Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe

8/13/2019 Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe

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Chapter 1

Introduction:

Aftermaths and the Afterlife of Images

In the aftermath of catastrophic events societies are faced with complex material

realities. Social, political, environmental, economical, and cultural consequences

follow suit how to reform society and political identity in the case of genocide, for

example; how to deal with the destruction of human life and material infrastructure;

how to handle the effects of environmental catastrophes that threaten both humanand non-human life; or, how to institutionalise the memory of these events. The

struggle with such material questions in the face of extreme events nds a parallel

in the struggle to achieve some sort of understanding of these events and their

aftermath. This struggle the attempts to come to terms with the events occurs

in the representation and signication of catastrophe. Images play a crucial role in

this process. Different images and aesthetic sensibilities are mobilised in the wake

of catastrophe, and coming to terms with the catastrophe is dialectically linked, in

public discourse, with these aesthetic fabrications and formations, which operate

at the level of epistemology rather than ontology. Because of this, images have

their own forms of afterlife or aftermath. They become iconic and emblematic

(the picture of the napalmed girl, for example). They prompt, repeat, resonate,

and interpenetrate each other (the raising of the ag at Iwo Jima and the remen

raising the ag on the rubble of the World Trade Centre). Or, as the journalist

Philip Gourevitch (2000) put it, they can revisit us, remembered or imagined

from various paintings or movies (301). The afterlife of certain images images

that implicate an epistemological, moral, or emotional move lies in their power

to inect and crystallise explanations of what the world is like.

Look Closer: The Gaze Upon Suffering

This book is concerned with the politics of seeing: the gaze at catastrophe and the

aesthetics of catastrophe. It addresses the political and cultural issues surrounding

the representation of catastrophic events, such as the politics of memory and

apologies for past crimes. In order to do so, it focuses on one particular set of

images used to represent catastrophe: Holocaust imagery that is used for events

and purposes other than those directly concerned with the Jewish genocide.

Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastropheanalyses uses of the Holocaust

in the pictorial culture of the media and the public sphere generally. It looks at the

instances in which uses of the Holocaust come loose from their historical moorings:


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Introduction 3

magazine cover in August 2010 of the girl whose nose and ears have been cut

off by the Taliban in Afghanistan it is because something in them makes us see

things that previously were not quite part of our experience. We understand, or at

least acknowledge, something of the suffering shown to us. We get a glimpse of

the aftermath of the experience or events. Something of the experience lives on inthe images (think, for example, of the images of the Killing Fields in Cambodia).

But what also gives images their afterlife is our use of them in the processes

of responding to catastrophic or traumatic events. Our modes of representing

catastrophe negotiate how to think about, react to, and represent these events. But

they also negotiate what Ross Chambers (2004) has called the obscene: that which

we do not want to see and acknowledge, the things that haunt us and yet we push

off-stage:

National cultures [] seem increasingly aware of the sense in which they are

haunted, both by past atrocities and by the continuing injustices those atrocities

have spawned. The list crowds the mind; it is an endless one. Germany has its

Vergangenheitsbewltigung(dealing with the past); France struggles to come to

grips with the reality of Vichy; the United States continues to live the aftermath

of slavery and the Civil War; many countries, both Western and non-Western,

deal and fail to deal with that of colonialism, Australia with its genocidal

founding as a modern nation, South Africa with apartheid, Argentina with its

so-called dirty war, Israel with the reality of Palestine; etc. Politicians in these

countries generally seem anxious to laythese ghosts, exhorting people to turn

the page and move on, that is to forget; they themselves forget that the ghosts

cant be laid without rst allaying the injustices that are the presents legacy

from the past, something that nations founded in violence appear constitutively

unable to do, so denitional to them are violence and injustice. And, of course,

plenty of new obscenities arise []. (Chambers 2004: 34) [emphasis in original]

In this sense all cultures, Chambers argues, are aftermath cultures: cultures that in

the face of their violence and ongoing injustices are regulated by a strange nexus

of denial and acknowledgment of the traumatic (xxixxii).

Aftermath cultures are characterised by a tension of past and present and the

question of the survival of memory. The question is whether the past and its trauma

is over and whether the pastness of the event means that it is no longer relevant

to the affairs of the present and can be forgotten. Chambers describes the state

of being haunted, both by past atrocities and by the continuing injustices those

atrocities have spawned (34) as the untimeliness of aftermath (43). The fact

of aftermath is that trauma is both in the past and not yet over; the past has not

passed (45). The Holocaust is one such past that is simultaneously over and not

over, and is continuing to unfold in the process of its own historical aftermath. This

is now primarily the case through its discourse, and I will analyse the Holocausts

aftermath temporality and the Holocaust as discourse in this book.


