Hitler’s People

When I grew up, the story I was told about the country I had been born into was that the Nazis had ruled it until 1945, causing terrible destruction and murder on the largest possible scales — and then they were gone. They had not merely stopped being in power: they were literally gone. At least that was the story. Nobody had had any involvement with the Nazis. In fact nobody had known anything.

For example, the next-door neighbour who would spend all day looking out of the window, glaring at everyone and everything in his view, and who, or so I was told, had a metal plate in his head was just to be left alone. That neighbour might have been the closest I have ever come to meeting an actual former Nazi.

But then who knows whether he had been one. He might have simply done his duty like many Germans. That explanation was offered when someone found himself in the position that he was unable to explain away his presence in the Nazis’ murderous machinery (such as the Chancellor who had been an artillery officer and who had just done that: his duty). And who knows how many former Nazis I met without realizing in whose presence I was.

Already when I was very young, I found all of this very fishy, especially given how the lack of knowledge or responsibility was applied in a very selective fashion. The same very competent people who clearly knew how to go about their lives and jobs turned into the complete opposite any time the Nazi era was brought up.

It wasn’t even so much that I was curious about the Nazis per se. I was not and still am not particularly interested in the lives of strangers. And yet, there have always been those nagging questions for me: why had they done what they had done? How was this even possible? The crimes committed by Nazi Germany were so monstrous that it was inconceivable to me how anyone would be willing to take part in them, however small or large their role might have been.

Over the course of the past thirty years, historical research produced many findings that confirmed that my suspicions had in fact been correct: Many people had known, and many people had played their parts. Most of them had managed to evade being held responsible for what they had done or what they had contributed to.

With Hitler’s People, historian Richard J. Evans dives yet again into the Nazi era, this time to look into its most well known and a number of lesser known characters. “Only by examining individual personalities and their stories,” he writes, ” can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime, and, by doing so, perhaps learn some lessons for the troubled era in which we live.” (p. xii)

Evans starts from the very top, Hitler himself, and makes his way down to smaller and smaller characters, even as their depravity and crimes do not in fact get much smaller. For example on page 375, we encounter Karl Brandt, the physician responsible for Aktion T-4, the organized murder of people deemed to have lives not worth living. In the end, up to 200,00 people suffering from various types of mental illness or with conditions such as cerebral palsy had been killed.

Brandt was an easy person to understand and detest: in Evans’ description, he struck me as a sociopath (Evans would probably disagree with this assessment. And yet, he wrote “What was striking about Brandt’s behaviour when observing the murders was his absolute lack of compassion.” — p. 380). If Nazi Germany’s leadership and perpetrators had been composed of sociopaths, that at least would offer some explanation (however disturbing it would be).

But in Hitler’s People, Brandt is an exception. What’s striking is how many of the people described by Evans came from rather prosaic middle-class (or lower middle-class) backgrounds. There are themes emerging here and there, such as shock over Germany’s loss in World War I, which appeared to have pushed many in the direction of radical right-wing politics.

Maybe the most insightful comment by Evans comes towards the back, in which he discusses Brandt and others. “The Nazi regime itself,” he writes, “beginning at the very top, created a moral milieu in which hyper-masculine ideas of toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism — all positive terms in the language of the Third Reich — encouraged the maltreatment and dehumanization of people excluded from the national community and treated as helpless and weak” (p. 398).

This is a stunning realization, especially given how Germany has prided itself for hundreds of years as the land of the poets and thinkers. Whatever you want to make of the particular circumstances of how World War 1 and the Weimar Republic conspired to create the circumstances that would result in Nazi Germany, it still is quite the jump from poets and thinkers turning into people addicted to “toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism” — unless, of course, “toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism” had been brewing underneath the surface all along.

Which obviously they had — and still are (and not just in Germany).

Having read Evans’ masterful Hitler’s People, I don’t think that I need to dive into another book to look for more answers. This book provided me with a lot of information and insight, and yet my questions mostly remained. None of it is the historian’s fault: what it comes down to is that I was and still am looking for clarity where none can be had.

I’m now convinced that I could reads hundreds of additional books about Nazi Germany, and I would still not be able to grasp how or why people contributed to it.

What I’m left with, instead, is a renewed sense of responsibility for, to re-quote Evans, “the troubled era in which we live”.

