The Art of

145
03
On this, see LIFE from
10 May 1945 and
Margaret Bourke-
White, “Dear Fatherland
Rest Quietly”: A
Report on the Collapse
of Hitler’s “Thousand
Years,” New York:
Simon and Schuster,
1946, figs. 53–68;
Dagmar Barnouw,
Ansichten von
Deutschland (1945):
Krieg und Gewalt in
zeitgenössischer
Fotografie, Basel/
Frankfurt am Main:
Stroemfeld/Nexus,
1997, p. 163–201; and
Norbert Frei, 1945:
Ikonen eines Jahres,
Munich: Schirmer
Mosel, 2015, p. 115–117.
“[I]f the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to
speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing.
For the photograph‘s immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion
between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object
has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is
alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute
superior, somehow eternal value.”
Roland Barthes 01
The iconic image by Margaret Bourke-White first appeared on
26 December 1960 in TIME magazine under the title Grim
Greeting at Buchenwald.
On 4 April 1945, soldiers of the Third United States Army arrived at the Ohrdruf
concentration camp near Gotha; it was a satellite camp of Buchenwald,
which they liberated a few days later, on 11 April 1945. The main camp on
the Ettersberg near Weimar, in which there were still around 21,000 prisoners
at that time, 02 was the first concentration camp to be freed by one of
the Western Allied forces without having been evacuated completely in advance.
Directly after the discovery of Ohrdruf, US headquarters gave the order
to immediately record every liberated concentration camp on film. Besides
the photographers and cameramen who completed this task in the
service of the Signal Corps, the request was also passed on to prominent
photographers. Commissioned by LIFE magazine, Margaret Bourke-White arrived
at Buchenwald on 13 April 1945. During the days that followed, she
produced several of the photos that have remained iconic to the present
day. 03 Among other things, these pictures by Bourke-White and other photographers
showed the dead and decaying bodies left behind in the concentration
camps by their former commanders and guards. The images of
corpses were reproduced in a large number of American and British newspapers
and magazines. They served both as evidence in the various legal
cases of the immediate postwar period as well as instruments of enlightenment
in the ensuing re-education measures for the German population.
Boris Lurie experienced the liberation in one of Buchenwald’s satellite
camps, the men‘s camp of the Polte
Works in Magdeburg-Stattfeld. He
initially captured his experiences and
memories of internment in the
camp in drawings and watercolors.
Towards the end of the fifties, however,
he changed his formal language.
He began to produce collages
using photographs of the liberated
concentration camp Buchenwald.
At the center of one of the first
works in the series Saturation Paint-
01
ROLAND BARTHES
Camera Lucida: Reflections
on Photography,
trans. Richard Howard,
New York: Hill and
Wang, 1981, pp. 78f.
02
Immediately before
this, from 7–10 April
1945, the camp-SS had
forced around 28,000
people on death marches
to the camps in
Dachau and Flossenbürg
or had deported
them to Theresienstadt.
MIRJAM WENZEL