Schnappschüsse der Befreiung: Fotografien amerikanischer Soldaten im Frühjahr 1945 by Peter Pirker and Matthias Breit

Abstract

Reviewed by: Schnappschüsse der Befreiung: Fotografien amerikanischer Soldaten im Frühjahr 1945 by Peter Pirker and Matthias Breit Jeffrey Luppes Peter Pirker and Matthias Breit, Schnappschüsse der Befreiung: Fotografien amerikanischer Soldaten im Frühjahr 1945. Innsbruck: Tyrolia Verlag, 2020. 303 pp. After fighting their way across France and Germany during the fall and winter of 1944, the members of the 103rd Infantry ("Cactus") Division of the United States Army found themselves in western Austria in the weeks immediately before and after Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender in the spring of 1945. This relatively unscathed alpine region in which the Cactus Division was positioned at war's end was both symbolically significant and strategically important: in 1940, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met there at the Brenner Pass to forge their "Pact of Steel"; it was also there that the Western European front linked up with the Italian front as members of the Cactus Division joined arms with the American fighting forces coming from the south. The 103rd Infantry Division's war and its immediate aftermath were anything but uneventful, and fortunately, its soldiers documented their experiences—including combat, the surrender of Wehrmacht soldiers, the liberation of concentration camps, encounters with forced laborers and displaced persons, arrests of high-profile Nazi leaders like Hermann Göring and Wernher von Braun, and the occupation of this part of Austria—with a great many photographs. The photos of the Cactus Division are the subject of a new study by Austrian historian Peter Pirker and graphic designer Matthias Breit. According to Pirker and Breit, the photos—both official photographs by noted members of the US Signal Corps as well as unofficial and hitherto unpublished snapshots by untrained soldiers, some of whom requisitioned their cameras while fighting in Europe—provide insights into the liberation of Tyrol from the perspective of American soldiers, not the most common perspective on this topic. Moreover, they contend that the photos under [End Page 128] analysis offer to some extent counter-images ("Gegenbilder") to the canonized and symbolically important images, far better known, that tend to paint the local populations in a more favorable light. Indeed, the authors argue, the photos of American soldiers make a significant contribution to Austrian cultural memory by dispelling widespread myths around the defeat of National Socialism and restoration of peace in Austria (23). With a firm focus on shedding light on Austrian memory culture, Pirker and Breit's book is actually more about the American soldiers and their behavior in Austria than about Austrians and their perceptions of their postwar occupiers. Their approach is innovative and, ultimately, successful. The authors selected the objects of their analysis from the photographic archives of the US Signal Corps as well as the large collection assembled by the volunteer-run 103rd Infantry Division Association housed today at the University of Southern Mississippi. While the official photos of the Signal Corps were generally of higher quality, their motifs—as Pirker and Breit point out—were more consistent and predictable, essentially rendering them less interesting. In most cases, including in some images of actual combat, which were far less common in the snapshots taken by regular soldiers, the purpose of the photos was to make clear to all who the "good guys" and "bad guys" were in the war and to legitimize the Allied occupation. For that reason, the authors of this captivating new study consider the more mundane photos of the everyday soldiers, who were crazy about taking pictures ("geradezu versessen aufs Fotografieren," 11), to be more illuminating. A particular strength of the book is the authors' use of additional resources, such as biographies of the soldier photographers, servicemen's letters to relatives back home, regimental histories, and local newspaper articles about the soldiers' experiences to provide further context for the photographs. The unofficial photos are notable to Pirker and Breit for what they do not reveal: images of casualties and scenes of combat; fraternization with Austrian women; contacts with local populations; and African American soldiers, to name a few examples. Instead, the bulk of the informal photos show the soldiers' now-peaceful everyday lives in this beautiful setting: homesick comrades and friends behaving like tourists on...