REMEMBERING TO FORGET

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................viiI Collective Memories, Images, and the Atrocity of War....................................................1II Before the Liberation Journalism, Photography, and the Early Coverage of Atrocity.....................16III Covering Atrocity in Word.............................................................................49IV Covering Atrocity in Image.............................................................................86V Forgetting to Remember Photography as Ground of Early Atrocity Memories................................141VI Remembering to Remember Photography as Figure of Contemporary Atrocity Memories.......................171VII Remembering to Forget Contemporary Scrapbooks of Atrocity............................................202Notes......................................................................................................241Selected Bibliography......................................................................................279Index......................................................................................................283

Chapter One

In writings published posthumously after world War II, the cultural critic Walter Benjamin contended that images of public events merit attention because they offer a compressed moral guide for the future. "Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns," he said, "threatens to disappear irretrievably."

This book stems from Benjamin's observation. It begins with a number of questions about visual memory and examines that memory's role in representing one of the most disturbing phenomena of the twentieth century—war atrocity. Through U.S. and British media coverage of the liberation of the World War II Nazi concentration camps, the book considers how haunting visual memories of the Holocaust and war atrocity were produced by the photographic record of the camps' liberation. These memories linger, in scholar Saul Friedlander's words, as an "indelible reference point of the Western imagination."

Yet what kind of reference point did they provide? As we stand at century's end and look back, the visual memories of the Holocaust set in place fifty-odd years ago seem oddly unsatisfying. The mounds of corpses, gaping pits of bodies, and figures angled like matchsticks across the camera's field of vision have paralyzed many of us to the point of critical inattention. But they have provided only a thin veneer of knowledge about the camps and the atrocities that took place inside. How were those first images of the camps produced and presented? By whom and under which circumstances? How were they received and to what effect? And most importantly, when, why, how, and to what purposes were they co-opted into memory? In what ways have they persisted as vehicles of collective memory, both about the Holocaust and about the ravages of war?

Questions like these are worth answering because the images of the concentration camps—called the World War II "atrocity photos" by postwar critics—have become a lasting iconic representation of war atrocity and human evil. But the questions are difficult to answer because they underscore a broader lack in our scholarship on images and image making. We still do not know enough about how images help record public events, about whether and in which ways images function as better vehicles of proof than words, and about which vehicle—word or image—takes precedence in situations of conflict between what the words tell us and the pictures show us. Moreover, as the technologies for photographic manipulation have changed and public skepticism about photos has grown, the questions themselves have changed too.

We know even less about how images function as vehicles of collective memory. Beyond recognizing that they conveniently freeze scenes in our minds and serve as building blocks to remembering, we do not yet fully understand how images help us remember, particularly in circumstances we did not experience personally. In an age where the media have become ever-present agents of collective remembering, this is no small problem. And it threatens to loom larger as image-making technologies become more sophisticated and diverse over the coming century.

This book addresses the mechanics of visual memory and historical record at their broadest level. Admittedly, studying images and collective memory through the concentration camps' liberation generates its own problems, because it is doubtful whether any change in the record would have affected the atrocities themselves. But the moral questions raised here about an image's viability to prove and disprove the past go beyond the Holocaust, to other cases where images might kindle outrage. Today, atrocities in places like Bosnia and Rwanda readily provoke comparisons with the Holocaust, suggesting that the earlier atrocity photos do more than simply document the Nazis' systematic extermination of the Jews and other persecuted groups. The photos' broad resonance suggests that images have enigmatic boundaries which connect events in unpredictable ways. Like a familiar sequence of musical notes that seems to appear from nowhere, images creatively pop up in ways that challenge what we think we know about the past and how we think we know it. It is with this challenge that Remembering to Forget is concerned.

The Shape of Collective Remembering

When cultural critic Susan Sontag recalled seeing the atrocity photos as a young girl, she claimed that experience had divided her life into before and after periods. "When I looked at those photographs," she wrote, "something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying." This book explores how others, like Sontag, have used the World War II atrocity photos to link past and present. It takes its cue from work on collective memory, which sees memory as a fundamentally social activity, and follows the scholarship of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who argued that memory is accomplished not in one's own gray matter but via a shared consciousness that molds it to the agendas of those invoking it in the present. The book thereby views collective memory as a tool "not of retrieval but of reconfiguration [that] colonizes the past by obliging it to conform to present configurations."

How might work on collective memory shed light on visual memories of the Holocaust? When viewed as a collective activity, memory takes on characteristics that distinguish it from individual remembering. It opens up the terrain that is remembered and turns it into a multiple-sided jigsaw puzzle that links events, issues, or personalities differently for different groups. Unlike personal memory, whose authority fades with time, the authority of collective memories increases as time passes, taking on new complications, nuances, and interests. Collective memories allow for the fabrication, rearrangement, elaboration, and omission of details about the past, often...