Ofer Ashkenazi, Sarah Wobick-Segev, Rebekka Grossmann, and Shira Miron. Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025. 355 PP. Cloth $60.00. ISBN: 9781512826357.
The advent of mass photography has often inspired a mix of fascination and frustration. The more accessible photography became, an enduring lament claims, the less a single image actually captured. A medium that had once unveiled a deeper truth about its objects that would go unnoticed in the flow of life, now seemed to render them practically meaningless through endless reproduction. Taking pictures was no longer an act of magical attentiveness. Rather, it became a practice of habituated sleepwalking. Certainly, skeptics have argued, photography’s proclivity for seemingly carefree consumption and smiling conformity made it especially unfit for the representation of peculiar experiences; much less those of German Jews under Nazism.
In the brilliantly crafted study Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany, Ofer Ashkenazi, Rebekka Grossmann, Sarah Wobick-Segev, and Shira Miron turn this assumption on its head. As they argue, it was precisely photography’s great popularity among the middle classes and its prevalent bourgeois conventions that made it a promising source to recover Jewish experiences after 1933. Sure, at first glance the vast majority of photos taken by Jews in Nazi Germany closely resemble those of their non-Jewish neighbors. They generally display seemingly ordinary scenes: a trip to the beach, the artsy décor of a bourgeois living room, or life at a boarding school. However, “what became ever more apparent in reviewing these photos was the strikingly large proportion of images that displayed incongruent moments” (3); subtle signifiers that undermined and challenged the superficial dullness commonly associated with private photography. Such “intricate inferences have been particularly effective in negotiating sentiments, beliefs, and self-perceptions in the face of growing uncertainty” (4). Photography, the authors of Still Lives assert, was not detached from the Jewish experiences of exceeding crisis and uncertainty. Rather, it’s widespread popularity and well-established conventions gave German Jews a nuanced language to articulate their attempts to make sense of them.
Photographs constitute the largest source of Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. As Jewish families managed to escape to foreign countries, they often brought with them photos and albums they had taken and assembled in the years before, many of which were later donated to Jewish archives around the world. Yet until recently, scholars have been hesitant to engage with them. If they did, it was predominantly through specific family collections or to examine groups such as the Jewish Youth Movement. Still Lives adopts a different approach. The authors built an impressively large database of around 15,000 photographs. Most of these images were captured by middle-class city dwellers. Within this data set, however, the images offer a great variety of gender, religious observance, and age. Notably, the authors have paid great attention to the ways that Jewish children and teenagers reflected their youth in a hostile environment. Still Lives thus constitutes the first comprehensive study of Jewish photography in Nazi Germany.
To bring these images together into a coherent framework, the authors define three “modes of expression”: abstraction, pathos, and irony. While abstraction refers to the visual detachment of an object from its socio-historical setting – the portrait of a mother set against the plain wall of her living room, a close-up of a hiker sitting in the grass with no connection to the surrounding landscape – pathos describes a deliberate emotional charging of an otherwise mundane setting. The conscious staging of Heimat iconography, for example, would depict a visit to the eastern countryside as an affirmation of German bourgeois culture, just like the adoption of Zionist imagery could tint an image of German farm work with the color of a promised future. Crucially, pathos ties its object to an imagined community. If both modes constitute a straightforward relationship between the objects and their historical environment, irony breaks up this bond again. Irony could be created within the photo, for instance by capturing a mundane picnic at a public swimming pool – with a swastika flag waving on a pole in the background. Or it could be generated outside of the frame, by placing a pathos-ridden image of a family proudly posing by its vehicle in an album – even though the supposedly liberating trip ended abruptly in a car crash soon after. In any case, irony adds a second, reverse layer to the photo.
Each mode of expression can be read as evidence of Michel de Certeau’s concept of “tactics”, that is, a subversive appropriation of a dominant culture. But it is the prevalence of irony that most powerfully proofs photography’s potential to capture a sense of contrariness and ambiguity, which, the authors conclude, “was essential to the way Jews perceived their life in Nazi Germany and sought to remember it” (172).
The book unfolds across three parts. The first section sketches the historical context of Jewish photography in Nazi Germany. Far from claiming a definitive history, it challenges the established distinction between a German and a Jewish photography on the one hand, and amateur and professional photography on the other. By framing Jews as “outsiders within” (52), the authors convincingly set the scene for a non-essentialist reading of Jewish photography. Taking up, turning, and subverting the established patters of German bourgeois imagery enabled Jews to mediate conflicting experiences of Jewish life in a time of “extreme uncertainty.”
