Johannes von Moltke, Department of Germanic Languages and Literature,
University of Michigan

To anyone with an interest in a historically grounded understanding
of the visual, these three essays mark a welcome intervention. Each
contributing distinct--but complementary--insights on the topic,
Betts, Crew, and Wandel all stake a fundamental claim that can stand
as the underlying premise of this forum: given the amount of serious
and sustained reflection on the role of visual culture in recent
historiography, the merely "illustrative" use of visual material in
historical scholarship can no longer go unchallenged. In Betts's apt
phrase, "to be effective, the integration of visual materials demands
much more than ‘just add images and stir.'" Rather, serious
consideration of the ways in which visual forms operate within, if
not define, specific historical junctures will require the adoption
of research practices, analytical methodologies, and theories that
allow for the specificity of the visual in its own right. Only to the
degree that we begin "thinking with images" in this strong sense can
we speak of a "visual turn" in the study of history.

With this assumption as their more or less explicit starting point,
the three authors raise a number of highly pertinent questions: to
what degree has a "visual turn" begun to inform historical research
in general, and work in German history in particular? What difference
does it make if we bring questions--let alone theories--of visual
culture to bear on pre-modern and early modern histories, as opposed
to the modern era through which these questions and theories tend to
be framed? What particular aspects of social, cultural, or political
life does a focus on the visual help to illuminate--and can such a
focus help to illuminate these aspects better than other approaches?
And how do we distinguish between different types and functions of
the visual--whether in terms of the different visual arts (painting,
photography, film, architecture, etc.), of different modes
(documentary or fictional) or of different "pragmatics," i.e. the
various uses of the visual (in museums or compilation films, as
evidence or propaganda, for the purposes of social or religious
"distinction," etc.)? Some of these questions are more implicit than
others, some remain unanswered in the context of these initial
considerations. My goal here is to pinpoint the questions that I
happen to consider the most promising, to indicate what other
questions might need to be asked, and thereby hopefully to initiate a
broader discussion on how we should frame the historical study of
visual culture as an interdisciplinary project.

Not all of the authors agree on how much has "visually turned" in
German history to date. Paul Betts, in particular, sounds a somewhat
skeptical note in his reflections, pointing out that "visual sources
are still noticeably absent from larger historical accounts of
twentieth century Germany, or Europe for that matter." David Crew
likewise finds that "when most historians think about images, they
tend to see only illustrations for the arguments they have already
derived from the documents in the archives." Curiously (why this
should be curious is part of her argument), it falls to Lee Wandel to
diagnose a bona fide "engagement with ‘visual culture' for early
modern central Europe" and to map the considerable excitement that
questions of visuality, vision, and representation hold for research
on early modern Germany, as well as for our understanding of the
historical role of visual culture itself. Her sketch of current work
on Jesuit art, on the ‘conquest of reality,' and on cartography
convincingly suggests ways in which close attention to early modern
forms of visuality has the potential to redirect our gazes, not only
at the social uses of (religious) images, but at the shifting
pragmatics of the visual as it plays out across early modern and
modern contexts. In this regard, I found particularly compelling her
assertion of "key distances" between the early modern and the modern
in questions of visuality.[1] For if images "were understood to
function differently [in early modern contexts] than modern visual
theory, psychology, or cognitive studies might posit," then this
strongly implies the need to carefully historicize those very
theories. While some of the latter already come "equipped" with a
certain degree of historical self-consciousness (e.g. Benjamin's
notion of the "optical unconscious," which is formulated within the
context of a historically grounded, critical theory of modernity),
others obstinately lay claim to ahistorical universals that Palmer's
perspective can help to dislodge. I am thinking here in particular of
cognitivist appeals to fundamental human perceptual schemata, which
in some instances have been invoked precisely to counter broad
claims--among them Benjamin's--regarding a fundamental shift in human
perception with the onset of modernity.[2] Where the cognitivist
position hopes to establish incontrovertible scientific evidence
through appeals to biology, neurology and the longue durée of human
evolution, Wandel usefully reminds us (following Lindberg) that the
scientific models to which we appeal are themselves historically
variable, and that "modern constructions of ‘perception' itself rest
upon a biological model of the body which achieved a kind of cultural
predominance only towards the end of the seventeenth century and a
model of human psychology that has been located in the twentieth
century."

Now, despite Betts's and Crew's caveats, it would obviously be
misleading to suggest that all historical work on this side of the
modern divide remains trapped in the bad, old habits of using the
visual in purely illustrative fashion. On the contrary, both Crew's
extensive discussion of photography in the context of Nazi Germany,
the Holocaust and its aftermath, and Betts's highly suggestive
examples of how the visual turn might serve to "explore aspects of
history that more conventionally-based textual histories ignore or
discount" clearly point to the vitality and promise of this field.
Crew compellingly demonstrates the centrality of the visual to our
understanding of German history by reminding us not only of the power
of images in the mise-en-scène of the Third Reich and in the ways we
have come to understand Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (whether
through the media of exhibition, film, or photography, or through
scholarly and critical writing); pointing to the work of Kracauer and
Benjamin, Crew also reminds us that, in the German context,
reflection on the power of images is part of the historical record.
As he points out, the work that he reviews (and, I should add, that
which he himself contributes) does suggest "that academic historians
of Germany are increasingly prepared to think seriously about the
possibilities and problems of images as historical sources and about
the ways in which photographs have been used by Germans in the past."