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Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe4

It is this untimeliness and the aftermath of failures of justice and humaneness

such as occurred with the Holocaust that bring about discourses of extremity

and images of catastrophe. But more often than not, the victims of injustice and

violence are excluded from public discourse, history and everyday life. Just think

of the withholding of Abu Ghraib images by the US government (on the politicsand iconic power of these images see Butler 2009, Mirzoeff 2005). It is because

of this silencing either by conscious obscuring and covering up or by blindness

to suffering and in denial that we need to analyse the aesthetics of catastrophe.

Chambers describes the cultural practice of troping and guration in the aftermath

as a way of returning back to our attention what a culture has made ob-scene: that

which is not to be seen and to be obscured, taken off the scene. Figuring in the

aftermath is in order to remind of, and bring back on the stage of public discourse,

what a culture prefers to forget and has excluded from both history and public

discourse.As I will argue in this book, uses of the Holocaust (guration and signication

through Holocaust images) are one such means to turn attention to violence, injustice

and suffering. This rhetorical function of redirecting attention is at the heart of the

Holocausts role in the cultural politics of seeing. Figuration, Chambers (2004)

denes as a mode of representation that is more and other than representation.

It is the turning from direct representation to symbolism, and becomes more

gural than directly representational (xxvii). It usually works through metaphor

that begins to function as a symbol, and does always entail a double rhetorical

process, an attention-getter [] serving alsoto turn attention to an other, a more,

or a beyond (12, emphasis in original). I will argue in this book that images of

catastrophe are signifying the events through this mode of representation and with

this kind of rhetorical motivation in the social battle over the meaning of traumatic

experience (Chambers 2004: 20), developing an aesthetics in the process. So what

do we turn attention to with these gurations?

An example of one such guration and an aesthetics of catastrophe is the

famous image of a woman giving birth in a tree shortly before being rescued

during the disastrous ooding in Mozambique in 2000. Its circulation caused

controversy in the media, particularly after David Shukman, a BBC correspondent,

accused camera crews of endangering lives in the race to get the best TV pictures.

Speaking on a BBC World Service documentary, Shukman criticised this image:

We reach out for a kind of intimacy, we really want to know an individual story,

and this was a classic individual story. But it is false intimacy (qtd. in Wells and

Morris 2001). Why this desire for intimacy? It is an intimacy that can always only

be an imagined intimacy. The act of looking and a desire to gain access to the

direct experience of the depicted events go together in the consumption of images,

as critics of photography have pointed out (Benjamin 1974, Sontag 2002). Why do

we want this intimate experience?

In this book I will examine whether this so-called intimate experience is in

fact not an individual desire, but rather an aesthetic principle and requirement of

the representation itself if its power is to be maximised. What would this mean for


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Introduction 5

the role of the one who looks in the aesthetics of catastrophe? Do we represent

and consume these representations in order to understand, in order to then act

according to this understanding, especially politically? Or are we simply being

dragged into the fascination and pleasure of spectacles? And, if so, what does

this mean in terms of how the particular aesthetics at work in the visualisationsof atrocities and catastrophes facilitate our understanding of real-life events, and

eventually also our thinking and understanding about political actions to take in

reaction to them? These questions lie at the heart of our understanding of the

function of images in the representation of events, and more specically news

events.

The history of the depiction of the horror of war, trauma and suffering in

Western culture is not just a history of iconographies of death, but also of us

looking at these images of suffering and death. One such example is from Platos

Republic (2000), and has become central to the history of Western iconographiesof horror. In a well-known episode, the young Athenian Leontius, on his way

home from the Piraeus, encounters the scene of an execution. He sees some dead

bodies lying near the executioner and feels a desire to look at them. At the same

time, he feels he should turn aside in disgust and puts his hand over his eyes. But

after a few vain attempts, he gives in to the desire to have a closer look. There you

are, curse you, have your ll of the lovely spectacle, he exclaims, opens his eyes

wide with his ngers and runs forward to the dead. Writing about the genocide

in Rwanda in 1994, the journalist Philip Gourevitch (2000) reinvokes this scene

when describing his encounter with a scene of an execution. At Nyarabuye,

where the dead of a genocidal killing spree had been left unburied for memorial

purposes, he wonders: What to do? Look? Yes. I wanted to see them (16). Unlike

Leontius, Gourevitch had not accidentally stumbled upon the scene but decided to

see Nyarabuye, where the dead were. He wanted to be stuck with the experience

of looking at them (16). But like Leontius, he is torn between his desire to look

and the disgust at the thought of this desire. He feels revulsion, alarm, sorrow,

grief, shame, incomprehension (19). And like Leontius, the desire to look gets the

better of him, and he looks and takes photographs because he wants an excuse to

look a bit more closely (19).

