History and the Challenge of

Photography in Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel

Kristopher Imbrigotta

Contradictions are our hope!

— Bertolt Brecht, “Der Dreigroschenprozess: Ein soziologisches Experiment”

As cultural critic Susan Sontag mused in her 2004 essay on the images from Abu
Ghraib prison, we may be able to ban words like torture from our vocabulary when
speaking of the horrors and scandals of war, but we can never prevent the photo-
graphs of the events from telling the story.1 In its response to the outrage the photo-
graphs caused around the world, the U.S. government did not explicitly use the word
torture, and in fact, no one really had to; the photographs did this by themselves. As
a result of the saturation of ineffective media in the public sphere, the very concept
of war today has become just as disconnected and abstract on the battlefield — think
of “shock and awe” — as it has to those looking at the images from their living room
couches. Effective images not only describe or simulate a situation; they analyze
and require analysis. The visual representation of war is in constant flux and will
continue to evolve to keep pace with technology, global interconnectedness, and the
blurring of meaning.
With this particular example I am not arguing for the primacy of images over
words to convey meaning; that debate can be best saved for other venues.2 In fact, I
would tend to disagree with any notion of a hierarchy or a dichotomy between image
and text that positions one against the other. Photographs do not dominate words;

Radical History Review

Issue 106 (Winter 2010)  doi 10.1215/01636545-2009-019
© 2010 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

27
28    Radical History Review

rather, word and image have come to depend on one another. However, whether we
are cognizant of it or not, a preference for the visual has only exacerbated the turn
toward images of history in our search for answers to today’s challenges. Specific
to literary and cultural studies, the study of photographs in texts of all genres has
a long tradition. It has been argued that photographs, seen as evidentiary docu-
ments, blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction, or that photographs reinforce
the reader/viewer’s self-reflective awareness of the very act of reading/seeing. In this
symbiotic relationship, the photograph adds substantiation to fictional narratives,
whereas narratives can add a sense of fictionality to the photographs. This process
develops into a productive practice for the reader/viewer, one that alters how we
read, see, and understand the world. In this essay I ultimately suggest — by drawing
on examples from a collection of “photograms” dealing with World War II — that we
as media and information users have come to depend on the narrative power of the
image to grapple with the ever-changing complexities of life. Keeping in mind the
mediated spectacle that war has become, this essay will turn to a literary account
of a past war. The following will attempt to briefly outline how one such collec-
tion combines appropriated press photographs and poetic commentary to help us
rethink our approach to history, war, and visual representation and will then argue
for photography’s continued critical relevance in our current relationship with and
understanding of the causes and effects of global conflict.

• • • • •

By 1940, the German playwright, poet, critic, and theorist Bertolt Brecht had been
living in political exile for seven years, having fled Germany shortly after Hitler’s rise
to power in 1933. To document his struggle he had begun to meticulously collect and
assemble newspaper clippings and photographs from various sources and publica-
tions. This endeavor was sparked by previous experiences during the interwar years
in Europe, chronicling his travels en route to America, and continued even after
World War II in East Berlin until the publication of his Kriegsfibel (War Primer)
in 1955, just one year before his death in 1956. The Kriegsfibel is the product of
Brecht’s artistic impulse for pictorial “documentation” of the events that shaped
the twentieth century. As Brecht scholar John Willett points out, many factors dur-
ing these years led to the inspiration for writing a “new kind of war poetry”3 — one
in which Brecht would be able to combine his need to comment on the perpetual
escalation in hostilities throughout much of Europe with his increasing interest in
more experimental media of the times other than the theater, namely film and pho-
tography. For an artist who worked in a visual medium during most of his career,
mass media proved to be an effective means of communicating while in exile when
he had no access to an audience via the stage.
Brecht conceived of a multimedia project that could reflect on the war from
a distinct point of view: from the outside observer (der Beobachtende). His Kriegs-
 Imbrigotta | History and the Challenge of Photography    29