It is this category of "use" that defines some of the most important
insights offered by both Crew and Betts. For Crew, this means to
inquire into how photographic images were produced and used in both
public and private spheres of the Third Reich, how they were used
differently by perpetrators and victims, but also how they were
subsequently used to implicate or exonerate, as evidence or as
political instrument. In a similar way, Betts draws our attention to
the way visual material has been used to assert, maintain or
"disseminate" power, how it is implicated in the social construction
of truth and how everyday forms of (self-)representation tend to
operate first and foremost on a visual level. These "uses" of
photographs, images, and visual forms of display--what I would call
the "pragmatics" of the visual--provide an enormously rich archive
for studying the history of everything from official forms of
representation at the level of institutional politics to the minutiae
of everyday life, from the construction of state power to the
construction of subjectivity.

This emphasis on "use" and its historical contexts, in other words,
seems both promising and appropriate for an exploration of the visual
anchored in history as a discipline. However, we should be careful
not to confine ourselves to such a pragmatics of the visual at the
expense of other ways of studying visual materials and modes of
display. Perhaps for reasons of space, but presumably also due to
disciplinary protocols, the three contributions by Betts, Crew and
Wandel pay far less attention to the aesthetics of the visual than to
its pragmatics. To be sure, my own inclinations on this issue are
themselves disciplinary in the sense that I consider myself a film
scholar with a sustained interest in (German) history, as opposed to
a trained historian. But by the same token, I would hope that my
interest in exploring also the formal conventions, the stylistic
histories, the aesthetic dimensions of any given visual material is
not construed in any way as opposed to the emphasis on pragmatics
that I've identified in the three historians' contributions. Rather,
I consider attention to aesthetics to be complementary with the
emphasis on pragmatics within the overarching project of studying
visual culture historically.

The goal in this discussion, as I see it, should be an increase in
interdisciplinarity, construed as a genuine dialogue among
disciplines.[3] To the degree that this goal does not (yet) emerge
already from the original contributions, this may have to do as much
with the term "visual culture" as with any disciplinary commitment to
history on the part of the authors--for there is a sense in which the
very notion of visual culture (much like the term "early modern," as
Wandel points out) operates a certain leveling effect on the
distinctions that fuel it: narrative media such as film become folded
into the same category as non-narrative visual forms, such as
painting, architecture, or even photography; photographic media and
their specific relationship to the "real" stand alongside the
digital, etc. To gain any analytical purchase on these distinctions,
in other words, we should draw on the specific expertise, methods and
theories developed in different disciplines, bringing them into
conversation with each other and with history, rather than forfeiting
that expertise by implicitly asserting the homogeneity of
heterogeneous visual forms.

To take a straightforward, and probably uncontentious example from my
own research and teaching in film, we should be prepared to link
considerations of Leni Riefenstahl's role as the Third Reich's
leading visual propagandist with considerations of the way she
manipulated cinematography and editing in her films; within a history
of the visual, reconstructing the ways in which Riefenstahl's films
were used should be one side of a project that also considers the
relevance of such seemingly minute aesthetic choices as the
deliberate blurring of the "Führer" in oddly off-centered shots (see
fig. 1 and 2 < http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/visual/
visual_index.htm >).

Similarly, considerations of the uses of photography in the Third
Reich such as those traced by David Crew might be amplified by
placing them within art-historical trajectories that map the changing
formal conventions of portraiture or amateur photography. Or--to
offer a less straightforward example--we might want to allow for
considerations of the historicity of a given medium itself, asking
how the cinema's relationship to notions of temporality not only
inflects the way we perceive cinematic images but also parallels (or
not) historiographic practices.[5]

This is not to say that such distinctions and connections are lost on
the contributors who, at various junctures, signal a keen awareness
of the stakes involved. In his considerations of framing, shot
composition and the odd smile of an ostensibly humiliated
photographic subject, David Crew, in particular, pays close attention
to the formal logics of individual images, as well as to the
specificity of photography as an aesthetic form. Betts likewise
emphasizes questions of style and genre alongside those of origins,
intentions, and audience. And Wandel, following Belting, crucially
posits the distinction between a medieval conception of the image as
icon and modern constructions of images as aesthetic objects. But I
would argue that these distinctions can be honed still further. Let
me offer two final examples of what I mean by this.