Philip Gourevitchs book on the Rwandan genocide is not only a journalistic

account of the events during 1994 and their aftermath, but also an attempt to

develop an aesthetics of the dead, an aesthetics of the horror of genocide. And this

aesthetics of the dead Gourevitch begins by recounting the Leontius episode from

PlatosRepublic(13). Like Leontius and Gourevitch, we too gaze at catastrophe.

But unlike them, most of us do not directly witness such scenes. Our gaze is

mostly dictated to by seemingly endless mediations; technological innovations

open our eyes for us where Leontius used his own ngers. Human history has

always been cast in terms of catastrophe, and representations of catastrophe are

nothing new; neither are the genres of this representation. There are traditions of

accounts of disaster, war, famine and disease, in oral as well as written accounts.

The Bible, for example, is full of such accounts; or Josephus (1981) history of


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the Jewish War, which remembers the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple;

or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, with its English memories of the Viking raids and

the Norman Conquest. The Great Famine in Ireland, the genocide of Americas

indigenous populations, African-American slavery, the Lima earthquake of 1746,

the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, World War I, World War II and the Holocaust,Hiroshima and Nagasaki, AIDS, the genocides in Rwanda and in the Balkans, 9/11

they all have been the subject of news, history, and art. The moment of gazing at

catastrophe has always fascinated people. The experience of this gaze, the idea of

witnessing atrocious incidents by looking at their shocking, yet fascinating sights,

has travelled through history and forms the core of the work of many inuential

Western thinkers.

In terms of theorising these issues names such as Nietzsche, Bataille, or Debord

spring to mind, but it is Walter Benjamin who has provided a lasting image for this

practice: his angel of history is the modern embodiment of the gaze at catastrophe.In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin (1973) presents a short

text piece that has come to be the emblem for his historical and philosophical

program. Showing his concept of thinking in images, Benjamins angel of history

emerges from two other images that interlace with, but also counter, each other:

the angel in Gershom Sholems poem Gru vom Angelus and the angel in the

Paul Klee drawing Angelus Novus:

IX

My wing is ready for ight,

I would like to turn back.

If I stayed timeless time,

I would have little luck.

Gershom Scholem, Gru vom Angelus

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he

is about to move away from something he is xedly contemplating. His eyes are

staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the

angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain

of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon

wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken

the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from

Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no

longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which

his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm

is what we call progress. (259260)

For Benjamin, only the gaze of this frightened angel can see catastrophe

in history. To us catastrophe is invisible; we only see a chain of normal events

because we have been trained by the political conditions of our society to only see

progress. Our blindness to catastrophe is one of the reasons why events that should

constitute a catastrophe (such as those, for Benjamin, taking place under fascism)


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Introduction 7

become the rule rather than give rise to a revolution. That things just keep on

going is the catastrophe, Benjamins (1972: 592) well-known phrase from the

Passagenproject goes. Benjamins philosophy is aimed at bringing about a real

state of emergency (Weigel 1996: 159), one that is intended to break with rules

and norms of oppressive regimes. For this, however, an other gaze is requiredto perceive the catastrophe in history the frozen, open-mouthed and wide-eyed

stare of the angel of history. It is this frozen gaze that resonates in the work of

many later writers.

In Requiem for a century, Agnes Heller (1995), a Hungary-born philosopher

and Holocaust survivor, turns us into the angel of history who cannot look

catastrophe and history in the face but can only glance backwards at it. The same

gaze is depicted by the South African writer J.M. Coetzee. All of Coetzees work

for which he won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature explores the gaze turned upon

scenes of torture, violence and suffering, animal or human. Many of his characters,like the angel of history, cannot close their eyes once they have witnessed such

scenes. For example, Elizabeth Curren, the narrator gure in Coetzees (1990)Age

of Iron, reports after she has consciously seen for the rst time the cruelties in

South Africa in the form of witnessing the murder of ve black boys that now

my eyes are open and I can never close them again (95). As an author, Coetzee is

vexed with the same dilemma Plato and Gourevitch have described: witnessing a

world of blind force and suffering where brutality has become the norm (in Walter

Benjamins words), and where therefore certain human acts are removed from

the domain of moral judgment, as embodied for so long in the Apartheid regime

of South Africa. Only when all human acts are returned to the domain of moral

judgment, says Coetzee, will the gaze of the author once again be meaningful,

because then the choice is no longer limited to either looking on in horried

fascination as the blows fall or turning ones eyes away (qtd. in Susskind 2001:

34). Coetzee, like Benjamin, calls for bringing about a real state of emergency,

and voices concerns with the aesthetic and political implications of the gaze at

catastrophe with the politics of seeing.