The second part of the book focuses on the analysis of single photographs. It’s opening chapter considers representations of the home. As Nazi persecution intensified in the years after 1933, the authors argue that the home became both shelter from the outside and a place where German and Jewish belonging would be reaffirmed. At the same time, however, the photos also – often using irony – display its impossibility to truly function as a site of protection and continuation. A similar duality is underscored in the following chapter which analyses photos of the public sphere. The antisemitic exclusion and violence are hardly ever depicted directly. Instead, the pictures emphasize a “desire for normalcy” (109). Yet, they are not simply detached from the increasingly hostile context. Through often subtle deviations of established conventions the photographs simultaneously capture a growing sense of alienation. The section’s final chapter is devoted to “Jewish spaces,” a term which includes not just religious sites but spaces where Jews openly came together as Jews, such as cemeteries, agricultural training camps, and sports fields. At first sight, many of the photographs seem to highlight the importance of community that Jewish spaces offered. But a closer analysis reveals the spirit of shared experiences was inherently challenged by the tensions and fears particularly young people experienced.
The third part of Still Lives examines the ways in which photographs were incorporated into various storylines. It traces the often associative narratives that unfolded in albums, collections, and collages. Chapter 6 offers a close reading of an album by the Freund family from Hamburg. Stretching from 1933 to 1939, the assembled images at first appear to present a story of cultural integration until it was no longer tenable and the prospect of new Zionist identity in Mandate Palestine emerges. A second, closer look, however, uncovers a conflicting narrative, one that questions both the vehement attachment to a German bourgeois culture and the hopes associated with foreign Palestine. Chapter 7 offers an equally attentive reading of an album by Marianne Holländer who attended a Jewish school near Ulm. Curiously, her album is captioned both by herself and her schoolmaster, thereby offering two different perspectives on the Jewish girl’s experiences of growing up in the somewhat sheltered space of the Jewish school. The following chapter is focused on the work of Martha Maas, a professional photographer who operated a studio in Berlin until the late 1930s. The portraits she assembled in a retrospectively compiled album reveal a strong tension between an affiliation to a German culture and the Nazi denial of her belonging. Chapter 9 juxtaposes two collage and montage works by Abraham Pisarek and Herbert Sonnenfeld, which unfold strikingly different visions of the hopes and uncertainties of Jewish emigration.
While Still Lives is primarily organized along spatial lines, moving across physical and narrational boundaries, it simultaneously follows a temporal structure. The work begins with the emergence of a democratic mass culture and ends with the visual imagination of departure and loss. Yet, by persistently emphasizing inherent dualities of photographs, the authors complicate the notion of a teleological chronology. Photography, after all, constantly calls into question the retrospective ways in which we make sense of the past. By unfolding a multilayered, often conflicting understanding of the images on display, the authors insist on a sense of contingency that was crucial to Jewish experiences under Nazism.
Still Lives is a collectively written monograph. Anyone who has ever participated in a co-writing project knows that the endless rounds of revisions amount to much greater work than practically any other form of humanities academic publishing. But, here at least, it pays off. Photography, perhaps more than written documents, calls for a collective reading. Its quintessentially ambiguous nature can best be worked out in a communal setting. In the spirit of full disclosure: as my own work on private photography by German Jews evolved somewhat alongside that of the authors, I got to take part in the discussions on several occasions – each of which become pivotal moments in my understanding of my own materials. By blending different perspectives together into a cohesive analytical framework, the authors avoid the trap of, say, edited volumes or special issues, that all too often fail to bring standalone pieces into a dialogue, much less a single narrative strand. Still Lives, by contrast, is an assemblage of case studies whose authors have managed to work out the photographs’ fundamental dualities with a single analytical voice.
In the final chapter, subtitled “Last Photos from Germany,” the authors sketch out how “last photos” were consciously enacted, including farewell-scenes from a train, or were retrospectively corroborated by the photo’s recipients, such as a grandmother’s portrait at her home shortly before her deportation. This closing discussion is less concerned with the inherent dualities of Jewish photographs in Nazi Germany. Instead, the authors trace the tensions between often mundane images and the great, incomprehensible strains they encapsulated. “Last photos” can function as focal points for memory in the face of rupture and loss.
Poetry from the past, Louise Glück wrote, is “autobiography stripped of context and commentary.” Still lives, the art historian Mark Doty remarked, work in a similar way. And, it may be added, the same holds true for photography, particularly the kind analyzed in this book. “[H]elplessness and consolation, dignity and despair” (53), assurance and doubt, adherence and separation, continuity and rupture, a sense of crisis and the prospect of overcoming: by providing context and commentary to the images taken, assembled, and saved by German Jews under Nazism, Still Lives ultimately is an acknowledgement of the many ways in which German Jews attempted “to maintain agency through the display of complexities and doubts” (4). Photography, it turns out, may transmit such conflicting experiences much better than previously imagined.
Robert Mueller-Stahl is a historian at the Potsdam Leibniz-Centre for Contemporary History. In March 2025, he completed his PhD: “Das Leben festhalten. Deutsch-jüdische Privatfotografie in den 1930er Jahren.” He recently curated the Schöneberg Museum in Berlin exhibition “Capturing Life: Private Photo Albums by Jewish Families in the Shadow of the Holocaust,” which ran from June 2024 to March 2025. In 2017-2018, Mueller-Stahl was a Fulbright Fellow at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.