Throughout Germanys tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval.The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history. Emphasizing the transformation of the visual arena and the ways in which ordinary people made sense of world events, these revealing case studies illustrate photographys multilayered role as a new form of representation, a means to subjective experience, and a fresh mode of narrating the past.

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Associate Professor for Late Modern Europe in the History Department of the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of several books on German and transnational history since the Enlightenment, most recently (as editor)Human Rights in the Twentieth-Century (2011) and (as co-editor),Seeking Peace in the Wake of War: Europe 1943-1947 (2015).

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

Introduction: Photography as an Ethics of SeeingJennifer Evans

Chapter 1. Thoughts on Photography and the Practice of HistoryElizabeth Edwards

Chapter 2. Seeing the Savage and the Suspension of Time: Photography, War and Concentration Camps in South West Africa, 1904-1908Claudia Siebrecht

Chapter 3. The Face of War in Weimar Visual CultureAnnelie Ramsbrock

Chapter 4. DocumentingHeimkehr: Photography, Displacement and Homecoming in the Nazi Resettlement of Ethnic Germans, 1939-1940Elizabeth Harvey

Chapter 5. Visible Trophies of War: German Occupiers Photographic Perceptions of France, 1940-44Julia Torrie

Chapter 6. Gazing at Ruins: German Defeat as Visual ExperienceStefan-Ludwig Hoffmann

Chapter 7. Edmund Kestings Polyphonic Portraits and the Abstract Face of the Socialist Self in East GermanySarah E. James

Chapter 8. Seeing Subjectivity: Erotic Photography and the Optics of DesireJennifer Evans

Chapter 9. Photographing Reurbanization in West Berlin, 1977-84Anna Ross

Chapter 10. The Diversification of East Germanys Visual CultureCandice M. Hamelin

Chapter 11. The Intimacy of Revolution: 1989 in PicturesPaul Betts

Epilogue: Hope Flies, Death Dances: Moving Toward an Ethics of SeeingJulia Adeney Thomas

Index