The politics of seeing is about the dynamic interplay between seeing and not-

seeing, looking and not-looking, but also the policing of what we can see, the

game of being permitted or not permitted to see, and of casting doubt about what

it is that is being seen (Baker 2000: 217). It is a game that consists of evaluating,

accepting or rejecting, testing and playing with rhetorical possibilities within

media and political institutions. In this way, the politics of seeing operates not only

on the level of perception and consumption, but also on the level of production.

My interest in the politics of seeing lies in the forms and media that facilitate for

us what we get to see and to know of world events via images.

The news media are among the most inuential mediating mechanisms

operating between events and their entry into public discourse. I am focusing on

images because of the ever increasing image use in producing and circulating

recorded facts. What is it about images that makes them central to news media?

The genealogy of the image of the gaze at catastrophe, specically, helps to unravel


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the two main sets of issues relevant to this question: how they work and what

their cultural value is. Firstly, the image of gazing at catastrophe provides insights

into the workings of images. Secondly, the gaze at catastrophe opens insights into

the cultural and economic value of images. The idea of this gaze has induced

fascination and intellectual inquiry in critical discourse (Walter Benjamin is justthe most prominent exponent). The idea and various manifestations of this gaze,

however, have also always sold well, whether it was the historic crowd turning up

for public executions or whether it is todays audience for documentary and news

photography.

Most of the documentary photography of catastrophic events consists of images

of dead or suffering bodies. This raises questions about the dignity of victims in

our visual culture. This book offers some thoughts on what can be the objects of

study for visual studies, and how to handle them. On the example of images of

the Holocaust transferred to other events, the book describes the work performedby the production, dissemination, and consumption of images of suffering and

trauma, as well as the cultural work performed by looking at such images. With

the analytical work in this book, I suggest we need to think about this kind of

visual representation in the same careful way as we do with literary representation.

This is increasingly relevant as ever less censored images come to us through the

media. The coverage of the 2009 Iranian protests, for example, freely broadcast

the mobile phone footage of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young, badly injured Iranian

woman, who later died. She was lying in a pool of blood. The inclusion of viscera,

like bodily uids, has not always been common in news images. This is an

example of the need to further develop and rene methodologies for analysing

such representations because these images and their reproduction are concerned

with the psychological and socio-political effects of catastrophe. Since her death

during an anti-government protest in Tehran and the global circulation of her nal

moments captured on mobile phone footage, Neda Agha-Soltan has become a

symbol for the Iran protests, and her image has been brandished at demonstrations

around the world as a powerful symbol of resistance.

Tracing the Aesthetics of Catastrophe

This book is about the role of images within the economy of representation in the

narration of catastrophic news events. Before I begin to analyse the persistence

of the Holocaust image and the practice of Holocaust transferals, I wish to use

a non-Holocaust image to introduce questions of the power and work of images

in the coverage of catastrophic events. With it, I not only introduce some of the

complexities of analysing and understanding their work and possible impact,

particularly the questions arising with representing catastrophe, but also illustrate

the notion of image at work in this book.


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Introduction 9

The image of a father showing the portrait of his son, who was killed in the Bali

bombings in October 2002, tattooed on his arm, illustrates many of the questions

that arise with representing catastrophe (see Figure 1.1). The issue here is not

only the kind of aesthetics used, but also the site of the chosen aesthetics. The

question of whether it is appropriate to use often highly stylised images of violent

events and how to use them within the mass media is an old one. It has been in

critical discourse ever since LessingsLaocoon, his essay from 1766 that gained

instant fame; the statue of Laocoon had become the prime example of eighteenth-

century aesthetics, primarily because of the way it expresses the experience of

pain. To name just a few examples from the area of feature lms produced for

mass audiences, City of Gods(2002), a lm about the ghettos in Brazil and their

youth violence, Saving Private Ryan (1998), Steven Spielbergs lm of World

War II, or Schindlers List(1993), his version of the Holocaust, are examples that

have re-incited this debate. The picture of the father with his sons tattoo on his

arm poses its own aesthetic questions. The image has been used in a story in The

Weekend Australian Magazine, the weekend colour supplement to theAustralian,

an Australian daily newspaper. It is one of the illustrations used for a follow-up

report on the Perth Aussie Rules club which lost seven of its players in the 2002

Bali bombings, and had subsequently gained a certain degree of fame because its

Figure 1.1 Kevin Paltridge showing a tattoo of his son who died in the

Bali bombings

Source: Photographer Ross Swanborough Newspix/News Ltd, with the permission of

Newspix/News Ltd.


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story had been picked up repeatedly by the mainstream media. This picture not

only shows the questions arising with showing catastrophe and its effects, but also

exemplies the difculties of analysing such representation. How, for example,

to analyse this picture of a father who uses his body as a screen for showing what

the Bali bombings mean for him? This image on a body has also turned into newsphotography on a magazine page and gained newsworthiness and, in this process,

has moved from the most private site possible, ones own body, to the public

site of the news industries. If we did not know that the tattoo in the photo is the

representation of a Bali bombings victim, the photograph to us would merely show

a man with a tattoo; it would not full the criteria of news photography for us.

