David Shneer. Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph.

Abstract

The postmemorial landscape of World War II has been shaped by well-known photographs. Endlessly reproduced, they crystallize the narratives of violence, conquest, and loss into a single image. Yet these iconic visual objects also have life stories of their own. In Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph, David Shneer brings to life one such biography. The photograph at the center of his book shows the aftermath of mass executions, in early December 1941, of the inhabitants of Kerch, a port city in Crimea. Shortly after the city fell to the Germans on November 16, 1941, about seven thousand of the city’s Jews were rounded up and shot in an antitank trench in nearby Bagerevo. The focal point of the Kerch photograph is a female figure with arms outstretched, leaning toward a corpse of a man. When the photograph was first published in March 1942, in a photo essay in the Soviet publication Ogonek (Огонёк), the woman was identified as “P. I. Ivanova, discovering the body of her husband.” Around her is a frozen landscape strewn with corpses—the last victims of the Aktion were shot in the open field along the edge of the ditch. A woman’s body contorted in a posture of grief, her countenance hollowed by sorrow, is a familiar trope that conveys the ravages of war, the eternally feminine face of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. The titular grief in the photograph is amplified by the image’s ambiance created by portentous dark clouds in the background, which we now know were spliced into the original picture.