Jörg
> Ecthernkamp), though she is careful to include translations  from the
> German in  many of the captions to her photographs.   Ms Guerin’s
> discussion adds little to what is already known about Herr Genewein’s
> collection, unless her  account of how she came across them—when she saw a
> film ‘on a rainy night in New York city’—counts as something new.  It’s
> when she says that  ‘the color of the photographs is, of course, striking.
> It is outstanding for its very existence at a time when color photography
> was in its infancy’ (p93) that starts alarm bells jangling.   Colour
> photography was not in its infancy in the 1940s.  Three strip Technicolor
> was developed in 1932. Kinemacolor had been around since 1906, Chronochrome
> since 1913, and even UFAcolor, a German process,  was developed in 1930. Ms
> Guerin  does belatedly notice Kinemacolor  (p 171)  and observes that
>   ‘technical innovations  in Agfacolor had begun prior to World War
> I…’(p166)
>
> When Ms Guerin comes to talk about *Europe at War in Color and Motion*,
> she  seems equally adrift.    I have not had the privilege  of seeing the
>  2001 (or 1998)  BBC production of  *The Third Reich in Colour*, and I
> probably never will since it was  made by *Der Spiegel’s  *film and
> television division (*Spiegel TV*), and* * transmitted by Channel 5 or by
> the History Channel—it’s not clear which. In any case the  English voice
> over was spoken, as she says,  by Robert Powell—featured in *The Italian
> Job*, and Franco Zeffireli’s *Jesus of Nazareth*—which  must have
> qualified him for the task even though we don’t seem to be told   who wrote
> the text he spoke.  The German version (*Das Dritte Reich—in Farbe*)  was
> transmitted in 1998,  directed and written   by Michel Kloff and produced
> by Michel Kloff, Bernd Jacobs and Elviera Lind.  Some scenes were
> colorized, (as were all of  Walter Genewein’s stills ) which is a process
> only professionals carry out. This  may or may not alter Ms Guerin’s views
> about the distinction she draws  between amateur and professional.
>
> ‘Up until the past fifteen years—that is until the television
> documentaries appeared and photographs such as Genewein’s came to public
> attention—the memory of  World War II, particularly in the  Anglo-American
> context, has been shaped through black-and-white images’ (p168) says Ms
> Guerin.  This ignores the 39 year old *World at War*, with its copious
> use of Eva Braun’s colour, amateur, film; colour images of the air raids on
> Hamburg beginning on July 24 1943 taken by  Hans Brunswig, a Captain in the
> Fire Brigade (*Feuerwehrhauptmann*); colour film of the German occupation
> of Kharkov; of the war in the pacific shot by  Combat Cameramen of   the
> United States Marine Corps; and colour film shot in Germany and
> Czechoslovakia by cameramen of the United States Army Air Force.  It also
>   neglects entirely interviews (among them those of  Holocaust survivors)
>  filmed in colour, though admittedly by professionals.
>
> Ms Guerin claims that with respect to *operation Gomorrah*, the Hamburg
> air raids: ‘The images are not about the city itself. The buildings could
> be in Russia, Poland, or Germany, in wartime or in peace. Nothing in the
> images ties them to Hamburg in 1943’ (p172) I find this hard to believe, as
> anyone who takes the trouble to view them on YouTube can verify for him or
> herself. The   devastation of the many  buildings could only, in peacetime,
> be caused by a  monumental earthquake (or a catastrophic  flood?) and
> neither Poland nor  European Russia is in an earthquake zone, nor is there
> any evidence of flood damage.  The  well-clad civilians  in the parks are
> hardly representative of the shabbily dressed citizens of   those
> countries. Even the  tidy prams do not  show quite how poverty stricken
>  the inhabitants of Polish or the Soviet Union’s cities must have been. **
> **
>
> I am also profoundly skeptical of  her claim, following, as she says, the
> scholar Roger Odin, that ‘unlike for the professional film maker, who
> commonly works with hired equipment, for the amateur ”the camera..is a
> precious object, an object of love.”’(183-4)  It really does strain
>  credulity to the breaking point to  describe professionals, like Newsreel
> cameramen, or members of the British Army Film and Photo Unit, or the U.S.
> Signal Corps, or the German *Propagandakompanien* or the United States
> Army Air Force cameramen who, when the *Luftwaffe* was wiped out, got
> in jeeps and followed the American army to Prague, as working with ‘hired
> equipment’.    I’d certainly hate to be the klutz  who broke the spring on
> one of those USAAF hand-wound  Eymos and had to explain to the  cameraman
> that since he’d hired it, he should simply take it back to the shop and
> have it replaced.
