Abstract
This article utilizes photographs taken in Berlin just after the end of World War II to reconstruct the history of mass rape that took place in the city during this period and to argue for this event as foundational to post-war democratic political regimes that inscribed imperialism’s ruling logic within a ‘new world order’. In arguing this point, the author refuses the positivist and evidentiary frameworks through which scholars typically work with photographic images, abjuring an over-emphasis on what is or is not seen within the photographic image, instead focusing on the photograph’s affective and sonic registers, as well as other types of inscriptions in the body of the camera and emissions that require another modality of re/coding. By rereading images historically interpreted as documenting Berlin’s destruction alongside and through textual evidence of the mass rape, this analysis challenges the imperial scopic regime that has classified these images as not being photographs of rape, and connects this act of photographic erasure to the Allies’ post-war efforts to present themselves as saviors, thus legitimizing their continued imperial dominance over the world’s populations.
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