History conjures up an image of the past and transports it into our present. Photographs both facilitate and, at times, markedly determine this historical process, especially for the twentieth century. For better or worse, they have irrevocably shaped the way we imagine the characters and sites of modern history. From infamous dictators to mass political rallies, from radical protests to everyday leisure pursuits: photographs form powerful frames through which we historians represent the past to ourselves and to our audiences.

Building on a generation of scholarship that argues that an understanding of German Jewish life must move beyond debates over terms—assimilation, acculturation, integration, subcultures, and symbiosis—this article uses three photograph albums created by the Wassermann family of Bamberg, in conjunction with the written record, to suggest an alternative interpretive framework for understanding the complexity of German Jewish lives in the first third of the twentieth century. Rethinking this history through a close analysis of photographs and photograph albums is particularly productive because even if photography and album-making were ubiquitous practices throughout the twentieth century, the special affinity of Jews for photography has been well-documented. Their paradoxical historic experience—including ghettoization and forced migration, on the one hand, and powerful feelings of “at-homeness” in their various diasporic dwelling places, on the other, in combination with the specificities of Jewish religious practice—has given Jews a particular relation to time and to place, a relation sometimes made manifest in photography. That relation is, furthermore, historical, changing with each context in which Jews find themselves living.

This article explores the significance of photography and photo-album making as practices that many Germans used to record their lives during the Third Reich. Millions of photos not only offer insights into everyday life under National Socialism: mass photography itself had a transformative effect, turning seemingly mundane actions into performances for the camera and into conscious acts of self-representation. The article also considers the relationship between amateur snapshots, on the one hand, and propagandistic and commercial photographs, on the other. Identifying connections between the genres, it argues that these are best understood as two-way processes of borrowing and (re-)appropriation, in which private subjectivity and public ideology constantly commingled. Particularly important in linking the two were photos of emotional or affective states, such as relaxation, exploration, introspection, and even melancholy, which were often defined or underscored by the ways in which both civilians and soldiers positioned themselves in relation to particular landscapes. The photographic archival record is highly varied, but such variation notwithstanding, photos helped cement immersive “experience” as the basis for individual and collective identity; this was central to the ideology of the National Socialist regime, even if it never wholly controlled its meanings.

This article examines images of Germany's “working world” in the 1930s and 1940s. Analyzing photos from three different genres—factory photography, special-occasion industrial photography, and the work of nonprofessional photographers—it addresses a series of questions: How was the “working world” depicted in photographs from this period? What were the different modes, functions, and effects of visual representations of work and workers in these three genres? In what ways did these photographs contribute to the (visual) production and “shaping” of memory—in terms of worker experiences, as well as with respect to attempts by the National Socialists to promote ideological notions of community-building (Vergemeinschaftung)? The main argument is that photography served as an important tool for the mobilization and self-mobilization of German workers under the Nazi regime.

The Jews who lived in the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) ghetto endeavored in a variety of written ways to document their experiences for later generations. Photographers who lived in the ghetto also helped capture on film the daily reality of those who lived there. In this way, the foundation was laid for a later investigation of the ghetto—one from the perspective of the victims, who wanted to ensure that the perpetrators would not be able to monopolize future interpretations of what had transpired there. After providing a brief overview of the history of the ghetto and of the archive set up by the Jewish ghetto administration specifically for this task, the article focuses on the activities of two photographers in particular: Mendel Grossman and Henryk Ross, who secretly, and at great risk to their own lives, attempted to capture as many aspects of ghetto life as possible. The article discusses a number of their photographs, the way in which they came into being, and the likely motivation of those who made them.

This article describes how a particular kind of queer figure moved from private photography into the mainstream of East German visual culture. It begins with a set of private photographs from the late 1960s from the collection of Heino Hilger, a regular, with his friends, at the East Berlin bar Burgfrieden. The photographs show how dressing in drag and the act of photography were important ways of constituting a gay male subculture. After the decriminalization of sex between men in 1968, the gay scene became bolder and more political in East Germany. The subversion of gender norms was central to the activism of groups such as the Homosexual Interest Group Berlin (HIB) and Gays in the Church. The visibility of the queer figure culminated in the late 1980s, when parts of the film Coming Out were filmed in Burgfrieden and when the popular monthly Das Magazin published a three-part feature on male homosexuality. What all these cultural artifacts and events had in common was not just a critique of the heterosexual norm, but also a queering of the boundaries between masculinity and femininity.