Summing up the individuals he portrayed, Evans writes that “apart from flying in the face of the evidence, thinking of them as depraved, deviant or degenerate puts them outside the bounds of normal humanity and so serves as a form of exculpation for the rest of us, past, present and future.” (p. 461, my emphasis)

Hannah Ahrendt had expressed this idea in a different form decades ago, which created a huge backlash. It would seem that we want to see monsters where they are none. Or rather: given the right circumstances, we can become monsters.

Maybe the most stunning chapter in the book is the very last one, the epilogue, in which Evans remembers meeting an anonymous elderly woman on a train ride to the Netherlands. As it turned out, she had left Nazi Germany early on because she wanted to have no part in what was unfolding in front of her. She went to Denmark, married someone there, and started her life away from the country she had been born into.

Of all the people portrayed in the book, that anonymous woman is the only one who had understood and accepted the moral choices presented to her. Everybody else had either just gone along or actively contributed — and then laying all the blame on Hitler once everything had come crashing down.

Highly recommended.

Richard J. Evans: Hitler’s People — The Faces of the Third Reich; 624 pages; Penguin Press; 2024

The Lines We Draw

For better or worse, communities play a very important part of human life. Communities range from the most basic unit, the family, up to larger and larger numbers of people. Some communities are chosen — such as when someone decides to join a chess club, say; while others are mostly not.

For example, if, like me, you’re born in the relatively small town of Wilhelmshaven, Germany, then you are a Norddeutscher, someone who not only originates from northern Germany but who, at least that’s the idea, displays certain characteristics that people from there either claim to have or are said to have.

Therein lies the rub: often, community is a lot less well defined than those within it would like to imagine. Families have their black sheep, chess clubs tend to erupt in rather pointless infighting over the proper rules of engagement as a club, some North Germans are stoic and don’t talk very much while others will chew your ear of.

Community, in other words, tends to come with bad blood, and bad blood has the potential to create open conflicts, even (or maybe especially) when the underlying reasons have long been forgotten or were so minor that in retrospect the whole conflict seems positively ridiculous.

But we stick to communities because they’re not only the sources of conflict. They’re also the sources of deep meaning, regardless of whether that meaning is derived from abstract principles or from something very real.

The largest communities we know are conglomerates of states such as the European Union or the United Nations. Just below these conglomerates sit the smaller ones, states or countries, that often are less poorly defined than you might imagine. Or rather, they can be defined in any which way — whether originally from the outside or inside.

And therein lies the trouble, because not all peoples have their own sovereign entities — even if they want to. But also not all sovereign entities contain all the people that they think they should contain. Or, and this is where things can get particularly iffy, some people think they should have their sovereign entities while the rest of the country they belong to will deny their request.

With their book The Lines We Draw, Lavinia Parlamenti and Manfredi Pantanella decided to focus on five different regions of the world that are not widely accepted as their own sovereign entities but that for some reason or another either exist as one or strive to do so. They are the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (Transnistria), the Republic of Catalonia, the Republic of Artsakh, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR).

The duo traveled to these five locations to photograph there and to collect material for their book that is intended to look into what this might entail: being a sovereign entity. In principle, photography is not particularly well suited for such endeavours, but clearly the inclusion of a vast range of materials in the book is intended to help guide a viewer/reader towards some more clarity.

The subject matter with its various complexities (some of them being more real than others) presents a challenge for anyone trying to approach it in a photobook. I think the gold standard for such work is still set by the books produced by Rob Hornstra and Arnold van der Bruggen (The Socci Project) who managed to distill the many details they encountered in the Caucasus into a series of very clear and engaging books.

With their work, Parlamenti and Pantanella could have created a book with five separate chapters, each of which with a focus on one region. That probably would have been moderately interesting, but it would not have been able to get at the larger idea.

Instead, the duo opted for a book in which photographs and material from their various travels intermix. Visually, that was a very good idea. It is clear from the photographs that they were taken in different locales. Their juxtaposition opens up very intriguing relationships between seemingly disjointed parts.

This is where (or how) photography can be incredibly enlightening not despite of its shortcomings but because of it: you can make people see things that are difficult to describe.

Alas, the book utilizes an impossibly complex concept that creates a lot of confusion because it insists on the viewer being presented with a myriad of information at all times. In addition, images or text pieces are cut in half in numerous places, continuing elsewhere. At times, I even felt micromanaged, given how insistent the authors were that I would get exactly that one point they felt they needed to push.

It’s the kind of concept that violates the most important tenet of photobook making: keep it simple. Especially with complex topics, you don’t want to make a complex book because one (the complex book) does not help the other (the complex topic). And you want to leave some space for your audience’s imagination.