fibel is a collection of sixty-nine “photograms” — an amalgamated term coined by

Brecht — which juxtaposes photographs and short, four-line epigrams that directly
challenge the stories and images of World War II. The Kriegsfibel activates histori-
cal awareness; it instructs the reader/viewer to critically engage with and question
the many images of war; it also offers a practical example for the claim that history is
conceived as images corresponding to the metaphorical language of photography — a
claim made famous by Brecht’s fellow exile and collaborator Walter Benjamin. The
collection presents the reader/viewer with a series of carefully conceptualized
photograph/text combinations as a guide to different contextual snapshots of history.
To awaken historical interest, Brecht’s epigrams incorporate themes, events, and
people with a distanced, ironic tone, while the newspaper photographs are meant
to visually recall specific perspectives of war. Each photogram aims to force us, the
reader/viewer, to confront conventional historical narratives and challenge what is
believed to be true. The photographs become critical records of history that invite
us to see its many visual gestures, showing us how humans struggle, communicate,
and dominate. Photography functions in this context to break history into fragmen-
tary moments so that we might examine its trends, its ruptures, and its subtexts.
In addition, we are consistently reminded of the qualities of Brecht’s work while
looking at, in this case, the Kriegsfibel press photographs: What does the photo tell
us? What is missing from that message? Who benefits? What are the contradictions
within the image and between the image and text?
The Kriegsfibel is a highly personal project, chronicling Brecht’s and his fam-
ily’s tribulations in the escape from and struggle against fascism, as well as a virtual
trail of breadcrumbs as to his whereabouts in exile. Yet the Kriegsfibel also shows
the reader/viewer a more universal side of this world war: its contexts, perpetrators,
victims, destruction, and contradictions. Brecht’s documentation through photo-
graphic means resists any large-scale definition or rationale for war; rather, it seeks
to identify constitutive parts that come to signify it: the many battles, the faces,
the cities, the institutions in play, the politics, and so on. As Brecht states in a short
text about photography from 1928, he is interested primarily in the supposed (and
highly contested) special relationship that photographs have to truth and reality.
Photographs question truth while simultaneously suggesting verisimilitude. Most
important, photographs position the viewer to recognize differences, and in essence
they show us what things do, not necessarily what they are.4 For example, a critical
reading invites comparison and facilitates a rethinking of what one sees and what is
missing. Furthermore, when we ask what things do in the photograph, we question
the motives surrounding such an image.
In the German context, the use of photography as a vehicle for artistic
expression and social commentary can be attributed to its proliferation in the early
twentieth century, especially in the Weimar Republic (1918 – 33). During this politi-
cally and socially unstable period of democratic rule, factions from every direction
30    Radical History Review

and persuasion vied for power in Germany and were seen in the streets, clashing
publicly; in party rallies; or in the mysterious controversies surrounding the burning
of Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, in 1933. Newspapers, periodi-
cals, and magazines played an integral role in the many attempts to shape public
opinions and debates, particularly at the two ends of the political spectrum: the
communists on the left and the National Socialists on the far right. Rising inflation,
high unemployment rates, fears of greater instability, and growing resentment of its
defeat after World War I had driven Germany into a quagmire. Artists and intellec-
tuals on the left and the right subsequently turned to the image — the photographic
image and the photomontage — as a choice medium for disseminating information,
and inevitably, propaganda. For Brecht, the photographic combinations he saw in
the left-leaning German Workers’ Illustrated (Arbeiter illustrierte Zeitung [AIZ])
piqued his interest. He publicly endorsed the photomontages of John Heartfield, in
particular, for their biting social commentary and defended them against criticisms
of being too formalistic in their approach to the masses.5
Between 1930 and 1938, the AIZ printed over two hundred of Heartfield’s
photomontages, either as front or back covers of the paper or occasionally as double-
page spreads (for example, see fig. 1). Willi Münzenberg, a German communist
politician, started the AIZ in 1925, at a time when many other illustrated journals
were being established throughout Western Europe and North America. During
that time, editors and artists began experimenting with design and layout to com-
municate political arguments effectively and to be visually attractive to readers. The
AIZ promoted a progressive message to workers, whom Münzenberg felt were not
otherwise being served by the mainstream press in Germany. Because the reader-
ship bought the AIZ from newsstands, engaging cover images were crucial for the
magazine’s visibility and viability. Heartfield developed his own distinctive, experi-
mental photographic aesthetic by cultivating relationships between the text and the
pictorial fragments, between the images and social commentary, and between the
issues raised in the photomontages and the perspectives of the articles in the maga-
zine. His satirical photomontages about Germany’s political climate and the interna-
tional events of the day are complex works about war and peace and about the links
he perceived between fascism, capitalism, and war.
Brecht’s critical eye was drawn to Heartfield for good reason. His photo-
montage work exhibited an overt disdain for the rise of the Nazis in Germany and
fascism in Europe; it also thematized in many cases the exploitation of the working
class by the social elite and big business concerns in line with nationalist sentiments.
Many leftist critics and artists — Brecht, George Grosz, and Erwin Piscator, among
others — saw these as negative aftereffects of Germany’s defeat in World War I and
insisted on linking them together. This amalgam of art and the public sphere, which
Benjamin aptly noted as the communist “politicization of art,”6 is exactly what drew
Brecht and others to the use of photographs. On the one hand, the widespread
 Imbrigotta | History and the Challenge of Photography    31

