Throughout Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history. Emphasizing the transformation of the visual arena and the ways in which ordinary people made sense of world events, these revealing case studies illustrate photography’s multilayered role as a new form of representation, a means to subjective experience, and a fresh mode of narrating the past.

Throughout Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history. Emphasizing the transformation of the visual arena and the ways in which ordinary people made sense of world events, these revealing case studies illustrate photography’s multilayered role as a new form of representation, a means to subjective experience, and a fresh mode of narrating the past.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Photography as an Ethics of Seeing
Jennifer Evans

Chapter 1. Thoughts on Photography and the Practice of History
Elizabeth Edwards

Chapter 2. Seeing the ‘Savage’ and the Suspension of Time: Photography, War and Concentration Camps in South West Africa, 1904-1908
Claudia Siebrecht

Chapter 3. The “Face of War” in Weimar Visual Culture
Annelie Ramsbrock

Chapter 4. Documenting Heimkehr: Photography, Displacement and “Homecoming” in the Nazi Resettlement of Ethnic Germans, 1939-1940
Elizabeth Harvey

Chapter 5. Visible Trophies of War: German Occupiers’ Photographic Perceptions of France, 1940-44
Julia Torrie

Chapter 6. Gazing at Ruins: German Defeat as Visual Experience
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann

Chapter 7. Edmund Kesting’s Polyphonic Portraits and the Abstract Face of the Socialist Self in East Germany
Sarah E. James

Chapter 8. Seeing Subjectivity: Erotic Photography and the Optics of Desire
Jennifer Evans

Chapter 9. Photographing Reurbanization in West Berlin, 1977-84
Anna Ross

Chapter 10. The Diversification of East Germany’s Visual Culture
Candice M. Hamelin

Chapter 11. The Intimacy of Revolution: 1989 in Pictures
Paul Betts

Epilogue: Hope Flies, Death Dances: Moving Toward an Ethics of Seeing
Julia Adeney Thomas

Index