I tried looking at the various details in the book a number of times, only to get confused and bogged down in details that I did not think I needed to know. Ultimately, I realized that if I only looked at the photographs and ignored the rest, the book created a lot of interest in me.

In part, this is because the photography is mostly very, very good. More often than not the combination of the various photographs evokes a state of hallucination: what is real and what is not? Because, after all, is it not hallucination that sits at the core of so much of what is taken as the basis for a country?

Of course, that’s not how we tend to approach things in the real world (from which, it is important to note, these photographs were taken). Hallucinations aren’t real. But are the divisions in a chess club over some rules real? Are the differences between two people who happen to live on different parts of what might be an arbitrarily drawn line on a map real?

With so many conflicts and wars still erupting over those lines on the map (whether drawn previously or to be added later) — can’t we approach all of this as a huge hallucination and focus on what really matters? On being human beings living next to and with other human beings?

The Lines We Draw; photographs and text by Lavinia Parlamenti and Manfredi Pantanella; text by Hugo Meijer and Maja Spanu; 272 pages; self published; 2024

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Romanzo Meticcio

Davide Degano‘s Romanzo Meticcio begins with reproductions from a 1938 pamphlet or magazine. I don’t speak Italian, but many of the words are familiar enough even in their somewhat different spellings. Razza bears similarity to Rasse from German (race in English). Il principio della razza seems clear enough (the year is 1938 when Italy was under fascist rule), and I bastardi certainly is, especially given the range of photographs used to illustrate the idea.

And it keeps going this way for two more pages; I can’t help but move a little faster through these pages. It’s not that I can’t believe that almost 90 years ago this type of material was so widely believed and assimilated; it’s the fact that the Vice President of the country I live in essentially repeats it on a regular basis on TV.

Italy’s curse is that it occupies the territories from which the Roman Empire sprang many hundreds of years ago. It’s difficult to go anywhere there without stumbling upon some of its ruins.

I don’t know how many generations have passed since it crumbled into dust; but it’s probably exactly those many generations that allow for the idealization that we can now observe not just in Italy (some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley are very fond of that Empire even as it is obvious that they know very little about it).

Mussolini, the original fascist, built the foundation of his rule on his country’s distant and presumed glorious past. Never mind that the Romans were actually very liberal with their ideas of citizenship. A number of Roman emperors actually weren’t Italian. Trajan and Hadrian hailed from what is now Spain. Septimius Severus was born in Northern Africa and appeared to have had roots there. Marcus Julius Philippus is commonly known as Philip the Arab.

As one of the texts in the back of Romanzo Meticcio explains, Trajan, Hadrian, Septimus Severus, and Marcus Julius Philippus would have to apply for Italian citizenship if they lived today: “To this day,” Davide Valeri explains, “Italian citizenship is considered a right for those with the same blood, while it is a prize or a gift for all the others. Non-descendants of Italians have to earn it by proving how deserving they are to be accepted by Italian society.” (emphases in the original)

Up until fairly recently, the situation was exactly the same in the country I was born in, Germany. Many thousands of young people, born to so-called guest workers from Turkey and elsewhere, did not have German passports even though they had never lived in a another country. Based on what the texts in the book tell me, this is still the situation in Italy, meaning that many of the people in the photographs are finding themselves in this situation.

Race and citizenship ultimately are merely constructs to divide people, regardless of whether that division is ideological or bureaucratic (let’s not argue over whether you can have one without the other).

The inclusion of the historical text right at the beginning of Romanzo Meticcio is heavy handed. It’s likely that a viewer would have figured out what’s going on by looking at the photographs first, to then be told some of the background. Alas, we don’t live in times that ask for a more, let’s say, polite treatment of the matter.

Furthermore, the texts charges the photographs before the viewer has seen them. And it is exactly that fact that lends them such potency, in particular the many portraits of people, most of them young, who one suspects belong to the group that would have to prove that they’re “deserving […] to be accepted by Italian society”.

Romanzo Meticcio unfolds through a combination of photographs of Italy’s lived environment and portraits. We could have a discussion over whether all of the photographs of people are in fact portraits. But that would take us into the neutered photoland territory where ultimately nothing matters other than photographic dogma. So let’s not do that. If we define a photographic portrait as a picture that conveys something about a person’s spirit, we’re good.

Because that’s what this ultimately is all about — the book as much as the struggle we’re now witnessing in our collective sphere: is one person’s spirit of equal value as another person’s, regardless of how different the two people might be?

