Germany 1945

Dagmar Barnouw was Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California, until her sudden death in May 2008. Her books include Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity (IUP, 1988) and Naipaul's Strangers (IUP, 2003), among other books of cultural criticism.

• List of IllustrationsIntroduction: Views of War and Violence1. Views of the Past: Memory and Historical Evidence2. To Make Them See: Photography, Identification, and Identity3. The Quality of Citory and the "German Question": The Signal Corps Photography Album and Life Photo-Essays4. What They Saw: Germany 1945 and Allied Photographers5. Words and Images: German QuestionsNotesIndex

[Barnouw's] work shows that perspective plays a key role both in photography and in trying to master Germany's past. [F]ascinating.(Library Journal) Germany 1945 is best seen as a contribution to [the] debate . . . about the uniqueness or otherwise of Nazi crimes, and the related questions of collective responsibility for those crimes, and the need to go on remembering them.(Times Literary Supplement) Resist the impulse to 'historicize' the Holocaust . . . and you run the danger of sacralizing it. Barnouw's effort to grapple with these dilemmas is provocative, brilliant, and unsettling.(Washington Times) Germany 1945 contributes a vigorous voice to the expanding chorus of scholars who have called for increased examination of the immediate postwar years. (H-NET Reviews Humanities & Social Sciences) [Barnouw's] thoughtful analysis of a large assortment of photographs . . . allows Barnouw to look at how and not just what people saw, and to bring that perspective into conversation with the historical debates about the war's end in Germany. (Journal of Contemporary History)