Narrating the war in pictures: German photo books on World War I and the construction of pictorial war narrations

Abstract

During and especially after World War I a large number of photo books on World War I were published in Germany. With these publications (photo books and text/photo combinations) the editors expressed their interpretation of the war by the arrangement, accompanying texts and captions. The editors took the single photographs out of their original context (regarding date, place and even motif) in order to create a coherent image of the war and discourse that was part of the overall debate on World War I during the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s in Germany. Authors on the political Left like Ernst Friedrich, and authors of the Right like Ernst Jünger, Franz Schauwecker and others, used the same photographs in conflicting images and interpretations of that past war. This article analyses the arrangements and contexts of photographs in these highly successful and influential publications. The publications should be read and understood as narrations with more or less obvious intentions to manipulate the reader and to gain hegemony of the image of World War I as the first modern war – an image that served as a blueprint for the representation of the next war(s) to come.