The Sonderkommando Photographs

Abstract

ecent debates concerning the possibility of representing the Holocaust focus on postwar attempts to do so, often by people who did not experience the events directly.1 The much-discussed works of survivors were of course produced after the liberation of the camps. Much of the existing literature on the representation of the Holocaust, dealing with retrospective reconstructions or responses, tends to concentrate on literature, poetry, film, or historiography. The special problems of photography-especially photography from the periodas a medium of representation have until recently been overlooked. The Sonderkommando photographs, however, are so important precisely because they are not recollections. There is an urgency, an immediacy about these photographs that appears to render the whole discussion of representation problematic. In the face of full-frontal atrocity, the impulse to theorize seems almost offensive. Can one say more about these photographs than confirm ErnstJiJnger's claim from 1931 that Already today there is hardly an event of human significance toward which the artificial eye of civilization, the photographic lens, is not directed. The result is often pictures of demoniacal precision through which humanity's new relation to danger becomes visible in an exceptional fashion?2 In the following pages, I argue that the Sonderkommando photographs, far from revealing the inadequacy of theoretical thought, actually demand an awareness of it, because these photographs go far beyond whatJunger had in mind in 1931. The photographs themselves are of such manifest importance that I must state at the outset that this article is only an attempt to broaden an awareness of the existence of these photographs with the aid of a theoretical vocabulary. If the