Bearing Witness.

Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. viii+292pp. $27.50 (cloth).

Zelizer's work on how the photographic record of Nazi atrocities has been lodged into collective memory -- and as such has accommodated to changing perceptions over the last fifty years -- is an important and needed addition to the expanding body of Holocaust scholarship and to our understanding of the power of the photographic image in the twentieth century. Zelizer's basic thesis can be summarized briefly: with the liberation of the Nazi camps, photojournalism and atrocity photographs moved to a prominent place within the journalistic profession in the United States and Great Britain. Because the public at home was unexpectedly and repeatedly exposed to images of unprecedented horror, Holocaust photographs entered into collective memory and thus became malleable to different cultural perceptions and political implications.

Before liberation of the camps, according to Zelizer, both the journalistic profession and the public was skeptical about the occasional reports of Nazi atrocities coming out of Europe. Recalling exaggerated atrocity stories used for propagandistic purposes during World War I, journalists and editors tended to dismiss or discredit reports about mass killings perpetrated by Nazi Germany. Even the early accounts of the Soviet liberation of death camps were given little credibility. This attitude changed abruptly with the liberation by the Western Allies. Now reporters found themselves unable to express in words what they witnessed, and the media increasingly relied on images, for they seemed to do a better task in convincing a disbelieving audience at home that Nazi Germany had indeed turned Europe into a slaughterhouse. "The word took backstage to the image for one of the few times in the history of the U.S. and British press," Zelizer writes, "[and] that relationship would shape the record of Nazi atrocity at the time as well as in memory." The "revival of the atrocity photos," she writes elsewhere, "coincided with... the further recognition of photojournalism." From now on, according to Zelizer, the photographic image of war atrocities became a staple of modern journalism.

The lack of a photographic record during the preliberation period made the sudden appearance of images in the spring of 1945 "much more unsettling." Due to the initial shock value, the wide dissemination, and the recycling of the most frequently depicted objects ("skulls and corpses, barbed wire fences separating survivors and victims from the outside world, camp courtyards,..., crematorium chimneys and furnaces, victimized mother and child, abandoned possessions," Holocaust photographs were seared into collective memory. This process was assisted by the fact that the media did not identify specific places, names, and backgrounds relating to particular photos displayed in news stories and picture-magazine spreads. Instead, images were given generic captions to bring home the larger story of Nazi cruelties.

Zelizer identifies different "memory waves" regarding the public's interest in Nazi atrocities, with emphasis on how Holocaust photographs have been received by the public. Until the end of the forties, the "first wave," high attention was given to the photographic presentation of atrocities, replaced by a second period characterized by partial amnesia, habituation, and the codification of narrative conventions and visual representations of the Holocaust. This second memory wave lasted until the late seventies, The 1980s and 1990s saw a renewal of remembrance activity and memory work when, during a third memory wave, "people began to attend not so much to events as to their representation in memory." These changes over time rendered Holocaust images increasingly iconic.

They no longer elicited shock and outrage from the viewer, but functioned as symbolic markers for moral indignation. Because of their iconic authority, Holocaust images became part of the public domain, recycled in the media, displayed in books, exhibitions, and museums, and integrated into artistic works (among the fifty-seven photos and documents reprinted in Remembering to Forget, the reader will find visual collages of Judy Chicago, Audrey Flack, and Robert Morris that illustrate Zelizer's point of the use of Holocaust photography in contemporary art).

If the intention of Remembering to Forget were simply to deplore the fact that people today no longer react to the Holocaust with the same unfiltered immediacy and urgency as in the 1940s, the book would be the product of a sentimentalist or moralist. But Zelizer, who is an associate professor at the Annenberg School of Communication in Philadelphia, is less concerned about keeping the history and memory of the Holocaust alive (the task of historians, educators, and museum curators) and more about the critical assessment of the usage and function of atrocity photographs in the public imagination. And here is where she sees a real danger: that the iconic authority of Holocaust images has contributed to "atrocity's normalization." Holocaust photographs, she claims, impede rather than help the process of sensitizing today's public to the effects of genocidal violence, because visual evidence of current war atrocities are being modeled after and measured by them.

With each new war, there is a "predictable arrival of iconic imags," she writes in her last chapter. "As soon as we see the agonized collectives of survivors and victims,...we recognize the atrocity aesthetic. And the media help us respond to that aesthetic by showing us where to position new horrors rather than understand them." The recycling of Holocaust photographs over the last decades -- for documentary, educational, legal, artistic, scholarly, evocative, and identity-forming purposes -- resulted in habituating viewers to the presentation of horrors, veiling rather than revealing the specifics of the atrocity displayed. When looking at images today (for example from Rwanda or Bosnia), we see less rather than more. We recognize the aesthetic but are no longer shocked into taking responsible actions.

Zelizer's analysis is not altogether new, and throughout her book she acknowledges her debt to other critics and scholars who have pointed in a similar direction, among others Tony Kushner's critique of a simplified codification of the Holocaust by the liberal imagination; Andreas Huyssen's argument that obsession with the past paradoxically leads to forgetting it; film scholar Anton Kaes's suggestion that the photographic record has "stop[ped] energizing and become instead energized by memory itself"; and Cynthia Ozick's and this reviewer's concern that remembrance of the Holocaust can lead to abstractions at the detriment of specificity and complexity. What is new in Remembering to Forget, however, is the author's detailed account of how the photographic record has entered into the public imagination through a changing journalistic practice prompted by the liberation of the camps by Allied forces. And she is also of great assistance in making the reader aware of how to decipher arrangement, composition, an d content of selected photos.

