Gazing at Ruins: German Defeat as Visual Experience

Abstract

Gazing at Ruins: German Defeat as Visual Experience

This essay explores documentary photography and, by way of comparison, diarywriting as the most common social practices for registering experiences of German defeat in 1945. Berlin witnessed one of the last gruesome battles of the war in Europe and the only one – with the exceptions of Stalingrad and Warsaw – where a major city became a battle-field. Soviet and German troops suffered more than 240.000 casualties in the space of only three weeks. More German civilians died during these last weeks of the war than during the entire bombing campaign against the city. The shattered capital of the Nazi empire was a war trophy for the Allies and subsequently became the social laboratory for the post-war international order. By moving beyond an exploration of visual propaganda, the main claim is that visual experiences in the wake of war constituted distinctive ways of making sense of defeat, destruction, and desolation. Finally, the paper will investigate how different modes of the photographic gaze at ruins shaped the «politics of pity» in the early cold-war years.