Book Review

Methods/Theory

Andrea Liss. Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust. (Visible Evidence, number 3.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1998. Pp. xix, 152. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

Barbie Zelizer's book begins with a quote from Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably." Zelizer thinks this "observation" crucially important to her project (p. 1). Yet attempting to show the ultimately numbing effects of an overabundance of atrocity photos, she seems oddly divided about the meanings to the present of images of the past and at the same time unwilling to accommodate a plurality of different meanings. Like many of Benjamin's cryptic and notoriously apodictic statements, this one, too, shuts out questions that might challenge its authorizing power: whose past, whose present, irretrievable for whom? Above all, what kind of image? "Theses," Benjamin's most insistently redemptive and antihistorical text—and for that reason an almost biblical authority in Holocaust discourses—was written in very dark, desperate times that have become an absorbing concern of our present.	1
Although Zelizer's study of the dynamics of collective memory in the uses of photographic documentation poses useful questions to increasingly ritualized Holocaust photography, it does not deal with the larger cultural questions raised by such ritualization and the increasing exclusiveness of commemoration on which it feeds. Zelizer does modify Saul Friedlander's overly generalizing assertion that visual memories of the Holocaust linger as an "indelible reference point of the Western imagination" by proposing to ask about the conditions under which those first images of the camps were produced, presented, received, and coopted into the collective memory (p. 1). But when she moves beyond the by now largely familiar documentation of camp photography in 1945 (chapters two through four) to explore that cooption (chapters five through seven), she is too indebted to Benjamin's (Proust-derived) neo-Platonic reservations regarding the ability of photo-images to be the site of true memory—reservations echoed in many arguments for the limits of representation where it concerns the Jewish Holocaust. She agrees with his assertion in "Theses" that the past "can be seized only as an instance which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it . . . It means to seize hold of memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger" (p. 15).	2
Benjamin in extremis was entitled to this neo-Romantic concept of the uniquely significant moment of revealed suprahistorical truth, but it is deeply problematic in the context of what Zelizer offers as a historical study at the end of the twentieth century. Her larger argument is shaped by the assumption that the Jewish Holocaust is different in kind from all other persecutions and that its (therefore) unique and suprahistorical status has to be reflected in its representation. This assumption has contributed greatly to the current cultural fascination with all Holocaust discourses because it removes them from the restrictions imposed by modern secular historiographical standards of evidence. Yet these standards also expand rather than limit representation precisely because they are assumed to be responsible to all of the past, not certain privileged pasts. The importance of photography to a better historical understanding of the dynamics of collective commemoration of World War II over the last half century is not that it yields, to the right viewer, one moment of truth that will never be seen again. It is rather the medium-specific openness of photography to questions of meaning, which does not signify premature closure or opaqueness but the possibility of different acts of viewing over time. Here Zelizer might have found useful some of the observations in my Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (1996), to which she does not refer although we share a good deal of the photographic documentation and the questions raised by it.	. . .