The first is methodological (even if it appears, on the surface, to
be merely terminological): in keeping with the other two
contributors, who also ask us to consider the visual always in
relation to the textual, Crew rightly asks, "What theories and what
methodologies do we need to ‘read the visual' that are different from
the instruments we utilize in ‘reading texts'?" But perhaps even this
question needs to be revised for a rigorous consideration of how
images function within history; for as David Bordwell has justifiably
insisted, the notion of "reading" an image (a legacy of semiotics and
structuralism in literary studies) may already skew our vision by
importing the metaphor of a natural language; referring to film
spectatorship in particular, Bordwell argues that viewing "is
synoptic, tied to the time of [a film's] presentation, and literal;
it does not require translation into verbal terms" for the viewer to
grasp an image (though it certainly does for a critic to analyze it).
[6] What we need to account for, in other words, are the specific
forms that "viewing" might take in any given instance.

My second suggestion relates to how we might locate that specificity.
There is surprisingly little discussion in these contributions of the
_media_ of visual culture--that is, of the forms in which images
reach (are mediated for) their viewers, of the particular aesthetic
properties and histories of these media, and of their distinct
historical roles. Again, this may be a matter of space as much as of
discipline, and again the term "visual culture" may conceal as much
as it helps to reveal. But clearly, it makes a difference whether a
human likeness appears as painted religious icon, as photograph in a
family album, or in moving images on film or television. Here, again,
I would advocate drawing together different forms of disciplinary
expertise as they have developed in the study of the various arts--
including their histories. Sven Kramer's volume, reviewed by Crew,
perhaps represents the closest approximation of what I have in mind
here. The anthology brings together historians and art historians,
scholars in cultural studies, the social sciences, literature and
film to investigate the audiovisual history of the Shoah from the
1940s through the present. Crew justly highlights the originality of
Jörg Friess's contribution to that volume, which is devoted to so-
called "compilation films" about the Holocaust. Friess' article, I
would suggest, can indeed serve as a highly specific example for ways
to bridge between the historical pragmatics and the formal aesthetics
of visual forms. Focusing on the various uses and re-uses (and even
what has more recently been called "remediation") of photographs and
film footage in such films, Friess's approach combines attention to
the pragmatics of the image with detailed considerations of the
rhetorics, aesthetics and politics of the compilation film.

The broader implications of this specific example, however, are
ultimately again of a methodological nature. An interdisciplinary
approach to the visual requires careful consideration of how to
"frame" a given image, a film, a museum exhibit, or aspects of the
built environment for the purpose of analysis and interpretation. If,
as Steedman has argued "an archive is not only a way of knowing, but
also a way of seeing" (quoted in Betts), then we should stop to
consider how entering the archive with different disciplinary
dispositions might produce different ways of seeing--how the same
archive of visual material, in other words, may reveal different
things to the trained historian on the one hand and the trained art
historian, film scholar or architectural critic, on the other. Our
goal as scholars must be, I submit, not to erase these differences by
asserting the primacy of a particular discipline or by sweeping them
under the rug of "the visual," but to bring them into
interdisciplinary dialogue with one another. In this spirit, I look
forward to the discussion in this particular forum.

Notes

[1]. This said, we probably should not overstress the methodological
divide between studies of modern and early modern forms of visuality.
A recent essay by Helmut Puff on sodomy in Dürer's "The Death of
Orpheus," for example, convincingly demonstrates the usefulness of
frameworks drawn from discourse analysis, arguing that "visual images
take up, reflect, connect with, comment on, ridicule, and reformulate
existing discursive formulations. To view images through the lens of
discourse allows us to locate them within a field of references that
are both visual and textual--a field that also testifies to the
process of image-making with its tensions and contradictions." Helmut
Puff, "Visual Translations: Albrecht Dürer's ‘The Death of
Orpheus' (1494)" in _Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of
Premodern Europe_ ed. Basil Duffalo and Peggy McCracken (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).

[2]. For a good summary of the debate on the "modernity thesis," see
Ben Singer, _Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and
its Contexts_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

[3]. Scott Spector issues a similar plea in a different, yet related
discussion: Scott Spector, "Was The Third Reich Movie-Made?
Interdisciplinarity and the Reframing of ‘Ideology,'" _American
Historical Review_ 106 (April 2001): pp. 460-484.

[4]. As Julia Hell, who has been working on the device of blurred
vision in paintings by Gerhart Richter, pointed out to me, images
such as the ones I identify here function not only in the context of
Nazi Germany, but are part of a larger "history of blurriness" that
is directly pertinent to the questions broached by this forum.
Wolfgang Ullrich, _Geschichte der Unschärfe_ (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2002).

[5]. For two very different ways of thinking about the relationship
between cinema and history in this respect, see on the one hand
Robert Rosenstone, _Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to our
Idea of History_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), and on
the other hand, Philip Rosen, _Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity,
Theory_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and Mary
Ann Doane, _ The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency,
the Archive_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

[6]. David Bordwell, _Narration in the Fiction Film_ (Madison:
Wisconsin University Press, 1985), p. 30.

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