The complex layer of questions arising with this image illustrates the importance

of analysing the work and role of images in the narration of events. As it becomes

clear with this image, there is no doubt that they have an impact on the viewer and

consequences that arise from their many contexts private and institutional butto analyse just what exactly these are is difcult, and these difculties lie in the

character of images themselves.

News images, for example, have complex commercial or industrial contexts.

As events, catastrophes make the news and are news; hence their value as well

as the political and ideological war over their images. The Iraq war still shows

the increasing complexity of the institutional questions surrounding images from

catastrophic events: images going through relatively new selection processes

in new institutional practices of production, such as embedded journalism, not

just through the more traditional selection processes in the news rooms of press

agencies, newspapers and news magazines, or TV stations. Images also are

products of the complex meaning-making processes used by consumers to make

sense of them. They are capable of holding and producing a number of meanings

and concerns.

Images of catastrophe, maybe more than other kinds of images, have to

stand in for what they represent. Photos depicting catastrophic events provide a

controllable frame (in form of small and handy material pictures) of events that

by denition are beyond our control, and difcult to grasp and deal with, because

of the enormity of their material consequences. Just as often as they do directly

depict the gruesome scenes of catastrophe, images of catastrophe do not depict

the actual event, but offer a different image instead. One such trope comes from

Holocaust photography, where we see people looking at the event, but no depiction

of the actual event. One famous example of this is a photograph by Margaret

Bourke-White of German civilians at Buchenwald concentration camp being led

past a pile of bodies. In her caption, Bourke-White writes how [m]any women

put handkerchiefs over their eyes. They could not bear to look (in Life Magazine

1979: 172). The photo shows the line of people either looking, looking away, or

using handkerchiefs, but not the corpses.1Another such trope depicting the horror

1 Interestingly, this trope exists alongside the trope of the viewing of corpses. This

is particularly so when soldiers of the liberating forces and survivors are shown viewing


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Introduction 11

of catastrophic events by a metonymic representation is formed by the many

images depicting a person representing their personal catastrophe by showing

photographs of it, the image of a grief-stricken parent holding into the camera a

photograph of the child they lost in the catastrophic event for example. This trope

can also be found in Holocaust photographs (see for example Manchester 1989:95). The photo now has to stand in for the lost child, and it is maybe because of

this fact of having to stand in and because of the manageability of a photo that

can literally be picked up and made to do the work of expressing and representing

the catastrophe that makes this image popular as a trope. The image of being able

to offer and show only something that is already a representation of catastrophe

as the tattoo on the fathers arm or the photo held into the camera and its many

variations have become a metaphor for the representation of catastrophe itself.

This image, or topos, raises one question in particular regarding the

representation of catastrophe and an aesthetics of catastrophe: it concerns thedesire for intimacy. As journalists and cultural critics have remarked, in the case

of catastrophic events we want to know an individual story and want a kind of

intimacy. The image of the father of the Bali bombing victim offers one version

of the classic individual story. Why this desire for an intimate experience, and,

more specically the experience of utmost horrible events? The use of, and desire

for, images as not just a window onto the reality of catastrophic events, but also

as a door to the experience of such events lie at the heart of any aesthetics of

catastrophe. In the case of news photography, this desire is spun out between two

poles in two ways: it is a play between distance and closeness, and it is a desire

not just of the consumer, but also the photographer. The act of looking, for Walter

Benjamin (1973), is one manifestation of the desire of contemporary masses to

bring things closer spatially and humanly (223). Why this desire and hence

need for intimacy?

Benjamins (1968) analysis of the techniques of reproduction and their effect

onto our sense perception in his essay The Work of Art indicates that this need

may be more the news medias need, not necessarily the consumers need. The

masses in modern society, says Benjamin, tend to overcome the uniqueness of

every reality by accepting its reproduction (223). This bent comes from the need

to absorb and adjust reality to its needs; it is an effect of the political situation

created by the forces in power in certain societies. Images the reproductions of

events we learn from Benjamins seminal essay, lie at the heart of bringing things

closer. But objects or events experienced closely in this way are still distant and

not really intimate, as Benjamin maintains:

Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels

differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence

the piles of corpses in liberated camps. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

(USHMM) Photo Archives (available online) hold many such images.


