on european ground by Alan Cohen. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.)

on european ground, a new book of photography by Alan Cohen, takes three major wars of the twentieth century as its theme: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Essays by Sander L. Gilman and Jonathan Bordo and an interview with Cohen conducted by Roberta Smith flesh out the photographs and provide a useful supplementary analysis, no doubt in part to prevent misunderstandings, since any representation of the Holocaust is a sensitive topic.

The photographs are divided into three sections, which document the sites -- the literal ground - of some of this century's grisliest events. The first section depicts the rolling hills and former ditches of the Somme and Verdun in France, landscapes representative of the slaughters of World War I. The middle section consists of photographs taken at six concentration camps in Germany and Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, and Buchenwald. The last section records the pavement and sidewalks where the Berlin Wall stood.

If at first the battlegrounds of World War I, concentration camps, and the Berlin Wall make a surprising juxtaposition, Gilman explains the connections. According to his historical analysis, the destruction of the German nation and its identity as a result of World War I led to World War II, and hence to the Holocaust. (Gilman hedges on this point, however, acknowledging alternative theories that the Holocaust had no precedent and no comprehensible reason for occurring). The Cold War and the erection of the Berlin Wall followed in turn from the legacy of World War II. Gilman describes "the sense of many Germans, especially German Jews, that the Wall, though built in 1961, somehow embodied the Nazi defilement of the city." For Gilman, then, the Berlin wall was a symbol of a divided country living with its criminal past, whose atrocities resulted from the historical circumstances of the first World War.

Gilman states, "Cohen's project is to explore, at the end of a century of mass death, how to represent historical trauma in a manner true to our own moment." Through their titles and subject matter, these black and white photographs reveal a depth of literalness at odds with their formal, abstract appearance. The actual earth, the scene of carnage and mass murder, bears few traces today of its tormented history. The sites of Cohen's photographs are memorials, yet they also give evidence of the erasure of memory and history by nature and time. Cohen implies that our task as responsible viewers is to bring back meaning to these disintegrating places through our knowledge of history. The sites of past, unspeakable horrors do not necessarily look evil.

Cohen's intention in presenting these photographs is not clear. If the photographs are to be "true to our own moment" in a documentary sense, why does he use the romantic format of black and white photography, which recalls either art photography or old historical photos? Black and white can give a "timeless," solemn quality to photography; but that very quality is a fiction created by our nostalgia for the format, thus separating us from a sense of immediacy which Cohen claims to desire.

The aesthetics of Cohen's photographs also raises questions about their intent. As readers, we can assume his point is to memorialize: we must never forget that evil, horrendous deeds happened here. But why, then, are some works so beautiful? The pleasure created by this beauty seems decidedly at odds with the photographs' subject matter. The sensuous pictures of the hills and dells left by shell craters in the Somme and Verdun suggest the earth as a wounded body, which was indeed how the French viewed their nation, especially after World War I.¹ Viewed in this context, the World War I photographs are the best of the series. The beauty of the photographs emphasizes how the earth itself was torn apart by the war, an apt metaphor for the men who died there.

Few of the camp photographs, to their credit, are beautiful. Most are banal and boring to the point of disinterest, perhaps capturing the "banality of evil" that philosopher Hannah Arendt describes in her record of the famous Nazi trial of Adolf Eichmann.² There is little contrast in tone, and the texture is flat. The attention to the smallest detail, such as the corner of a former building represented today by concrete curbs, hints in its very normality at the agony involved in every moment of camp life.

Yet the last photograph of the section, titled Bergen-Belsen, shows such a concrete curb covered by tiny, star-like flowers. Is this frankly beautiful image a clichéd and tasteless suggestion of hope in humankind? Is it a comment on the seduction and beauty of evil? Or does it perhaps expose the treachery involved when we trust our memory to the indifference of nature, instead of to history and knowledge?

Cohen's final photographs document the filled-in gashes on the sidewalks and streets where the Berlin Wall once stood. He creates pictorial abstractions of the pavement by capturing more interesting views than in the camp pictures. Despite the strong pictorial devices, however, these photographs are the weakest within the overall schema of the book. Although grim reminders of the city's (and the nation's) separation, these images finally express optimism. They are signs of a city peacefully re-unified and patent symbols of the end of the Cold War.

Unlike the memorialized sites of World War I and the camps, these spots have been integrated into the bustle of daily life, barely noticed by anyone except tourists. This is Cohen's very point in memorializing them, says Gilman. But if the Wall stood for Germany and Berlin's Nazi past, as Gilman earlier states, then, following his own logic, the removal of that Wall must be a removal of guilt and even of memory itself. When combined with the bloody devastation of World War I and the horrible circumstances of World War II, such a hopeful point of view, ultimately denying the evils of memory and making a case for history as progress, is highly problematic.

In on european ground, Cohen reiterates the importance of place in memory. Unfortunately, through his choice of subject matter, which follows what could be called the coincidence of history, he gives a rather pat, naïve optimism to what should be a memorial of sorrow and horror. Perhaps because Cohen, as an American, is both geographically and culturally removed from this complex and difficult European past, his attempt to make sense of it creates a skewed narrative which simplifies the story of place and memory within an unfinished history.

Sources>>

Author's Bio>>