Formally, Remembering to Forget is divided into seven chapters. Following a short introductory chapter on the book's general theme, Zelizer pieces together the background to and story of the preliberation editorial negotiations (between individual reporters and journalistic conventions) on how to incorporate and balance the written word over against the emerging visual evidence of mass killings. The next two chapters take a detailed look at the anguish of British and U.S. journalists and photographers over reporting the hitherto unimaginable, both in words (chapter 3) and in images (chapter 4). Here Zelizer introduces the concept of "bearing witness" as a new journalistic style -- a style testifying to the emotional impact which the reporters felt when entering the camps, thereby removing them from their traditional role of neutral observers. Chapter 5, "Forgetting to Remember," addresses the habituation process during the second memory wave (1950s to late 1970s), and chapter 6, "Remembering to Remember," ex amines the increasing obsessiveness with the past during the third memory wave, from the 1980s onwards. In the concluding chapter, "Remembering to Forget" (to be read as "remembering so as to forget"), Zelizer attends to her thesis that Holocaust photos dilute the impact of contemporary atrocities. But she shies away -- without offering any reasons -- from calling this new phenomenon a "fourth memory wave," a terminology a reader may have expected from the progression of her argumentation.

The validity of Zelizer's thesis about the effects of the iconic quality of Holocaust photographs is intriguing but also debatable. One can argue, for example, that the renewed interest in the Holocaust of the 1980s and 1990s has led to at least two different phenomena: on the one hand to an easily recognizable, generic iconography of atrocity that hides rather than reveals specificity (Zelizer's thesis); on the other hand, a serious attempt to contextualize Holocaust photographs by identifying geographic location, dates, identities of people depicted, and names of the photographers or camera units. The work done at the photo archives at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is but one example of this effort -- an immensely difficult undertaking precisely because photos have been carelessly used in the past.

To illustrate the recent attention to detail, one only needs to look at the postponement of the American opening of the Wehrmachtsausstellung in December of 1999 in New York. This exhibition about the widespread involvement of regular German army units in war crimes and genocide has already been shown in major German cities, often over the protest of conservative politicians and Neo-Nazi groups. The exhibition touched a raw nerve in the German public sentiment because the general consensus had been that only a small number of special units like the SS or Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) had perpetrated these crimes. In the fall of 1999, scholars discovered that captions of a few photographs in the Wehrmachtsausstellung wrongly implied that German soldiers depicted at a mass grave in East Galicia were responsible for that massacre, while, in truth, the photos showed those soldiers in front of exhumed bodies of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews shot earlier by the NKVD (the Soviet secret police). This revelatio n provoked protests by opponents to the exhibit, followed by public apologies of the exhibit organizers and the postponement of the U.S. opening -- even though scholars agreed that the exhibition was otherwise historically accurate.

This reviewer also wonders about Zelizer's assertion that the iconic status of Holocaust photographs leads to habituation and to political inaction. Certainly, Zelizer is correct in highlighting how easy, and hence dangerous, it is to influence public opinion through the publication of atrocity images modeled after Holocaust photographs: it suggests facile comparison at the expense of analyzing usually more complex situations. But it is also true that the publication of images modeled after the Holocaust can have the effect of cutting through the evasiveness of political language that has shied away from naming a genocide "a genocide" when it seemed politically inopportune, as in the case of Bosnia. When images of emaciated prisoners in Bosnian camps and of alleged sites of mass graves were published in U.S. media, more serious political and military interventions followed (see Mark Danner's series of articles on Bosnia published between November 1997 and March 1998 in the New York Review of Books).

A shortcoming of Remembering to Forget is the book's style. Sentences like "photographs of atrocities are like tombstones: they create a visual space for the dead that anchors the larger flow of discourse about the events that motivated their death" are awkward. Meaning and clarity is lost in these mixed metaphors. There is also repetitiveness in her work. For example, her arguments about bearing witness could have been condensed at various points (for instance, on pages 191-93, her repeated mentioning of atrocity photos as "acts of bearing witness," as upholding "the centrality of bearing witness," and as "tools of bearing witness" is simply redundant). Perhaps, an editor should have insisted on cutting down the excessive number of subheadings in bold print and italics, which often confuse rather than facilitate the reading. Between pages 176 and 191 alone, for example, we find the following six successive subheadings:

Reviving Atrocity Photos: The Centrality of Visual Memory Enhancing Atrocity Memory

Using Atrocity Photos to Enhance Memory: Event-Driven Memory

Using Atrocity Photos to Stabilize Memory: Rupture-Driven Memory

Reviving Atrocity Photos and Additional Memory Agents

Professional Forums and Atrocity Photos

In all this wordiness, it is often difficult to discern whether Zelizer makes substantially new points or repeats herself in different words.

Still, Remembering to Forget is a book worth reading for anyone interested in the proliferation and power of one of the legacies of the twentieth century: the atrocity photograph.

Bjorn Krondorfer is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St. Mary's College of Maryland.