As far as I can tell, typically discussions start out from abstract concepts and then try to move to the people affected by them. However, it’s very much worthwhile to do it the other way around: to start from basic principles. Doing it this way places the burden of proof on the Italian government to justify why some people have to earn their right of citizenship even though they’re born in the exact same country as the others who don’t.

Romanzo Meticcio clearly is a book of and for our times. Unlike many other contemporary photobooks, in which their makers try very hard to avoid making an open statement, here it’s very clear. And it works not only because of Degano’s clear convictions but also because of the quality of the photographs.

The photographs are seductive and delicate, even when there is someone in a portrait who channels his inner Mussolini. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any illusions about people who vote for fascists. But I also know what denying another person’s humanity can lead to. Still, at any given moment, the focus cannot be on trying to understand fascist voters while so many other people are literally fearing for their lives.

Romanzo Meticcio was published with a relatively modest edition size — 300 copies, meaning (possibly) that you might have to act fast to get yours (assuming you want one). The book is a marvelous achievement by Davide Degano, a new addition to the Italian photography scene.

Recommended.

Romanzo Meticcio; photographs by Davide Degano; texts by Davide Degano, David Forgacs, Igiaba Scego, Davide Valeri; 160 pages; Artphilein; 2024

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Scenes of Absence

One of the challenges with words is that they will shade how you view photographs. While you can in fact use words with photographs, making them an integral part of the work, I think for the most parts words are being added to photographs after the fact, to serve as a statement to go alongside them or maybe as a slightly longer text to provide some context.

Depending on whether you see your photographs as the work or not — or maybe whether you want your audience to focus only on the photographs — a problem arises: the words might draw a lot of attention to themselves or to the story that they convey, a story that maybe would not reveal itself in quite this fashion in the pictures. Words, after all, function differently that pictures: they’re specific in ways that pictures are not.

On the other hand, it’s not clear whether an insistence on the primacy of photographs really helps to work with the full breadth of possibilities the medium has to offer. In part, that insistence on the primacy of photographs derives from the medium’s practitioners’ earliest attempts to establish their craft as, well, a form of art. Conventions were copied and adopted from other media (mostly painting) that undercut photography and vast parts of its potential.

In the end, if text has not been made an integral part of the work a photographic body of work still has to convey its intended purpose in a clear and self-contained fashion. However, even though many pieces of text added on later have as much utility as, say, a blurb a publisher might produce to sell a novel, there are cases where the text might add an essential part of the experience.

This certainly is the case for Touyama Yuhki‘s Scenes of Absence (頭山ゆう紀 — 残された風景; please note that I’m following the Japanese convention used on the book’s cover: family name followed by given name). If you were to ignore the text at the end, you would not only miss insight into how the work was made and what it alludes to. You would also miss one of the most heart-breaking pieces of text written by a photographer I’ve read in a while.

The text begins with the photographer’s grandmother announcing a cancer diagnosis that at age 92. Given her age and possibly also given the restrictions posed by the then ongoing Covid pandemic, the decision is being made not to pursue treatment. Instead, Touyama moves in with her grandmother and takes on the role as a home carer (at least initially supported through regular visits by a nurse and doctor).

Contrary to the initial assessment (“she has only three months at best”), the grandmother beats medical odds and survives for over a year. While taking care of her grandmother’s needs, Touyama takes photographs when she finds the time: the outside world seen from the inside or scenes encountered while being out on errands. As I suppose anyone can imagine, the long-term role of a caregiver is taking an increasing toll on her, though.

“My time as a caregiver had not gone well,” Touyama writes. The final three paragraphs of her text are absolutely heartbreaking. In it, the photographer voices her frustrations with relatives who abandoned her with the task at hand (“my father’s inability to take care of my grandmother because ‘men just can’t do that'”) and with herself (“I should have shown her more kindness”).

Once the grandmother has passed away, Touyama Yuhki is left to live with, in her own words, “endless regret and questions. Although I read lots of articles and books on caregiving, in actual practice I couldn’t keep up with what I learned.” The photographs are almost entirely devoid of her inner turmoil; and it is precisely this fact that makes the combination of the text and the photographs so poignant.

After reading the text, I found myself looking through the book time and again, trying to pinpoint some of what I had read in a photograph. Was there a way to see a sign of frustration, of trying to make her grandmother’s time more bearable? In the end, I am convinced that what I saw I only saw because I either wanted to see it or because I imagined that were I in this particular position I would maybe take such a photograph.

But that’s merely what words will do: they will affect us to see photographs in a specific fashion. It’s important not to lose sight of what matters, though: the first and foremost task at hand is to acknowledge the photographer’s hurt. Then, and only then, can one move on to imagining being in her place.

