War and PhotographyAuthor(s): Ernst Jünger and Anthony NassarSource: New German Critique, No. 59, Special Issue on Ernst Junger (Spring - Summer, 1993),pp. 24-26Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488220 .Accessed: 04/06/2011 10:29

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War and Photography

Ernst Jutnger

A war that is distinguished by the high level of technical precision re- quired to wage it, is bound to leave behind documents more numerous and varied than battles waged in earlier times, less present to con- sciousness. It is the same intelligence, whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemy to the exact second and meter, that labors to pre- serve the great historical event in fine detail. The equipment at its dis- posal is immense. Already, a gigantic literature about the world war has taken shape in every country and is still growing, drawing on an endless supply of personal reminiscences and official accounts. The historian of the future who wishes to report on this war will certainly be more perplexed by the excess than the lack of sources.

Included among the documents ot particular precision, which have only recently been at the disposal of human intelligence, are photo- graphs, of which a large supply accumulated during the war. Day in and day out, optical lenses were pointed at the combat zones alongside the mouths of rifles and cannons. As instruments of a technological consciousness, they preserved the image of these ravaged landscapes which the world of peace has long since reappropriated.

Thus arose a trove of images, which can be endlessly recombined, and not only serve as a lively stimulus to the soldier's memory, but also as a useful aid to the imagination of those who could not partici- pate in the world of the war. The life of the soldier on leave, in the re- serves, and in the combat zones; the types of weaponry, the look of de- struction they inflict on human beings and on the fruits of their labor, on their dwellings and on nature; the face ot the battletield at rest

24

Ernst Jiinger 25

and at the peak of activity, as seen by the observer in the trenches or bomb craters, or from the altitude of flight - all of this has been cap- tured many times over and preserved for later ages in a tashion that compliments written descriptions. Indeed, we even possess pictures which originated in moments of close combat, lucky accidental shots of the camera, aimed by hands that relinquished the rifle or grenade for a second in order to click the shutter.

For the attentive observer, a collection of such optical documents opens the way for a valuation of war not only as a succession of battles, but, in its essence, as labor as well. In particular, the viewer is offered a singular view of horror and of the desolation of the landscape that will in all probability never be repeated, a view which, apart from the world war, was only hinted at in the Russo-Japanese War. Already in these years after the war, there has been a transformation developing in battle technology, which will inevitably alter the look of tuture con- flicts. Weapons are becoming continually more abstract, developing in stride with the technological world in general; increased mechaniza- tion makes them more mobile and effective at greater distances. One could guess that the army of engines which will carry these weapons across the land and through the air will no longer tolerate an extended stalemate on the front, and will increasingly turn toward cities, the nerve centers of the technological world.

It goes without saying that such a development makes war a deed of ever greater responsibility and of ever more drastic consequences. The effects of the last war now extend tar beyond the life of the generation that took part in it, and perhaps a less vigorous nation than Germany [ein Land von geringerer Lebenskraft als Deutschland] would have been un- able to tolerate such a defeat. Insofar as life tends to forget very quickly the difficulties it has endured, pictures that make the misery of war present are especially valuable. A photo anthology cannot exclude such photos any more than it can consist only of them, though there have been attempts at the latter. Appealing only to our revulsion to suffering would be a betrayal of our moral essence, as would a beautification of such a serious matter as that which was embodied by this war.

One simply cannot expect more from photography than it can de- liver. Its detailed impressions of the surface of events are like the im- pressions left behind in stone of the existence of certain strange crea- tures. Certainly these offer visual data - but to surmise how the life of a large animal in all its mysterious movements untolded: that requires

26 War and Photography

imagination. To sense the spirit of great deeds and great suffering be- hind the images of a lost world, behind its ruins, that is the task which

every document demands of the attentive viewer; so it is with the pho- tographs of zones of battles past.

Translated by Anthony Nassar*

* "Krieg und Lichtbild" was the lead essay in an anthology entitled: das Antlitz des Weltkrieges. Jtonterlebnisse deutscher Soldaten. Mit etwa 200 photo-graphischen Aufnahmen auf ihfeln, Kartenanhang sowie einer chronologischen Kriegsgeschichte in lizbelle. [The Countenance of the World War: Experiences of German Soldiers on the Front. With approximately 200 photographs, an appendix with maps, and a chronological war history.] Edited by Ernst Jiinger and published by Neufeld & Henius Verlag, Berlin, in 1930, the volume was meant as a cultural history of the war as represented through soldiers' descriptions of their experiences as well as through pictures from the battlefields. Reprinted with the kind permission of Klett-Cotta O J. C. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, Stuttgart.

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