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are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the

former. (223)

In this sense, the desire for intimacy and closeness in the act of looking represents

primarily an aesthetic need for the media as part of what Michel Foucault (1986)has called power-knowledge relations. And, indeed, the desire to get close, or

to get a closer look, is a staple of photojournalism discourses, expressed by

photographers and critics alike (see for example Nachtwey 1999: 469, Salgado

2000: 113, Schloss 1987: 190191). At the same time, however, enacting this

intimacy in news photographs raises the phatic level of the photo, and can

emphasise an events uniqueness rather than obliterate it. A strong photo in this

sense can both tell about the meaning-making processes behind its production

within the media industry, and set individual consumers meaning-making

processes in motion. This tension between looking as the consummation ofmere aesthetics without any pragmatics and looking as a pragmatic, political, or

epistemological possibility informs the image analysis in this book. The nal

chapter will answer the question as to whether in the aesthetics of catastrophe

there are acts and ways of looking that can challenge the disjunction of aesthetics

and pragmatism, that is that we are not merely staring for visual pleasure, but

might gain a better understanding of historic events.

The Holocaust, and the transfer of its imagery onto other events, is one set

of signifying practices activated in the attempt to gain some form of access

to catastrophic events. For reasons I will explain in the course of this book,

Holocaust imagery has ultimately come to be functionalised in the development

of an aesthetics of catastrophe. Because this particular practice of representing

catastrophe remains prevalent, I use it as a case study for the work of images in

the signication of events.

Picturing catastrophe and cultural analysis of gures of catastrophe

In order to analyse the cultural politics of seeing, and how images of catastrophe

might be analysed, the main material I analyse is visual. However, I will also

employ two other kinds of sources. Alongside the visual material, the main

concern lies with critiquing the operation of theoretical discourse, and especially

Holocaust theory and its various related critiques and offshoots. To make my

argument, a second kind of evidence is employed: the eld of representation that

roughly coincides with the mass medias reporting of catastrophe.

Theory and journalism are not the same and work in different ways. At the

same time, however, they are semi-autonomous at best; it is impossible to strictly

demarcate, or even denominate the academic and journalistic realms (Esch

1999: 10). I make the move between these two sets of discourses because there

are striking similarities in the structures (institutional and ideological) and patterns

evident in the use of the Holocaust as a device to negotiate meaning-making in

the face of contemporary catastrophe. In both discourses, the same shift from


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Introduction 13

the Holocaust (the event of the Nazi genocide) to the Holocaust (its ideological

representation) and Holocaust theory (its commodication for cultural production

as well as critical discourse) occurs. Looking at both sets of discourses produces a

certain degree of slippage between theory and journalism as the object of analysis,

but is necessary because of these similarities, which suggest a relation between thetwo circuits of discourse.

The books theoretical orientation is towards a combination of visual analysis

and textual analysis. Mieke Bal (2008) characterises visual analysis as a eld

that examines what more established disciplines have neglected: non-canonical

artworks, street scenes, grafti, and so forth. This book will collate Holocaust

images not previously analysed together. The political and ethical entailments

of using Holocaust imagery pose the question of how to analyse the images of

suffering and trauma. Analytical work in research about images has to negotiate

methodologically both the empirical and interpretive side of images. To do this,I will combine critiquing the operation of theoretical discourse and journalistic

discourse and map the meeting grounds between the two circuits of discourse. The

basis for this mapping is the critical concept of genealogy (in the sense of Foucault

and Nietzsches dialectic ofHerkunft/descent andEnstehung/emergence).

From there the book will provide a critical framework to analyse the cultural

politics of seeing. This will centre on a widened notion of the image. My denition

of image is based on understanding images as not just visual but also textual, and,

ultimately, epistemological. An image is not just a picture but also a kind of screen

on which the concepts and notions of events are envisioned, and understandings

and meanings of events are constructed: what we think and imagine them to be.

An image is a space in which social relations and discursive strategies are acted

out; it consists of, and reects, rhetorical, epistemological, and aesthetic moves.

The understanding of image underlying this book takes its starting point from

the denition W.J.T. Mitchell (1986) gives in What is an image?, the rst chapter

of his Iconology. Images are, he writes, best thought of as a far-ung family

which has migrated in time and space and undergone profound mutations in the

process (9). The Holocaust image and its imagery its own family of images

has also migrated through time and space, and I follow some of these movements

in order to describe the visual rhetoric of Holocaust images. Many things go by

the name of image: pictures, statues, optical illusions, maps, diagrams, dreams,

hallucinations, spectacles, projections, poems, patterns, memories, ideas (Mitchell

1986: 9). In this book I will show how images are not just visual but also textual,

and, ultimately, epistemological.

A considerable and canonised part of critical work on images has a more

negative view of what images do. One of the classic formulations of this is in

Vilem Flussers (1984) famous Towards a Philosophy of Photography:

Images are meant to render the world accessible and imaginable to man. But,

even as they do so, they interpose themselves between man and the world.

