Overview

Esteemed scholar Françoise Meltzer examines images of war ruins in Nazi Germany and the role that images play in how we construct memories of war.   The ruins of war have long held the power to stupefy and appall. Can such ruins ever be persuasively depicted and comprehended? Can images of ruins force us to identify with the suffering of the enemy and raise uncomfortable questions about forgiveness and revenge?   Françoise Meltzer explores these questions in Dark Lens, which uses the images of war ruins in Nazi Germany to investigate problems of aestheticization and the representation of catastrophe. Through texts that give accounts of bombed-out towns in Germany in the last years of the war, painters’ attempts to depict the destruction, and her own mother’s photographs taken in 1945, Meltzer asks if any medium offers a direct experience of war ruins for the viewer. Refreshingly accessible and deeply personal, Dark Lens is a compelling look at the role images play in constructing memory.

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Reviews

Meltzer has written a masterpiece--an intensely personal, beautifully expressed and reflective critical interrogation of transgenerational haunting in relation to the ruins that dominated her own childhood in post-War Germany. One special feature of Meltzer's writing is the subtle and riveting range of perspectives she brings. It is rare to find such voices so superbly melded in so urgent and important a text. --Jas Elsner, University of Oxford Can we escape the Romantics' aesthetization of ruins when we 'read' Germany's ruins? Do the texts, paintings and photographs allow us to 'see' the suffering of civilians - then and now? No other ruin scholar has raised the ethical questions provoked by these haunting ruinscapes as subtly and rigorously as Meltzer. When she leaves us alone with her mother's photographs, Meltzer's probing reflections have prepared us to think about what a concept of ruin art might mean in this politically treacherous context. --Julia Hell, co-editor of Ruins of Modernity and author of The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome Meltzer's meditation on her mother's searing photographs of German ruins is bold yet subtle. Dark Lens tears these images out of the continuum of history to examine civilian suffering. Meltzer suggests a way of looking at pictures of destruction without lapsing into either moral relativism or another cycle of blame and retribution. --Ulrich C. Baer, New York University Can catastrophe and the suffering of others be persuasively represented so as to reduce human suffering? In Dark Lens, Meltzer addresses this question fully, with a theoretically versatile examination of attempts to capture catastrophes in words and images. Meltzer stresses the historical and ethical contexts in which these texts demand to be read, but recognizes that no amount of theorizing or moralizing will domesticate the upsetting incongruities she lays bare. --Werner Sollors, author of The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s

Author Information

Fran oise Meltzer is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where she is also professor at the Divinity School and in the College, and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Meltzer is the author of five books, most recently of Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity, and a coeditor of the journal Critical Inquiry.

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