Figure 1. (Above) “With his phrases he wants to gas the world.” (Below) “The man who swore to the
German constitution now speaks of peace. He will honor that like he honors his oath.” John Heartfield,
photomontage of Adolf Hitler, AIZ, June 1, 1933. Courtesy of the International Center for Photography
32    Radical History Review

proliferation of photoreportage images in the press and the technical reproducibil-

ity inherent in the medium of photography were seen as a potentially “dangerous
weapon against truth”7 in the hands of the bourgeoisie; on the other hand, it seemed
this was a medium well suited to telling history. At the same time, it was able to
contest the opposing viewpoint to Benjamin’s statement quoted above, namely the
fascist “aestheticization of politics,” or the process of making war look good.
Following this contrast of the fascist and Marxist conceptions of art, one
can readily see Brecht’s intentions for a new poetics of war imagery in the Kriegs-
fibel. As art historian John Tagg points out, there is a political and social message
embedded in photography’s very framework. Photographs are material items that
are constructed by individuals within a sociopolitical system, coded with both visual
and linguistic messages, and distributed within a specific social context: “Images
[are] made meaningful and understood within the very relations of their produc-
tion and sited within a wider ideological complex, which must, in turn, be related
to the practical and social problems which sustain and shape it.”8 One can debate
photography’s claim to objective truth, but its inherent ideological slant cannot be
denied; a seemingly banal photograph of a set of china, for example, would qualify as
ideological once the reader/viewer begins to process what is seen and ask questions
about how it got there, who claims ownership, how and for whom it was produced,
who has access to look, and so on. Photography’s visual power lies in its ability to aid
the reader/viewer in shaping societal focus. It appeals to the reader/viewer’s ability
to recognize the elements of meaning in the image and critically decipher any given
message(s).
Brecht’s work with appropriated photographs is specifically concerned with
the search for access to truth and a specific approach to history, which in effect
directly challenges the stories and images of conventional bourgeois thinking.9 Not
only does Brecht problematize fascism through his documentation of World War
II; he also engages the very means of production with which the fascist propaganda
machine operated. In effect, Brecht’s Kriegsfibel both criticizes and utilizes photog-
raphy for these purposes.

• • • • •

For its initial publication in 1955, Ruth Berlau, Brecht’s longtime collaborator and
friend, contributed the foreword to the Kriegsfibel, itself a primer for Brecht’s War
Primer:
Why do our workers of state-owned industry, our communal farmers, our
progressive intellectuals, why does our youth, who already enjoys the rations
of happiness, why must they all at this moment hold in front of them these
grim images of history? He who forgets his past does not escape it. This book
[Kriegsfibel] wishes to teach the art of reading images. It is as difficult for
the novice to read images as it is to read hieroglyphics. The great ignorance
 Imbrigotta | History and the Challenge of Photography    33

about societal relations, which the forces of capitalism carefully and brutally
perpetuate, turns the thousands of photographs in the media into true panels of
hieroglyphics, indecipherable to the unsuspecting reader.10

Here we have the stated goal of the entire project of Brecht’s photographic his-
tory: teaching readers/viewers how to read and see the images of history through
a particularly Marxist lens. This is a common thread that runs through much of
Brecht’s theoretical writing, toward educating and engaging the working class with
artwork that effectively “speaks” to them. Just as Brecht’s “worker who reads” ques-
tions the events of bourgeois historiography,11 or the history in textbooks, so should
the reader/viewer of these images of history learn to synthesize “Monumental
History” — war, science, art, and so on — with the history and lives of everyday
people (History vs. history). Even though we may see photographs of the key play-
ers in World War II — mainly the politicians, the dictators, the perpetrators whose
biographies dominate the textbooks of history — we are also asked to remember the
common person, who, according to Brecht, is the real casualty of the atrocities of
war and class conflict. The history of the workers’ struggle is directly interfaced with
the history of warfare among the upper echelons of society. The passage by Berlau
quoted above undoubtedly refers to the images in the Kriegsfibel’s middle section,
which presents photographs of exploitation and the effects of total war upon civilian
populations. Equally interesting in the preface is that Berlau never explicitly uses
the word war to describe Brecht’s War Primer. Instead she mentions the “images of
history” (my emphasis), playing on the expectations of the viewer of such a collec-
tion of photographs with “war” in the title. We see history as war and war as signi-
fied through the images of history.
As critical readers/viewers we are not simply confronted by these grim
images; rather, we are instructed to see the deeper message(s), or signifying codes,
within the photographs. For example, in photogram 47 (see fig. 2), which originally
appeared on February 15, 1943, in Life magazine, the reader/viewer can see an
armed American soldier standing over (and almost on top of) his Japanese counter-
part, who lies dead on the ground. We also see the caption that offers information
about what has taken place and why this is an event worthy of photographic record:
“An American soldier stands over a dying Jap who he has just been forced to shoot.
The Jap had been hiding in the landing barge, shooting at U.S. troops.” In addition,
Brecht presents us with his epigram, intended to instruct the viewer on how to read
the photograph within its historical and social context, and to recognize its contra-
dictions in order to critique the false propagations of history:
And with their blood they were to colour red
A shore that neither owned. I hear it said
That they were forced to kill each other. True.
My only question is: who forced them to?12
34    Radical History Review