They are meant to be maps, and they become screens. Instead of presenting


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the world to man, they re-present it, put themselves in place of the world, to

the extent that man lives as a function of the images he has produced. He no

longer deciphers them, but projects them back into the world out there without

having deciphered them. The world becomes image-like []. (7)

By analysing the use of Holocaust images in contemporary culture, I will challenge

this negative view regarding the work of images and aesthetics and discuss in

what sense images can be screens onwhich processes, histories, and the workings

of institutions and discourses are made visible, rather than screens that obscure

things.

As this book will show, the particular historical event of the Jewish Holocaust

has become material for contemporary cultural production, but it has also become

a political and rhetorical tool. The focus is on uses of the Holocaust as a political

and rhetorical tool in order to represent certain events, suffering and trauma. Thebook draws on a varied corpus of materials from the media in order to analyse

the character of these transferals and the work they are made to perform in media

institutions. In addition, the collecting of the iconography of Holocaust material

in use is directed towards developing a rhetoric of visual tropes that traces the

origins, genealogies and histories of the images in use.

Holocaust uses occur not only at points of mass destruction, atrocity or

injustice, but also at points where there is a struggle to achieve an understanding

of such events and their aftermaths; hence the search for the right name, which

reects the political and social issues that arise in the aftermath. The socio-

political and economic effects of catastrophe are of primary concern for both

theoretical and journalistic work. In the case of AIDS, Paula Treichler (1988) has

talked about an epidemic of meanings or signication (32). Events that are not

fully knowable because of their horric excess, she suggests, have an enormous

power to generate meanings. This provides the background for how I understand

the trade between theory and journalism. In the face of catastrophe, journalism (as

does popular culture) readily searches for explanations and is more likely to accept

theory, which is otherwise often criticised for its lack of relevance, its alleged non-

engagement with material and practical concerns. But theory, too, undertakes a

search for explanations when dealing with catastrophe. In this search for meaning,

both theory and journalism perform the work of representation and signication.

The analysed material comes from both these circuits of discourse, as well

as their meeting grounds. I discuss pictures that use Holocaust imagery from

everywhere in the public sphere: from newspapers, news magazines, and glossy

magazines; from book covers, cartoons, as well as grafti; from art books,

exhibition catalogues, academic and theoretical books, but also comic books; from

online news services, media sections and archives of organisations and institutions,

but also from propaganda posters, protest posters, or online art projects. All these

forms are news media in the widest sense: sites and media in which and through

which news events are discussed, negotiated and circulated. The analytical work

in research about images has to negotiate methodologically both the empirical and


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Introduction 15

interpretive side of images. Empirically, journalistic questions about production

and selection processes have to be asked, together with political economy questions

about their value in news industries, but also audience research questions about

their reception (What do people think, see, or feel when they look at news images?

Can images have an actual impact on peoples lives?). The interpretive work asksquestions about the content, form, aesthetic value, and construction of meaning in

the images. I try to combine both aspects in my analysis whenever possible; the

main focus, though, lies on the interpretive work in order to describe the visual

rhetoric of Holocaust imagery.

This approach, and the focus on the interpretive side, enables me the

methodological distance necessary for a theoretical analysis of this kind of

material and subject matter. My purpose is to do a cultural analysis of the use and

re-presentation of images of catastrophe, not an analysis of the images affective

dimensions (on affect as crucial for acts of looking see Jill Bennett 2005). Giventhe sensitivity of the material, this is a difcult task. The historian Inga Clendinnen

(1999) summarises her attempt to understand and comprehend the Holocaust:

The greatest difculty for any reader is to keep ones critical balance in face

of this material. Even reduced to marks on paper it is profoundly disturbing,

exacting sleepless nights, darkening days. (10)

Distancing oneself from this kind of material, for whatever reason, in itself has its

politics (and to a certain degree I will discuss these politics in the book), but it is

necessary in understanding the practice of picturing catastrophe.

The ideas here about the function of images and about how to analyse images

are shaped by work in what by now is called visual culture: Walter Benjamin,

Erwin Panofsky, E.H. Gombrich, and also W.J.T. Mitchells work on picture

theory and iconography; John Bergers work on photography and the work of

images; and others who have worked in the tradition of the critique of images.

Panofskys (1991) multi-discursive and multidimensional approach to pictorial

representation (he includes and combines religion, philosophy, psychology,

physiology, art history, and science) has helped to dene my methodological

approach. Gombrichs, Mitchells, and Bergers similarly methodologically

innovative and sensitive writings on pictorial representation and visual culture

have all helped to understand the historical complexity, range, and openness of the

power of images and their rhetoric (see particularly Berger 1982, Gombrich 1956,

Mitchell 1986). Visual culture is a still developing eld of study and its object

domain and methodologies are widely discussed (for a critical overview see Bal

2003, or Pink 2008), and a multiplicity of genealogies of the eld keep emerging

(for an attempt at tracking some of these see Elkins 2003).

