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The End

08 Friday May 2015

Posted by in 1945

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VE_Day_celebrations_on_Bay_Street_1945It’s been 70 years since the official end of WW2 in Europe. A good time to be grateful. Western Europe hasn’t seen a significant conflict on its soil in three generations. No matter what people think of terrorism, it isn’t a World War.

The Cold War wasn’t (or isn’t) fun. The threat of nuclear annihilation that influenced the second half of the 20th century was real. But those were fears, those were threats. That wasn’t a firestorm raining from the sky, or tanks rolling through towns, or child soldiers, or gas chambers. There are wars all over the world right now, but nothing like that.

Here in Germany, there’s been a lot of information about the end of the war in the media. It’s taken all those years for survivors to speak up, mostly children back then, now in their 70s and 80s. They still don’t wholly understand what they lived through. “It’s incomprehensible,” they say. It may be hard to imagine what it was  like, but we – the younger generations – need to try every once in a while. Not in the knee-jerk, finger-pointing sort of way. Those of us who live comfortably and in peace need to remember how fragile that is, and how privileged we are.

In many places, my home country for one, we’ve passed into a pseudo-peace where wars are fought in our name all over the world without us knowing what’s really going on. That’s a scary situation, and one that could lead to very bad places, as I noted in a post a couple of years ago about the Sadness of War.

But still, nothing going on today has the scale of WW2. I get the sense the Germans are immensely grateful for the peace they’ve lived since then. On a political level, they’re still aware of Germany’s responsibility to the past. That’s why the German chancellor Angela Merkel will attend ceremonies in Moscow (the former western allies won’t go, because of the Ukraine conflict). As skeptical as I am about Russian politics today, I think it’s right to honor what the Soviet Union did in WW2. It took the brunt of the fighting, and the deaths, defending their land from invasion.

In western Germany, the Americans were the real winners of WW2. 1945 started a love affair with all things American that didn’t truly break until the Iraq War. The US was the “Schutzmacht,” Germany’s protector. In the past 15 years or so, the public skepticism about the US and its interests has grown. The recent scandal about the German intelligence service spying on European interests for the Americans is fuel for the fire. The Germans are grateful for everything the US had done for them after WW2, but there are calls to move on. The ex-Schutzmacht can’t be trusted like it used to.

That leaves Germany, a central member of the European Union, trying to find its role 70 years after the catastrophe it brought upon the world. For years, international polls have shown how admired modern Germany is, and people around here tend to be slightly stunned when they learn this. They’re more used to the childish and vicious reminders of Germany’s past, like in Greece when people put a Hitler mustache on a picture of Merkel, or show her with a swastika. As if any other country in the world has dealt better with its dark past than Germany.

Photo: VE Day Celebrations on Bay Street, Canada. By John H. Boyd [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AVE_Day_celebrations_on_Bay_Street_1945.jpg

Photo essays and white lies

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Media

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Photos can lie. It’s not a big revelation to us, but in the postwar world, people weren’t so sophisticated about media.

Photos are political too. After the war, photographers flooded into Germany to record the destruction and to give the world images of the German enemy. Allied Rückführung deutscher Kinder aus Polenphotographers arrived with an agenda, or several at once. No doubt they wanted to show the truth of what they saw, to use photos to tell the story of Germany’s defeated state. They wanted to ask their audience at home to look at the photos and think about how these Germans could be the same people who caused the Holocaust. They wanted to show allied life, German life, and where they intersected.

I found a nice example of how photographers coped in a photographic history of the postwar Ruhr area (Bildberichte. Aus dem Ruhrgebiet der Nachkriegszeit) issued a few years back by what is now the excellent Ruhr Museum in Essen. Unfortunately, I can’t find these images on the web, so I’ll describe what’s on p. 71 and 72.

The British magazine Picture Post did a report on August 31, 1946 called “Europe can’t afford this Germany” (this is my translation of the title since my source only had the German). One photo is especially interesting:

The Girl without a boy, the soldiers without a girl. A woman in heels looks at a pair of allied soldiers who gaze into a shop window.

On the next page of the Ruhr Museum book are the negatives of the original images used later in the Picture Post article. In the original shots, the girl and the soldiers had nothing to do with each other. The girl is alone pausing in the street for one reason or another. You only see the back of her curled blond hair, her black heels and dark dress. The soldiers are window shopping and chatting in what was likely a different location, one of many brick buildings.

The photographer melded the two images to make a point. The girl in the montage is looking at the soldiers, who are at the moment more interested in what they see in the shop window. (As unlikely as that is!). The families of allied soldiers were concerned about the goings-on they heard about in Germany, a sexual freedom the boys likely didn’t have at home. The Girl Without a Boy photo sent a message of the pretty, available, perhaps even predatory German woman just waiting for the allied boys to notice her. The photo melded from two unrelated images was a small lie, and it became political.

It’s important to look critically at photos shot in postwar Germany. Remember what goals the photographer might have had, and keep the most basic modern attitude to media in mind — what you see might not be what it seems.

Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2003-0703-500 / CC-BY-SA via http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en Wikimedia Commons

Allied Museum

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by in postwar, Travel

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My recent trip to Berlin was like postwar heaven, though the state of the city at the time was anything but heavenly. I’d never heard of the Allied Museum until I found a reference to it in one of the guidebooks I dragged around. Not knowing what I’d find, I hopped on the U-bahn to Zehlendorf, a leafy district southwest of Berlin’s center.

After World War II, when the Allies divided Berlin into 4 sectors, the American sector stretched from Zehlendorf to Neukölln in the east, where it hit the Soviet sector (and from 1961, the Berlin Wall). The American headquarters lay in Zehlendorf, so it was a natural place to install the Allied Museum.

Outpost cropped

After Germany reunited, the Americans, British and French agreed to cooperate on  the museum, and you see this in the collections. Start in the old Outpost, a wonderfully curvy 1950s movie theater that holds the permanent exhibits. They focus on the first postwar years and the Berlin Airlift.

I love artifacts, and there was enough at the Outpost to keep me shooting photos till my camera’s battery went on strike. I got a close look at the contents of a CARE package. I hunkered down next to an old army jeep, amazed at the little details (I didn’t know there was a power plug in the back). I listened to broadcasts of the postwar German radio network RIAS.

Allied Museum planeIf you’re there on a Sunday, you can pay a euro and climb into a Hastings TG503,  a plane used in the Airlift donated to the museum by the British. With 6.8 tons, it had the biggest transport capacity of any plane in the Royal Air Force. Unfortunately, I wasn’t at the museum on a Sunday and didn’t get to see the interior.

Opposite the Outpost and on the far side of the plane is the Nicholson Memorial Library, which houses the second part of the permanent exhibitions and rotating exhibits. If you’re interested in the spy tunnel built in the 1950s that was like a wiretap on the Russians (I am!), a life size  model is in this part of the museum. The exhibits take you through allied life all the way up to 1994. The non-permanent exhibit about how American music helped transform postwar Germany was excellent (I’ll do a post on this).

All in all, a museum to visit if you love this era. Clayallee 135, open Tuesday to Sunday 10-18:00.

And get this. It’s free.