Books and other media about the Holocaust typically feature photographs documenting the deprivations of ghetto life and mass murder in concentration camps. Those photographs were most often taken by perpetrators rather than victims. Ofer Ashkenazi, Rebekka Grossmann, Shira Miron, and Sarah Wobick-Segev offer an original approach in their joint publication. Working from a database of 15,000 images compiled from archives and personal collections across continents, the authors instead look at how German Jews chronicled their everyday lives under National Socialism.
The photographers featured in this book range in age and background. Some were professionals but most were amateurs. Cameras were prevalent and manageable in size, allowing photography to flourish as a popular pastime. German Jews turned the camera lens to their shifting reality, and compiled photographs in carefully curated private family albums with narrative arcs and, in one case, a child’s school album. That these sources have survived is remarkable, and the attention they are given in this study is a welcome addition to both Holocaust and photography studies.
Weaving the history of mounting discrimination with extensive visual analysis of previously overlooked photographs, the authors assert that the varied perspectives encoded in these images are essential to our understanding of the German Jewish experience after Hitler’s rise to power. A 1934 photograph on the book’s cover provides a case in point. The authors argue that this ordinary day on the beach, one of close friendship frozen in time, was a conspicuously choreographed attempt to preserve some sort of normalcy amid mounting uncertainty. Easily missed on quick glance is the suitcase in the lower right corner, a mundane object that portends a future when the amiable group will be torn apart. This fleeting moment on the beach, one in a public sphere populated by Jews and non-Jews, is joined by photographs of the Jewish home and places specifically meant for Jews, such as Zionist youth organizations and synagogues.
A crucial point is that the photographs are not meant as straightforward documentation or illustrations of a rapidly changing Jewish world that would soon be destroyed. These photographs transmit diverse reactions to ongoing crisis stretching across gender, class, and differing levels of religious practice. German Jewish fears, aspirations, and renegotiations of Jewish identity in the face of Nazi oppression are considered by parsing the photographers’ stylistic choices, framing, composition, and carefully chosen subjects. Photographs range from depictions of families in their homes, to school girls running in a three-legged race, to a cosmetic treatment in a beauty salon. Still Lives ably shows that the spaces of Jewish life captured by pocket-sized cameras convey vital narratives of life before a seismic rupture.
Samantha Baskind is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Cleveland State University. She is the author or editor of six books on Jewish American art and culture, which address subjects ranging from fine art to film to comics and graphic novels. She served as editor for U.S. art for the 22-volume revised edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica and is currently series editor of Dimyonot: Jews and the Cultural Imagination, published by Penn State University Press.
