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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:

[email protected]

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

# 2012 Taylor & Francis

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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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Rubble Photography and Politics of Memory in Divided Germany

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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.


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.


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


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



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



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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Documents

Hoelscher dresden a camera accuses