In photogram 44 (see fig. 3), we see a photograph (again from Life, from February
1, 1943) of the burned, impaled head of a Japanese soldier whose corpse is missing.
The head has been attached to a tank during battle. Like the previous one, this
image also has its caption (“A Japanese soldier’s skull is propped up on a burned-
out Jap tank by U.S. troops. Fire destroyed the rest of the corpse”) and Brecht’s
epigram:
Alas, poor Yorick of the burnt-out tank!
Upon an axle-shaft your head is set.
Your death by fire was for the Domei Bank
To whom your parents are still in debt.13

How can one use the visual cues from the press photograph and the informa-
tional elements from the texts to critically judge what one sees? As Roland Barthes
has aptly noted in his many essays dealing with photography and its signification,
any given image is necessarily made up of the interrelationship of its three messages:
linguistic, coded, and uncoded.14 The photographic image is a set of connotators
that signify meaning. Brecht’s Kriegsfibel provides all three of these messages. In
number 47 (fig. 2), the American soldier plays double duty, depending on the view-
er’s reading of the photograph. First, the soldier signifies heroism and triumph in
the struggle against the imperial power of the Japanese military, which aligned itself
with Nazi Germany in the war (the uncoded message). Second, within the context of
the Kriegsfibel, the viewer also perceives the soldier as an instrumental tool of colo-
nial world power (the United States) fighting another colonial power (Japan). This
ironically subtle yet salient contradiction (the coded message) captures the reader/
viewer in the didactic process of looking; subsequently, Brecht’s epigram catalyzes
communication between the photographic image and the viewer.
Barthes’s essay “The Photographic Message” further extends the reading of
press photographs like those in the Kriegsfibel. According to Barthes, photographs
take on different meaning when placed in a different venue or institutional setting.15
Compiled in this collection, specifically in this way by Brecht, the Kriegsfibel pho-
tographs appropriate images that, when combined with the captions and epigrams,
facilitate a third degree of reading history filtered through multiple intermediaries:
first as a photograph taken by a photographer seen in an international publication,
then placed in a collection and published by Brecht, and finally interpreted by the
reader/viewer. Consequently, the images that were once journalistic photographs
out of international magazines and newspapers become something greater; the pho-
tographs become isolated instances of the signification of history. They do, how-
ever, retain a form of bias: though still attached to Life magazine or a newspaper,
they are also now attached to Brecht’s name, along with all it implies. This invites
the reader/viewer to critically engage with what is seen through various degrees of
 Imbrigotta | History and the Challenge of Photography    35

Figure 2. U.S. soldier standing over a Japanese soldier. Photogram 47 (Kriegsfibel), 57 (War Primer).
From Life magazine, February 15, 1943. Copyright Suhrkamp Verlag. Courtesy of the Akademie der
Künste, BBA 2069-66

estrangement or defamiliarization (Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt). Just as in the epic

theater, where the viewer does not emotionally identify with the events on stage, the
reader/viewer of the Kriegsfibel does not identify with what is seen in the image, but
instead remains at a distance; the greater this distance, the better critical access one
has to determine its messages, represented through signification of meaning, not
through meaning itself.
36    Radical History Review

Figure 3. Japanese soldier’s head on tank. Photogram 44 (Kriegsfibel), 53 (War Primer).

From Life magazine, February 1, 1943. Copyright Suhrkamp Verlag. Courtesy of the Akademie
der Künste, BBA 2096-62

In photogram 44 (fig. 3) something is missing: the press photograph of the

impaled head does not show the Americans. The gruesome image and immediacy
of the impaling onto the tank provide the viewer with ample cause to rethink how
we process images of war. The skull’s mouth is open in perpetual lament — Brecht’s
epigram alludes to the deceased Shakespearean jester in Hamlet — yet we are
obligated to remember that the Japanese soldiers were themselves oppressors and
instruments of war. With the head purposefully mounted at the front of the vehicle,
we cannot escape the allusion to the hood ornaments of automobiles from major
 Imbrigotta | History and the Challenge of Photography    37

