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Dark Lens

Imaging Germany, 1945

Buy this book: Dark Lens
Paper
$30.00
ISBN: 9780226816852
Published December 2021
Cloth
$38.00
ISBN: 9780226625638
Published September 2019
epub
$29.99
ISBN: 9780226625775
Published September 2019
epub (45 days)
$12.50
ISBN: 9780226625775
Published September 2019
pdf
$29.99
ISBN: 9780226625775
Published September 2019
pdf (45 days)
$12.50
ISBN: 9780226625775
Published September 2019

Dark Lens

Imaging Germany, 1945

Esteemed scholar Françoise Meltzer examines images of war ruins in Nazi Germany and the role that images play in how we construct memories of war.
 
The ruins of war have long held the power to stupefy and appall. Can such ruins ever be persuasively depicted and comprehended? Can images of ruins force us to identify with the suffering of the enemy and raise uncomfortable questions about forgiveness and revenge?
 
Françoise Meltzer explores these questions in Dark Lens, which uses the images of war ruins in Nazi Germany to investigate problems of aestheticization and the representation of catastrophe. Through texts that give accounts of bombed-out towns in Germany in the last years of the war, painters’ attempts to depict the destruction, and her own mother’s photographs taken in 1945, Meltzer asks if any medium offers a direct experience of war ruins for the viewer. Refreshingly accessible and deeply personal, Dark Lens is a compelling look at the role images play in constructing memory.

256 pages | 4 color plates, 41 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2019

Art: Photography

History: European History

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

Philosophy: Ethics

Reviews

“It is the ‘righteous pleasure in retribution’ that worries Meltzer in Dark Lens, a work of scholarship organized around a collection of previously unpublished amateur photographs, taken by Jeanne Dumilieu (the author’s mother), that feature ruins in the wake of the Allied bombings of Germany. . . . Our gaze is precisely what Meltzer is interested in investigating. What and how do we see when we see these photos? Can we even see the ruin as such? This proposition suggests a provocative way of rereading the history of interest in and representation of ruins. Perhaps our enduring obsession with them—and our drive to depict and behold them—is fueled by our very inability to reckon with destruction.”

Nathan Goldman | Lapham’s Quarterly

“Meltzer’s Dark Lens is based around a couple of dozen snaps which her mother, a Frenchwoman who had been in the Resistance, took of ruined German cities immediately after the war. This personal angle whets the reader’s appetite, as does the reminder of just how strangely fascinated we all are by ruins.” 

James Hawes | The Spectator

Dark Lens offers striking insights into Meltzer’s childhood experiences as a foreigner in a defeated land. . . The book is elegantly written and cogently argued.”

German Studies Review

Table of Contents

What I Remember
 
By Way of Beginning
1 When Words Fail: Writing Disaster
2 Ruination in Painting: Making the Unspeakable Visible
3 Through a Lens, Darkly: Texts and Images
4 Suffering and Victimization
Foregone and Other Conclusions

Appendix
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index

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