The first two photographs in this book look innocuous — showing a country path, partly tree-shaded, and a forest scene with a twin-trunked tree spreading its branches every which way – and they only become shocking in retrospect and in the knowledge that this is a photobook entitled Buchenwald.
Photography and the Holocaust is a complex matter involving delicate ethical and aesthetic considerations; Trespassing through Shadows is the title of one book, now out of print, on the subject. There are surviving photos of moments from the historical event, like The Auschwitz Album and The Sonderkommando Photographs, but it can be argued that their circulation and general reuse engender a casual familiarity with the subject that may hinder, especially for the young, a proper engagement with the Nazi genocide. It should not need saying that such photos were all taken without the participants’ permission, mostly by Nazis, and this in itself raises questions about their use. Claude Lanzmann, giving voice to such trepidation, said that if he had ever come across any film made by the SS showing the Holocaust he would have destroyed it.
The third photograph in Buchenwald is also a forest scene but the trees and vegetation are growing out of the remains of a grid-like structure. From having the book before you and knowing its subject matter, the provenance of the man-made structure is never a mystery and becomes more explicit as more pages of the book are turned. The natural scenery comes to coexist with the premeditated acts of cruelty and murder that are known to have taken place there from after its establishment in 1937 until its liberation in 1945. Nature and the unnatural are synchronised and a present that appears innocent is seen to contain a guilty past; the now is also a past and what is contemporary points to the wound of its historic shadow. This is not history as understood by the English historian G. M. Young –‘the conversation of people who counted’ – but the uncounted and excluded voices that for E. P. Thompson, another English historian, we should be ‘listening all the time to’.
Photographing a countable presence through the absence of the uncountable is what Christian Rothe achieves in his work arising from time spent, between 2017 and 2024, across the vast area of the former concentration camp near Weimar. Using an analogue large-format camera, his black and white images constitute haunting visual testimony to what former concentration camp inmates have endeavoured to do in prose. One of these, a survivor of Buchenwald, is Jorge Semprún, a young communist arrested in France in 1943 and sent to the camp. In his novel The Long Voyage he describes a moment when two children, fleeing from dogs set upon them by Nazis, are united in death when the older one returns to take the hand of the younger child who has fallen behind: ‘The blows of the clubs felled them and, together, they dropped, their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all eternity’. Parts of Semprún’s autobiography, What a Beautiful Sunday!, are interspersed between Rothe’s pictures along with extracts of other notable texts by Bruno Apitz and Imre Kertész, a poem by Jossé Fosty and contributions by Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Günter Jeschonnek and Andrea Karle.
Semprún’s words represent a noumenal absolute, a universal, appearing as appearance and Rothe, doing something similar with his mise en scenes, captures a disquieting absence that is a presence. By way of critical contrast with Schlinder’s List, this is what also characterises Zone of Interest, the 2023 film that does not depict the industrialised slaughter but makes its presence all the more insistent because the viewer knows (and hears) what is happening. There is a dialectical twist between presence and absence – felt in the poignancy of remembering departed loved ones — that another photographer, Chloe Dewe Mathews, touched on in her Shot at Dawn: bringing a hundred years of memory into our consciousness by frame-freezing precise spots where British, French and Belgian soldiers were executed for cowardice and desertion in the First World War. It is the executions and deaths that took place at Buhenwald that are remembered by Christian Rothe.
Sean Sheehan
Christian Rothe : Buchenwald
Hartmann Books
German/English
Edited by Günter Jeschonnek
Extent: 240 pp
Illustrations: 119
Size: 21 × 33 cm
ISBN: 978-3-96070-125-5
€ 40.00
https://hartmann-books.com/en/produkt/christian-rothe-buchenwald-en/