German industrial concerns (such as Mercedes), which were involved in manufac-

turing tanks and military vehicles for the war effort, many of them war profiteers
themselves. The head is also wearing a helmet (as if this decaying body part were
still able to fight in battle), suggesting to us that this press photograph was staged for
mass effect (see Sontag’s essay quoted above) both as a signifier of future warning to
the Japanese army and to signify victory for the American and Western European
readership of Life magazine. The position of the maimed head is slightly turned and
resembles a mug shot, portraying this bodiless soldier as a casualty of war: “This is
what they looked like.” Yet the reader/viewer does not know who this person really
was; we can only employ the caption and Brecht’s epigram, instructing us in the
deeper message, one that emerges from the interplay of image and text. The soldier
remains nameless and (almost) faceless. Here we see the employment of the pho-
tography of death at work, of some person who so graphically died while screaming,
both victim and instrument of war.
Brecht’s collection of images as history presents us with many contradictions
and decisions. The photographs are not Brecht’s ideas per se; rather, they comprise
a set of coded messages, material Brecht gathered together and placed within their
respective contexts so that a critical reader/viewer produces meaning and under-
stands them through their means of production and multifaceted representation.
Yet through the contradictions interwoven into the very fabric of photography, the
reader/viewer sees that Brecht offers us no definitive truth claim. The photographic
image offers options but does not give us one truth, alluding to the inexhaustibility
of the performance of possible meaning in art.16 Brecht’s Kriegsfibel is arguably, just
like his theater pieces, a performance of social history. The major players all have
specific roles in each photograph, and they stare the reader/viewer in the face to
tell their stories. The reader/viewer, however, does not stare blankly in return but
is asked to engage with what is seen as well as what is not readily apparent and to
question what is given to us as truth. We are asked, as Alan Trachtenberg writes, to
bear “witness” to history while at the same time to engage with it and make it our
own, because, in this case, history is war.17

• • • • •

As a subset of the Kriegsfibel, the photographs of Adolf Hitler can be examined

through Brecht’s theories of the epic theater and the social “Gestus” (Gesture). For
Brecht, the Gestus has both a restrictive and an expansive meaning. Restrictively, it
refers to an approach to acting that assumes an understanding of the world from the
observation of human behavior. The epic actor uses gestures on stage, but not every
gesture constitutes this effective illocutionary speech act — for example, one that
promises, deceives, or condemns. In other words, the Gestus always aims to fore-
ground the social significance of an action.18 With the photograph of the American
soldier mentioned above (fig. 2), we see the social Gestus of fascism only when the sol-
38    Radical History Review

dier stands over the corpse he has killed. Expansively, the Gestus refers to the com-
plete scene, within which every component — costume, lighting, props, scenery — 
contributes to the work of eliciting the social theme.
Epic theater proceeds through an accumulation of gestures, resulting in a
calculated fragmentation. Thus, for Benjamin, Brecht’s theater proceeds by fits and
starts in a manner comparable to the images on a filmstrip, or in this case a col-
lection of contrasting photographs. Affinities between epic theater and cinema do
exist, but Brecht is also drawing on older traditions, such as those explored in Bar-
thes’s essay “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein.”19 For Barthes, the social Gestus rethinks
G. E. Lessing’s idea of the “pregnant moment” (prägnanter Augenblick).20 This “Pola-
roid moment” is achieved through a composition that gives maximum emphasis to
the “perfect instant” — a significant and tangible moment, which visually condenses
past, present, and future. The Gestus represents social situations semiotically and,
in the case of Brecht’s Kriegsfibel, visually. Barthes, whose œuvre is deeply invested
in photography, insists on the intimate relationship between Brecht’s work and the
elements of photography. They are so similar that photography, through its distinct
form of capturing the decisive “moment” and exposing the social Gestus for critical
examination, realizes elements of Brecht’s epic theater that are perhaps not fully
perceptible without such a visual aid. Significant moments can be simply overlooked
by the human eye, whereas with a photograph, we have the image and its social Ges-
tus frozen for inspection. Moreover, there seem to be elements of Brecht’s concept
of the theater, whose home is not so much on stage but, rather, in the photographs
of stage production themselves — one need only to look through the Theaterarbeit
(1961) collection of the many Brecht plays from the Berliner Ensemble or the images
of the photography-laden theater production models (Brecht’s Modellbücher). With
the Kriegsfibel Brecht challenges the viewer’s preconceptions and misconceptions
of war. To this end, photography provides us with a privileged medium for coming
to terms with and representing the unforgettable throughout history: admonishment
and hope, ironically both in the image of Hitler.
Through the representational medium of photography, one does not have to
physically stand on the battlefield in order to bear witness to history — we simply
need to look, but look carefully. Photography’s special status as recorder or objective
“witness” to real events allows space and time to collapse for the viewer. On behold-
ing the first photographic image in the Kriegsfibel — Hitler at a party rally — one
can have the sense, according to Barthes, that the photographic event “has been”21
and that the reader/viewer can still see this event as if staring Hitler in the face,
even though we know Hitler is dead. The photograph provides the means of bring-
ing the historic “Hitler image” into the present and collapses the distance between
the photographer at the moment the scene was recorded and the reader/viewer in
the present. The photographs of Hitler (four total in Kriegsfibel; six total in Willett’s
War Primer translation/edition) constitute a repetitive theme of this work and also
allow the reader/viewer to perceive the sense of purpose with which Brecht sought
 Imbrigotta | History and the Challenge of Photography    39

