How Lee Miller’s photos remind us of the destructive brutality of war

Almost 80 years after the end of the Second World War, the film shows us images of its destruction LEE.

The film traces the journey of renowned war and surrealist photographer Lee Miller (played by Kate Winslet) during the war.

On April 30, 1945, Miller witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp together with the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions of the US Army.

Today, Dachau is a place of remembrance that embodies the stories of the past – the told and the untold. Family legacy and trauma shape these stories and places.

As a German citizen, I am disturbed by the past and see it as my duty to learn from it and understand it. I am a Millennial, educator, aspiring scholar of Holocaust memory, and secondary witness to the Holocaust. That’s why I examined the relationship between Holocaust remembrance, collective memory and the Dachau Memorial in my doctoral thesis.

Passing witnesses

As time passes, we approach the post-World War II period. The number of Holocaust survivors is decreasing and education about the Holocaust is increasing to combat denial, silence and forgetting.

Yet the atrocities of the past continue to shape our perspectives today and highlight the importance of addressing the relationship between truth and evidence.

As the third post-war generation, Millennials are faced with the challenge of learning about the past. Connections to survivors diminish, and people must puzzle together fragments of history conveyed by cultural narratives and figure out what those narratives reinforce or avoid.

A 2018 study commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that two-thirds of American millennials did not know what Auschwitz was. The study also found that four in 10 did not know that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Transitional memory

Processes of reflecting on and negotiating our responses to evidence of atrocities can be explained by transitional memory. This type of memory shapes the way we experience stories associated with the past, through intrapersonal values ​​and interaction with people, places and stories.

The complex and dynamic process of Holocaust remembrance continues to shape what literary scholar Marianne Hirsch calls the postmemory of war – referring to how later generations are shaped by collective Holocaust trauma through the stories they grew up with.

Hirsch’s work emerged from an engagement with intergenerational survivors, but she later also examined “postmemory” theory in broader society.

The social historical constructions of societies are conveyed through photographs, films and books. They are memory carriers that change over the years and, taken together, form an important part of our memory of the Second World War and its stories. An example is Miller’s photographs.

Lee Miller’s photography

LEE examines Miller’s life and career before and after World War II. In parts of the film that document Miller’s work photographing horrors at Dachau, the film shows Miller confronting death and trauma.

She captured evidence using photographs, unaware that they would resurface decades after the liberation. Miller took photos of the Dachau camp, its liberation and the people held there. In this way, she encourages the viewer to take part in coming to terms with the past.

Through the film, viewers can learn how Miller’s photographs particularly humanized those who died in the final, brutal days of the war. Miller’s photographs show the raw, unfiltered truth – and, as the film shows, were initially considered unpublishable.

See Miller’s images today, or a fictional treatment of her work through film LEE can help people imagine the circumstances and perspectives of the past. This can help us think critically about how we conceptualize standards we should adhere to and how we understand to whom we are accountable.

Miller’s experience in Dachau also reminds us how important photojournalists are in war zones today. War, suffering and death underline the reality of death and the precariousness of life.

Social psychologists, drawing on anthropologist Ernest Becker’s ideas within terror management theory, study how such confrontations can provoke feelings of shame or denial. These feelings lead to potentially debilitating terror that people “manage” by adhering to certain cultural worldviews.

Creating memories today

Miller’s photos captured the unfiltered truth at the camp. Today, visitors to concentration camp memorials take photographs as an act of remembrance, which scholar Alison Landsberg sees as an extension of themselves and thus a kind of “prosthetic memory.”

This allows people to develop empathy and a more meaningful connection to what they observe. On the other hand, taking photographs in the form of selfies at traumatic sites can be distressing for intergenerational survivors and has been discussed among scholars. As a form of testimony, photos can trigger ambivalence, and visitors to such places must remember that “Dachau is not Disneyland.”

A haunted gift

The shadows of the past continue to haunt the present. A little more than a year has passed since the attack on October 7, 2023 in southern Israel. Thousands have died from war crimes and mass destruction in Gaza that United Nations experts and Holocaust researchers have described as threatening genocide.

Holocaust educators now face the challenge of grappling with the geopolitics of reconciling a collective troubled history.

For many Germans, the ongoing reputation continues to be marked by feelings of guilt Coming to terms with the past (coming to terms with the past), while society aims to process and implement lessons from history.

Path to memory

The path to remembering the Holocaust remains fragile in Germany and other Western countries.

Some believe in banning literature like the graphic novel Mouse or political parties that repackage fascist ideologies should shape today’s approach to coming to terms with the past.

Postwar generations can embody advocacy and act as truth-finders through educational conversations and media.

Further efforts are needed to counter the denial, silence and forgetting of the horrors of the Holocaust.