>
> In discussing ‘Filming the Ordinary in Extraordinary Times’ Ms Guerin
> makes much of film shot at Dachau, but falls into a common error when she
> says ‘Thus we recognize the sites of incarceration and, by extension,
> eventual incineration that lay behind the seeming banality of everyday life
> in the camps.’(p205)   If by this she is  claiming that Dachau was an
> extermination camp, she’s  simply wrong.   Dachau  was a concentration
> camp, and Ms Guerin of all people, ought to recognize the distinction
> between a concentration camp and  an extermination camp. To spell it out,
> the sole  purpose of extermination camps was to kill people; the purpose of
> concentration camps was to incarcerate people whose enthusiasm for National
> Socialism was, shall I  say, defective.  Some survived Dachau.   Auschwitz
> was an extermination camp, a concentration camp and a slave labour camp.
> No one  designated for extermination  survived if  those in charge could
> help it.  ****
>
> Her chapter on Eva Braun is  to my mind, unnecessarily dismissive. Ms
> Guerin notes her ‘sudden changes in film speed, repetitions, out-of-focus
> shots, obstructions of a frame by an intruding head or hand, and the shaky,
> uncertain motions of a hand-held camera’ (p218)  but seems to forget   that
> she was an assistant to Heinrich Hoffman, who was Hitler’s favourite still
> photographer, and had clearly learnt quite a bit from her boss  (p226).
> Those who have seen the entirety of Eva Braun’s collection must have
> noticed her confident ability  to frame people and her steadiness as a
> platform for her camera. These  were, after all, home movies, and had she
> wished to seriously edit them and eliminate the out of focus material and
> inadvertent human obstructions, there is no reason to suppose she would
> have made a hash of the task, despite what Ms Guerin, relying on Traudl
> Junge’s assurance that ‘Braun edited the films herself always with a
> specific audience in mind’  (p228)  may say.  Traudl Junge was not herself
> a film maker, amateur or otherwise, and she may have believed ‘editing’
> might simply have meant ‘stringing reels together’—which is what the
> Americans did when they found the Home Movies  at the Berghof.  That is,
> incidentally, why  those who view them at NARA in  College Park, Maryland
> find them in such a disordered state.
>
> Ms Guerin’s reproach that ‘the war that was ravaging Europe, the nearly
> complete annihilation of the Jews in the Holocaust that was going on not so
> far away, and the violent, maniacal  acts being planned behind closed doors
> are nowhere to be seen in Braun’s images.’ (p219)  is, frankly, daft.  Does
> Ms Guerin seriously think  the  history of the Second World War would have
> been better served if Eva Braun had enlisted in a *Propagandakompanie*?
> Or, like Franz Bastanier  had filmed the advance on Stalingrad in colour?
> Or been seconded to Hitler’s favourite cameraman, Walter Frenz, (not
>  Göring’s as Ms Guerin  says (p93) and  had been his assistant when he
> filmed  the  surrender of France in the railway carriage at Rethondes? As a
> member of a *Propagandakompanie*, Ms Braun would of course have been
> excluded from filming the ‘violent, maniacal acts being planned behind
> closed doors’, though she might have been permitted to film the
> perpetrators as they entered the rooms where the acts were being planned.*
> ***
>
> In her conclusion Ms Guerin when she talks about  Eva Braun’s films as
> presented on YouTube, reverts to the language of Alan Sokal:  ‘The use of
> Braun’s images in YouTube narratives is an impetus to recognize first, just
> how fluid is the memory work that re-envisions the past in the present and,
> second, the imperative to produce visual narratives that are historically
> and ideologically responsible.’  (p285)  In other words   getting things
> right is very, very, difficult…****
>
> But before that, we are  treated to a prodigious kick at a wide open door
> when Ms Guerin offers what to her may be a profound  insight: ‘Scholars
> such as Dagmar Barnouw, after Friedländer, have argued that the history of
> World War II is always going to be incomplete without the perspective of
> the Germans who contributed or committed to the crimes.’ (p221)    Behind
> this tormented prose  lies the  belief that  only  scholars  are likely to
> notice that histories of the Second World  War may not  be entirely
> trustworthy  if they don’t take account of the participation of the
> Germans, who started it all.  As my professional colleagues would  say;
> ‘You couldn’t make it up.’
>
> Jerome Kuehl****
>
> Jerome Kuehl was the  Associate Producer of the 26 part series *The* *World
> at War*
>