to link World War II with the image of Hitler. By sheer number the photographs of
Hitler comprise a relatively small yet substantial portion of those dedicated to war
perpetrators and criminals. The image of Hitler, with all its associations and conno-
tations (fabricated or true), is the seminal element Brecht insists we never forget. It is
purposefully positioned in the Kriegsfibel — staggered in intervals throughout — to
remind us of the work’s intention and effect. In fact, even when we see images of
other Nazi officials, we are nonetheless compelled to set them into their broader
context — compelled to see Hitler either as the one responsible or at least as some-
one linked to them. Among other World War II criminals prominently displayed
are Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, and Dr. Joseph Goebbels, minister
for public enlightenment and propaganda. Through the proximity of photography,
history comes closer to the viewer while remaining at a certain distance, and we are
left with “the unforgettable” — the photographic images of Hitler.
The Kriegsfibel begins its archive with a press photograph of Hitler standing
at his lectern (see fig. 4). Brecht’s epigram, written around 1940, helps to contextual-
ize the photograph:
Like one who dreams the road ahead is steep
I know the way Fate has prescribed for us
That narrow way toward a precipice.
Just follow. I can find it in my sleep.22

Figure 4. Adolf Hitler.

Photogram 1 (Kriegsfibel and War
Primer). Date unknown, probably
from around 1940. Copyright
Suhrkamp Verlag. Courtesy of
the Akademie der Künste, BBA
2096-14
40    Radical History Review

Brecht’s words allude to a photomontage by John Heartfield entitled Der Führer

weißden Weg (The Führer Knows the Way), which appeared in the AIZ on January
3, 1935. This first photograph and its epigram introduce the reader/viewer to specific
personae of Germany’s former dictator, namely to Hitler as larger-than-life orator
and as “Knecht,” or what postwar authors like Günter Grass or Heinrich Böll called
the clown figure.23 The word stresses Hitler’s role as servant and accomplice to the
large business concerns that profited from the outbreak and duration of war. To that
end, Brecht composed a four-line epigram dated 1954 intended for the Kriegsfibel;
it did not make it into the 1955 version. The epigram reads:
An image of the servant hangs in every house.
“Heil Hitler” greeted thousands and died.
But no one knows: How do the masters look?
Does the servant greet them with “Heil I. G. Farben?”24

Those press photographs, along with Brecht’s epigrams, showing the reader/viewer
the means of war production, refer us to further exploitation of workers for war
profiteering, for example in photograms 2, 32, and 44.
The reader/viewer sees this version of Hitler with his eyes wide open, gazing
toward some point external to the photograph; the crazed look gives his visage an
eerily calming, chilled effect. His mouth is slightly open, suggesting that he is in the
middle of a speech. The hand and arm are outstretched to reach Germany and the
world. The contrast of white and black separates Hitler from the other spatial ele-
ments in the photograph: brightness illuminates his physiognomy — as if Hitler’s face
were painted white like a clown’s — and the microphones act like an eagerly listening
audience. The rest is dark and hidden. Because of the way the photograph printed
in the Kriegsfibel has been cropped, we do not know whether he has an audience
before him, although it is most likely the case here. The abysmal “narrow way” to
which Brecht alludes in his epigram plays on the difference of darkness and light; the
swastika is barely visible in the background. However, this sign of Nazism should be
immediately noticed as a focal element within the photograph’s frame. As Hitler’s face
stares into the heavens, his hypnotic eyes and extended arm lead the viewer directly to
the swastika that is markedly not attached to his sleeve; the swastika as his end point
becomes a cipher of power and history, signifying his vision of a Third Reich which, as
of the publication of the photograph in 1935, was not yet fully realized.
This first photograph of Hitler shows the dreamlike trance with which he
hypnotically stared into the face of the rest of Europe. We should also ask what is
“missing” from the photograph: the audience, Hitler’s supporters who constantly
surrounded him. In this photograph the reader/viewer also sees the German people
 Imbrigotta | History and the Challenge of Photography    41

in Hitler, and therefore we do not need to infer an audience. We cannot segregate

