Photo of the Auschwitz-Birkenau gatehouse
The photo of the Auschwitz-Birkenau gatehouse is a black and white photo by the Polish photographer Stanisław Mucha . It was taken from the inside of the camp in February or March 1945 after the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and shows its entrance building and the track system extending from it. Originally taken on the Soviet order to document the liberated camp, the photo developed into a symbol for Auschwitz and the Holocaust from the 1960s onwards .
Emergence
The Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp was built in 1941 as part of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex near the city of Oświęcim in the part of occupied Poland annexed by the German Reich and served to murder Jews , Sinti and Roma in the context of the Holocaust and Porajmos . In January 1945, as the Red Army approached, a large number of the prisoners in the camp were sent west on death marches . Around 5,800 were left behind and witnessed the liberation of the camp by the 60th Army of the Soviet Union on January 27th. Shortly afterwards, the Polish Red Cross built a field hospital in the barracks there .
The Polish photographer Stanisław Mucha came to Auschwitz in February 1945 with a commission from the Red Cross. He was commissioned by the Soviet Commission to Investigate Nazi Crimes to photograph the camp and the objects found there as evidence. A total of 100 photos were taken in February and March. He recorded 38 of them in an album that he donated to the Auschwitz Museum . Among them was the photo no.28 of the gatehouse, which Mucha said he wanted to use to document the track system. It was to be the only one of his photos of Auschwitz that gained greater prominence.
description
The photo was taken from inside the warehouse. The upper third shows the gatehouse of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp built in 1943, which fills almost the entire width of the photo. The gate tower with the open doorway is located exactly in the middle of the building and the photo. In the right part there is another open gate, which was intended for motor vehicles. A track extends from the middle gate, which is fanned out into three routes by switches. These tracks were built in the spring of 1944. After the German troops marched into Hungary in March 1944, Heinrich Himmler commissioned the camp commandant Rudolf Höß with the extermination of the Hungarian Jews , who then pushed ahead with the expansion of the rail connection and the track system within the camp. In the lower part of the picture the approach of the ramp can be seen, where new prisoners arrived and were selected . Sheet metal and enamel crockery is scattered in this area . Like the ground, it is partially covered with snow.
analysis
Although taken from inside the camp, Mucha's photo gives many the impression that it was taken before the concentration camp. Some artistic uses of the motif show the three tracks outside the camp, such as Art Spiegelmann's comic mouse - The story of a survivor . But some media scholars also succumb to the impression . Götz Großklaus , for example, described the ramp in the foreground as the “courtyard of horror”, while the “place of death” would remain invisible beyond the “Tores threshold”. For the historian Christoph Hamann , the reasons for this impression can be found in the central perspective of photography. Their vanishing point is in the gate passage, towards which the alignment lines of the tracks run. As a result, the gate appears as the entrance to the warehouse and the “destination of all trains”. The perspective creates a pull on the viewer. Since tracks generally make a reversal unlikely, the photo gives the impression of a hopeless situation that inevitably leads to the gatehouse. This appears as a dividing line between life in this side of the beholder and death in the hereafter behind the gatehouse, which eludes his gaze. Only through the dishes in the foreground can one guess what happened to the people in the camp. In addition, the art historian Monika Flacke emphasizes the abandonment and desolation as well as the oppressive silence of the photo, which can be understood even without knowledge of the historical background.
Due to the absence of the perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust in photography, she visualized genocide as a bureaucratic and industrial process, an assessment that had also reached the majority of society in the 1960s through the Eichmann trial and the Auschwitz trials. In doing so, she ignores the fact that among the murderers there were not only those who committed orders but also many excess and ideological perpetrators. By depicting a concentration camp outside Germany “somewhere in the east”, the Holocaust is also portrayed as an event that had nothing to do with the realities of life for Germans, and thus apparently relieving them of any responsibility for these crimes. According to Hamann, this, together with the absence of violence, favored the broad reception of the photo.
reception
The number of surviving photographs documenting the Holocaust is enormous. In 1986, Sybil Milton spoke of more than two million photos that were in the archives of more than 20 nations, not including the extensive collections in the archives of the Soviet Union . In comparison, the number of images used in publications is low. These pictures also include the motif of the gatehouse and, above all, Mucha's photo, which developed into symbols for Auschwitz and “ icons of extermination”, just as Auschwitz became a synonym for the Holocaust. The use of Mucha's photo for documentary purposes is viewed critically in some cases. Monika Flacke points out that the photo, as it was taken after the liberation of the camp, cannot be a document of destruction and has only little documentary value. Since when photos are used in exhibitions and books there is usually no explanation of the background and the naming of the photographer, historical images would be produced and reproduced without criticism, only to generate emotions and to satisfy the audience's expectations.