Within this context, my work on the visual rhetoric of Holocaust imagery in use

for contemporary events can be most closely located in a version of visual studies

that James Elkins (2003) calls mobile models, where visual studies would have

to be in continuous motion, Deleuze-fashion, in order to nd its subjects (235).


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Part of this approach includes putting certain theories to work but also theorising

disciplines to a certain degree, as I have described above. My genealogical

analysis of images therefore combines semiotic, textual, and discursive analysis

and draws on several disciplines and ideas: mainly cultural studies, philosophy,

and literary theory. My understanding of genealogy is based on Michel Foucaults(1986) description of genealogy, which in turn is largely based on NietzschesZur

Genealogie der Moral, as a documentary search not for the origins of ideas but

forHerkunft(descent, which seeks the numberless beginnings of ideas and their

complex faint traces and hints of colour (81) not their unied, continuous, and

mythical beginning) andEntstehung(emergence, the moment of arising (83) and

the hierarchical and ideological struggle of the forces that produce this moment).

The books concern lies in the political, ethical, and cultural entailments of

an act of semiosis in this case an act of semiosis performed through and within

Holocaust imagery.2Therefore, the book is not a survey of all incidents of Holocaustuses and transferals, but an investigative exploration of this cultural practice.

Holocaust imagery is a widespread trope and deserves analysis as a cultural

repetition; the use of Holocaust imagery constitutes a repetitive representational

pattern. This book scopes the practice, and analyses its function and signicance.

Atrocity, violence, suffering and trauma have become characteristic of human

history (Chambers 2004: xx, Hobsbawm 1995). As I will discuss in the book, of all

the historical traumas and cataclysmic human events, the Holocaust has originary

status; originary in the sense of giving rise to the major discourses of the twentieth

and twenty-rst centuries. The Great War is perhaps the only other historical event

that has similar originary status. The Holocaust has been posited as the signature

of a whole era and the climax of modernity and the rational and emotional

catastrophe that led to the unhealable wound which Nazism has made in Western

civilization (Habermas 1987: xi). Hence it has been described as a pervasive

marker in the West and a cultural condition (Stratton 2008: 1). The history of how

knowledge of the Judeocide has developed into this discourse has been described

often (see Breines 1990 or Segev 1991 for Israel, Novick 2000 for the US; see also

Stratton 2008). This book also focuses on the historical formation of the discourse

of the Holocaust, but in order to show what, once this discourse is established,

can be done with it and what uses it is being put to. It will track the increasingly

general usage of the term, in order to understand how the Judeocide came to have

the range of qualities which are now attributed to it. The term Holocaust, including

the gradual acceptance of the capitalised H, needed to be taken-for-granted and

socially accepted before it could be re-applied to other catastrophes. This is the

pre-history to the history of Holocaust transference I describe.

As suggested earlier, the shift to a Holocaust discourse that enables to bring

horror to other events has happened through the images of the Holocaust, and

2 Because of the political, ethical and cultural entailments of an act of semiosis

through Holocaust imagery, I use terms such as trope, genre or icon in their everyday use

rather than in their specialised sense in rhetoric or semiotics.


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Introduction 17

when the Holocaust itself turned into an image. The Holocaust and its images

have become a large scale cultural commodity. Not only have they provided

excellent material for all kinds of cultural production (museums, lm or modern

art are just the most obvious examples), but they have also been functionalised

in the development of an aesthetics of catastrophe the ideas and underpinningsof how to think about, react to, and represent catastrophic events. In this way,

the Holocaust image inuences and structures the contemporary production of

representations of catastrophe as well as the critical discourse about catastrophic

events. This has happened primarily through its imagery.

The following chapters will examine the pragmatics of global Holocaust

representations and the Holocaust as discourse.3 They are widespread and

persistent, and they are a direct result of our media industries and public

discourses. Because of this, an analysis of the operations of the Holocaust image

offers insights into the operations of our media in constructing world events andthe role of images in this. The central role the Holocaust holds within Western

culture cannot be sufciently explained without looking at the spectacle of the

Holocaust. The work of the spectacle has been described by Guy Debord (1995)

as to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via different

specialised mediations (17); that is images take over from the real world and

turn into real images. The persistent use of Holocaust images for other current

events is one such form of Debords specialised mediations that are designed to

make us see the world. The spectre of Holocaust imagery lingering throughout

post-1945 catastrophe representation is a direct result of a specic economy of

representation one that chooses an old image and its imagery, one already tested

for its efciency. The following chapters will analyse these mediations and its

efciency in a variety of areas.

3 I use the term pragmatism in its meaning that suggests a concern with practical and

pragmatic questions. On the pragmatics of discourse (rhetoric, semiotics, culture) see the

work of C.S. Peirce or Anne Freadman.

Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe

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