the image of this Hitler at the podium from the thousands of wartime images of
Germans at Nazi rallies and in the streets of many other European cities, cheering
the fascist regimes in their fervent nationalism, giving the “Heil Hitler!” salute with
arms raised like Hitler’s in this photograph.
The reader/viewer might contrast this particular version of Hitler with the
final photograph in the Kriegsfibel (see fig. 5), a disparate image taken from an
unknown American periodical during Brecht’s exile in southern California some-
time around 1944. The final Kriegsfibel photograph screams at us through Hitler’s
open mouth: “This is what you came to see.” The stage setting remains, with the
microphone, the speech, and the rally, but also with a twist: Hitler frozen in the act
of wild bodily movements during his typical theatrics. The screaming Hitler is the
version Brecht overtly employs in his Hitler parody The Resistible Rise of Arturo
Ui,25 from which exist various photographs of the stage performances (see fig. 6).
The Kriegsfibel presents us a chronicle of Hitler’s time in power, from persuasive
and mythical orator with promises of a strong and respected Third Reich (1935) to
mentally and physically ill man unwilling to admit impending defeat (1944). Here
the reader/viewer sees the culmination of war, oppression, and ultimate madness in
Hitler — yet he remains, in his oversized uniform, large boots, and contorted face, in

Figure 5. Adolf Hitler, date of photograph unknown.
Photogram 69 (Kriegsfibel), 81 (War Primer).
Copyright Suhrkamp Verlag. Courtesy of the
Akademie der Künste, BBA 2096-61
Figure 6. Gangster boss in Brecht’s The
Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Photograph by
Vera Tenschert. Copyright Suhrkamp Verlag.
Courtesy of the Akademie der Künste, BBA
4419-033
42    Radical History Review

the guise of the clown figure. As Brecht states, the logical thinker must be able
to think through the images he or she sees, especially when what we see requires
illusion and supports misconception.26 This closing photograph presents us with a
frontal shot of a different Hitler than that of the first image in the Kriegsfibel: the
madman as opposed to the somnambulist. Hitler’s hands are once again prevalent
features. In this instance, one hand swings back, not to reach out but to strike; the
other hand clenches itself into an arthritic fist. The background of this press pho-
tograph displays Hitler’s party faithful, not the cryptic, empty darkness of the first.
The reader/viewer also notices quite distinctly that the sign of the swastika is now
on Hitler’s arm. No longer is he simply facing it; it has become a part of him and his
message to the world.
Brecht’s epigram accompanying the final photograph reads:
That’s how the world was going to be run!
The other nations mastered him, except
(In case you think the battle has been won) — 
The womb is fertile still from which that crept.27

The combination of the photograph and the epigram collapses time and establishes
the connection between these diverse layers. Line 1 alludes to the past and connects
it to the future through use of the future passive; lines 2 and 3 set the reader/viewer
in the concrete past after Hitler’s defeat in 1945; the epigram finishes in the present
time, with a warning that such a tyrant may one day present humanity with a similar
crisis. Here we see history through the image of Hitler from all possible perspectives
of past, present, and future. The warning is the final message in Brecht’s collection:
history as disjointed revolution where our fate is doomed to repeat itself. The lesson
is to learn from the series of mistakes in our history (such as war) and closely echoes
the final lines of Brecht’s Arturo Ui. The addition of “HITLER: April 20, 1889” in
the lower left-hand corner — the photograph’s only caption — reinforces the rhetoric
of a fruitful womb still able to bear those who are inclined to continue the violence
and oppression; it is Hitler’s date of birth.

• • • • •

In the Kriegsfibel we see history as the collection of photographic images. Not only
are these images a series of powerful moments or flashes of conflict; we also get
the sense of the kind of narrative (in)stabilities that accompany the compilation of
such moments in history. The two photographs of Hitler function as bookends for
Brecht’s photographic theater of World War II. Its montage construction is similar
to the essay “Photography” from Benjamin’s Arcades Project, or Eduardo Cadava’s
monograph Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History,28 in that it forces
 Imbrigotta | History and the Challenge of Photography    43

the reader/viewer to notice the juxtaposition and arrangement of each element, to

look and read between the lines of the captions and Brecht’s epigrams. We cannot
read the Kriegsfibel in the usual way, from cover to cover; rather, we are constantly
interrupted by what we see and how it is presented to us. The physical limitations of
the collection are felt as the viewer turns each page to behold yet another moment
in history.
We can continue to utilize the interpretive strategies briefly discussed in this
essay in order to better sift through the flood of contemporary media images and
texts. Such a collection of photographs insists that its reader/viewer actively engage
with what is seen and reflect on the lessons to be learned from such a reading. The
Kriegsfibel photographs directly expose us to challenging questions today: Can we
still bring images to speak? Can images of war hide more than they uncover? Can
the sheer quantity of media images today cause us to forget how to perceive social
relations? Brecht’s goal, as previously suggested, is to instruct the reader/viewer how
to look for and provide answers to these questions for those images that do not
include an epigram.
War photographs continue to shock and fascinate us. Fascination inspires
the need to reflect on but not to identify with the images. The photograph becomes
the critical visual argument allowing us to see history’s many constitutive parts.
Photography sanctions isolation of fragmentary moments for the examination of his-
tory’s trends, breaks, and subtexts. It solicits the discovery of difference and, in the
case of Brecht’s Gestus, exposes contradictions and generalities in the creation of
human behavior. Just as the photographic image represents the photographer’s mul-
tiple decisions and manipulations, so too does Brecht’s work insist on the awareness
that modernist art and human behavior are no simulacra of nature. To that end,
photography is better equipped to narrate history than to narrate reality. One must
recognize artifice to recognize what is real.