In 1960, Mucha's photo, together with the photo of the boy from the Warsaw ghetto, which later also became a symbol of the Holocaust, was part of the book The Yellow Star by Gerhard Schoenberner , one of the first comprehensive collections of images from the Holocaust. It was also shown in large format in the 1964 exhibition Auschwitz - Pictures and Documents in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt . Unlike the photo of the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto, the photo of the gatehouse was rarely used in school textbooks. The media used them more often for this. She appeared several times on the cover of Der Spiegel magazine . It was seen there for the first time in February 1979. The four-part fictional US series Holocaust had recently been broadcast on German television and received a lot of attention. In the issue, Der Spiegel published the first part of the six-part series Nobody Comes Out of Here , in which the Polish director Wiesław Kielar reported on his time as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Mucha's photo forms the lower part of the cover, with the title Auschwitz extermination camp above it . Inmate No. 290 reports reading. In the course of the so-called Goldhagen debate about the book Hitler's Willing Executors by US sociologist Daniel Goldhagen , Mucha's photo reappeared on Spiegel in 1996 . It is in the background of the cover titled The Germans: Hitler's Willing Murderers? pictured; In the foreground you can see Adolf Hitler , who is cheered by a crowd. This cover is an example of the above-mentioned reinterpretation of the image as an outside shot, since Hitler and the crowd are actually in the camp in the logic of the montage. Two years later the photo appeared for the third time on the Spiegel cover, this time as the central element of a collage of photos of personalities and events of the 20th century. The booklet marked the beginning of a 50-part series about the century that was about to end.
Mucha's photo is also used by organizations committed to commemorating Auschwitz and the Holocaust. It was shown extensively behind the lectern at the memorial event of the International Auschwitz Committee on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. In 2013 the Simon Wiesenthal Center used the photo on a poster that could be seen in numerous German cities. It promoted Operation Last Chance , which asked for information that would lead to the prosecution of Nazi criminals.
The great popularity of Mucha's photo ensures that many visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum use it as a “template” for their own photographs of the gatehouse.
literature
- Christoph Hamann : Vanishing point Birkenau. Stanislaw Mucha's photo of the Auschwitz-Birkenau gatehouse (1945) . In: Gerhard Paul (Ed.): Visual History. A study book . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-36289-7 , pp. 283-302 .
- Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. Contributions to image competence in historical and political education . Dissertation at the Technical University of Berlin, Berlin 2007, p. 92–106 ( d-nb.info [PDF; 9.3 MB ]).
- Christoph Hamann: Gatehouse Auschwitz-Birkenau. A picture makes history . In: Gerhard Paul (ed.): The century of pictures. 1900 to 1949 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-30011-4 , pp. 682-689 .
- Judith Keilbach: Photographs, Symbolic Images, and the Holocaust: On the (im) possibility of depicting historical truth . In: History and Theory . tape 47 , 2009, p. 54-76 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1468-2303.2009.00498.x , JSTOR : 25478837 (English).
- Sebastian Schönemann: Representation of absence. Visualizations of the Holocaust in social memory using the example of the photo from the Auschwitz-Birkenau gatehouse . In: Journal for Qualitative Research . tape 17 , no. 1–2 , 2016, pp. 41–57 ( ssoar.info [PDF; 673 kB ]).
Web links
- Benjamin Drechsel: Torhaus Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1945. In: Online module European political image memory. September 2009 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. P. 94.
- ↑ a b Sebastian Schönemann: Representation of absence. P. 45.
- ^ A b Christoph Hamann: Torhaus Auschwitz-Birkenau. 2009, p. 682.
- ↑ Sebastian Schönemann: Representation of absence. P. 46.
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. P. 92.
- ^ A b Judith Keilbach: Photographs, Symbolic Images, and the Holocaust: On the (im) possibility of depicting historical truth. 2009, p. 73.
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. P. 93.
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. Pp. 93-94.
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. P. 96.
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. P. 97.
- ^ Götz Großklaus: media images. Staging of visibility . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / Main 2004, ISBN 3-518-12319-X , p. 9-10 . Quoted in: Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. P. 98.
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. Pp. 95-96.
- ↑ a b Monika Flacke: Uses of images . In: Étienne François , Kornelia Kończal, Robert Traba , Stefan Troebst (eds.): Historical politics in Europe since 1989. Germany, France and Poland in international comparison . Wallstein, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1068-1 , p. 514-524 , here: 517-518 .
- ↑ Sebastian Schönemann: Representation of absence. P. 44.
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. Pp. 100-103.
- ^ Sybil Milton: Photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto . Annual volume No. 3. Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1986 (English, Photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto ( Memento from June 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive )).
- ↑ Annette Krings: The power of pictures. On the significance of historical photographs of the Holocaust in political education work (= Wilhelm Schwendemann , Stephan Marks [Hrsg.]: Erinnern und Lern. Texts on human rights education . Volume 1 ). Lit, Berlin / Münster 2006, ISBN 3-8258-8921-1 , p. 89 .
- ↑ Monika Flacke: History exhibitions . To the 'misery of illustration' . In: Philine Helas, Maren Polte, Claudia Rückert, Bettina Uppenkamp (eds.): Image / history. Festschrift for Horst Bredekamp . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-05-004261-9 , pp. 481-490 , here: 486 .
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. P. 102.
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Visual History and History Didactics. P. 103. Christoph Hamann: The boy from the Warsaw ghetto. The Stroop Report and the Globalized Iconography of the Holocaust . In: Gerhard Paul (ed.): The century of pictures. 1900 to 1949 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-30011-4 , pp. 614–623 , here: 616 .
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Vanishing point Birkenau. Pp. 297-298. Cover on spiegel.de.
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Vanishing point Birkenau. P. 291. Cover on spiegel.de.
- ^ Christoph Hamann: Vanishing point Birkenau. P. 283. Cover on spiegel.de.
- ↑ Sebastian Schönemann: Representation of absence. P. 54.