Scenes of Absence might appear to be a specific book about a specific situation (a Japanese woman taking care of her dying grandmother), but it’s really not. Caregiving is a task performed all over the world. All over the world it is gendered, whether it’s taking care of young children or of dying relatives. That father who decreed that “men just can’t do that” could be almost any man, even if the verbiage, of course, might vary. More often than not it falls on women to do the caring.

Seen that way, the absence in the title of the book also points at a larger absence in our societies: An almost complete absence of meaningful conversations around the duty of taking care of someone.

“It’s fine,” Ishiuchi Miyako, the grand dame of Japanese photography, says in a long conversation with Touyama Yuhki (I’m quoting from the machine translation; there is a short video with English subtitles that you want to watch), “as long as you keep taking pictures and don’t give up,” referring to photography’s ability to give solace to those who are in need of it. While Ishiuchi’s words specifically refer to a photographers, I think they extend outwards to viewers as well.

Things will be fine, we might conclude about any of the topics portrayed through photographs, as long as you keep looking at picture and don’t give up on looking the world, understanding what it ails, and on then making it a better place.

Recommended.

Scenes of Absence; photographs and text by Touyama Yuhki; 176 pages; Akaaka Art Publishing; 2024

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District

“The photos took place in Kyiv before the full-scale invasion.” The weight of these words, a few pages after the final photograph in Vladyslav Andrievsky‘s District, are hard to assess for anyone not living in Ukraine, anyone not experiencing the daily threat of being torn to pieces by russian missiles, drones, or bombs.

To what extent my knowledge of the war influences my read of the book I can’t tell. Am I reading too much into these photographs taken from 2017 until 2022 when I claim that there is a pervasive feel of dread, of something not entirely benevolent that might happen at any moment?

Perhaps.

And yet, I maintain that what I see is real. I could pinpoint it in the photographs and their interplay, which, given the way visual books work, would be a lot easier to demonstrate by showing it in person than by writing about it.

Alas…

It feels flippant to compare attempting to find one’s footing as a young person with living in a country at war, even as youthful drama often yields the kinds of exaggerated situations that life under bombs will bring naturally.

But bombs might bring death while the drama of youth only brings disappointment — and maybe some hurt.

At its core, District centers on growing up among the large multi-story apartment buildings that are so pervasive in those regions of Europe that previously were under Soviet rule/occupation. Mass produced and cheaply built after World War 2, they served an immediate need for housing, and at least initially, they brought forms of comfort to places that had not had them before.

With time, however, their increasing dilapidation not only served as a metaphor for the system that had created them, it also brought daily misery to those forced to live inside them.

And their anonymity stood in the way of what young people strive for the most: a sense of belonging to a unique community, a sense of feeling seen (while not being seen too much).

District is filled with depictions of those buildings and their surfaces. It’s difficult not to imagine being among them on a cold day, with the wind howling and diversions being absent.

Seen that way, the book’s story (if we want to use that word) is one that is experienced all over the world and that could have been told anywhere.

I’m writing this not to diminish Andrievsky’s book in any way. Instead, and this is important to note a few days after the current US president and his lackeys betrayed Ukraine, we need to see the people living there in the same way we see our neighbours across the street: as human beings who are just as deserving of safety, protection, and our care as we are.

Their stories, in other words, are our stories as well, even if the details might differ. That young people growing up in banlieue (to use the French term that seems most well suited to describe what I’m after) all face the same struggle is worthwhile mentioning; of course, it’s only the ones in Ukraine (or Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere) who also live under the threat of death arriving anonymously from the skies.

District breaks with the conventions of telling such a story through its inclusion of a very smart detail. The bulk of the photographs are in black and white. But there is a small number of colour pictures: a view of the sky, with the sun coming out behind an impossibly dark cloud. The pictures appear to have been taken moments apart, and there is more and more sun.

More and more sun. It’s not clear whether the hooded figure who in the first photograph gazes towards apartment towers in the distance will notice it. But in the final picture in the book, his head has turned, and there are traces of a face to be seen.

District shows a gifted photographer at work, one of a number of young Ukrainians who now are slowly becoming more well known outside of their home country.

It’s a brooding book for all the reasons I outlined above, but who am I to tell a young person not to brood? (Especially since I’m still spending so much time brooding myself.)

Recommended.

Слава Україні!

District; photographs by Vladyslav Andrievsky; essay by Olha Pavlenko; 100 pages; Syntax contact; 2024

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