Notes
1. Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” New York Times, May 23, 2004.
2. See Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri, “Photographic Interventions,” Poetics Today 29
(2008): 1 – 29, which provides an excellent overview of past and current discourses of
image/text relations, specifically regarding literature and photography. See also in that issue
J. J. Long’s essay on text/image relations in Brecht’s War Primer.
3. John Willett, in Brecht, War Primer (London: Libris, 1998), vii. My essay does not conflate
Willett’s War Primer edition with Brecht’s Kriegsfibel. The two works differ in number of
“photograms” presented, have different visual approaches to the cover/back cover, and offer
their reader/viewer at times completely different information about the conception and
background of the work in the included critical apparatus. Not all texts from the original
are translated for Willett’s edition (see Kriegsfibel’s foldout jacket text or its preface, both
authored by Brecht’s collaborator Ruth Berlau).
44    Radical History Review

4. Bertolt Brecht, [“Über Photographie”], in Works in 30 Volumes: Berlin and Frankfurt

Critical Edition, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlev
Müller (Berlin/Frankfurt: Aufbau/Suhrkamp, 1988 – 98), subsequently cited here as “BFA
volume number: page number,” in this case, BFA 21:264. All translations are mine unless
otherwise noted.
5. Brecht, [“Über Photographie”], BFA 21:264. Brecht defends Heartfield on occasion, but
he rejects the Dada movement as a whole because the “historic view,” or the standpoint of
history, is “wiped out with the loss in expression of originality.”
6. Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”
(1936), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 44. For the English translation, see Benjamin, “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 242.
7. Brecht, “Über die Wiederherstellung der Wahrheit” (1934), BFA 22.1:89 – 90. For the
English translation see Brecht, “On Restoring the Truth,” in Brecht on Art and Politics,
ed. Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles, and Laura Bradley (London: Methuen, 2003), 133.
8. John Tagg, “Contacts/Worksheets: Notes on Photography, History and Representation,” in
The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 188 – 89.
9. See Benjamin’s seventh thesis in “Theses on the Concept of History” (1940), where he insists
that we read history “against the grain,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 257.
10. Ruth Berlau (1954), BFA 12:129. Berlau’s foreword is not reprinted or translated by John
Willett in War Primer.
11. Brecht, “Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters” (1935), from Svendborg Poems (1939), BFA
12:29. For the English translation, see Brecht, “Questions from a Worker Who Reads,”
in Poems 1913 – 1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, trans. Michael Hamburger
(London: Methuen, 1976), 252 – 53.
12. Brecht, cited from Willett, War Primer, photogram 57.
13. Ibid., photogram 44.
14. Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image — Music — Text, ed. Stephen Heath
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 36.
15. Barthes, “The Photographic Image,” in Heath, Image — Music — Text, 15.
16. Tagg, “Contacts/Worksheets,” 203.
17. Alan Trachtenberg, “Albums of War,” in Reading American Photographs: Images as History
from Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 73.
18. Brecht, “Über gestische Musik” (1937), BFA 22.1:329. For the English translation, see
Brecht, “On Gestic Music,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and
trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 104 – 5.
19. Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” in Heath, Image — Music — Text, 73.
20. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Laokoon: Oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie,”
in Werke, vol. 6, ed. Albert von Schirnding (Munich: Hanser, 1974), 103 – 4.
21. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1981), 77.
22. Brecht, cited from Willett, War Primer, photogram 1.
23. Lutz Koepnick, “Face/Off: Hitler and Weimar Political Photography,” in Visual Culture in
 Imbrigotta | History and the Challenge of Photography    45

Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle, ed. Gail Finney (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 2006), 215.
24. Brecht, [“Ein Bild des Knechtes” (“An Image of the Servant”)], BFA 12:283.
25. See Brecht, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: A Parable Play,” in Collected Plays: Six,
ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1985),
113 – 211.
26. Brecht, “Über die Wiederherstellung der Wahrheit” (1934), BFA 22.1:89.
27. Brecht, cited from War Primer, ed. and trans. John Willett, photogram 81.
28. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1999), 671 – 92; Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of
History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).