Hauptinhalt
Christian Fuhrmeister
„Tour of Curators to occupied regions of France and Belgium, October 12-22, 1940“ – Reflections on a photo album preserved at the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Munich
In mid-October 1940 nine curators (including Georg Lill from Bavaria) and three members of the Ministry of Science and Education of the ‚Third Reich’ (including Robert Hiecke) went on a tour to Belgium and France, guided by the members of the German Military „Kunstschutz“: Rosemann (Belgien) und Metternich (Frankreich). Temporarily, Metternich’s staff members (Pfitzner, Bunjes, von Tieschowitz, Kalnein, Hörmann, Busley und Zimmermann) accompanied them. A photo album documents this tour; in addition, Lill wrote a detailed 70 pages travel report. Furthermore, a number of colour slides were taken by Lill during the trip.
Despite a number of references to both the photo album (which was exhibited in 2009 1) and the travel report,2 the status of these two documents remains unclear and certainly deserves further investigation. In particular, the visual and the written documentation raise a number of questions: Can this tour be seen (or interpreted) as a sightseeing tour? Or rather as an educational journey? Was it a proper study trip – or an official documentation of protection measures? In which way did the participants exploit, employ and use – or merely benefit from – the occupation status?
Essentially, the conference paper introduced the audience to this album by showing some exemplary pages, and quoting a number of Lill’s descriptions.
Both the set of images and the accompanying text by Georg Lill pose, I believe, a number of serious challenges – and problems. To begin with, the references to these documents mentioned above remain rather descriptive in the sense that they rarely do more than to identify places, buildings, persons, and actions. They present a narration, based on visual and textual evidence, but they do not present a coherent analysis, and they do not tackle with the very specific character of both report and album. As far as I can see, only Christina Kott has tried to highlight the genuinely ambiguous and ambivalent character of this tour (and the role of its participants), taking into account, first of all, the context of the tour. She correctly identifies the protagonists as art and architectural historians in an occupied country.
However, I believe we have to go further, and include questions of a more general character: How would an ideal interpretation of this album look like? What are the prerequisites of an analysis that goes beyond that what is visible? Nota bene: I am not interested in the ontological status of these photographs, nor in theoretical reflections of the relationship between camera and object, medium and message, photography and evidence, etc.. Rather, I wonder whether we need to expand our understanding of what photographs such as these – produced under very specific circumstances, and assembled in an album – represent. Given the fact that this album shows some buildings, persons, and activities, and does not show others, we are forced to reflect presence and absence in a more comprehensive way. In short, I believe that it is as important to note what is included, and what is excluded – or perhaps even consciously hidden from sight. Secondly, while these images are certainly meant to document, they unwillingly and inevitably also reflect dispositions, expectations and convictions of the photographer (who, in this case, is 1. the man operating the mechanical apparatus of the camera, 2. the academic or scholar with a particular background, field of expertise, and research interests, and 3. the head of a State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in war times). That said, it is clear that we have to start to think differently about photographs such as these: We not only need a precise account of the circumstances, of the context, and of the individual author/producer, we also need to take into account that these images might eventually function as ‘mirrors’. In short, I am arguing towards a multi-dimensional interpretation of visual documentation.