How Lee Miller's Photos Remind Us Of War's Destructive Brutality

(MENAFN- The Conversation) Almost 80 years since the end of the Second World War, images of its destruction are being brought back to us through the film LEE .

The film charts 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 alongside the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions of the U.S. army.

Today, Dachau is a site of memory that embodies the stories of the past - the told and untold. Family heritage and trauma shape these stories and sites.

As a German citizen, I am distraught about the past and see it as my duty to learn and understand. I am a millennial, an educator, emerging scholar in Holocaust remembrance and secondary witness of the Holocaust, which is why my doctoral studies explored the relationship between Holocaust remembrance, collective memory, and the Dachau Memorial Site.

As more time passes, we are nearing the post-witness era of the Second World War. Holocaust survivors are dwindling , and Holocaust education is ascending in order to combat denial, silencing and forgetting.

Nevertheless, past atrocities continue to shape our perspectives today, highlighting the significance of confronting oneself with the relationship between truth and evidence .

As the third postwar generation, millennials experience challenges learning about the past. Connections to survivors diminish, and people are left puzzling together fragments of history, mediated through cultural narratives, and what these narratives amplify 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 is. The study also found that four in 10 did not know six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Processes of reflection and negotiation of our responses to evidence of atrocities can be explained through transitional memory . This type of memory informs the way we experience stories associated with the past, through intrapersonal values and interaction with people, places and stories.

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

Hirsch's work ignited through engagement with intergenerational survivors, but she later examined“postmemory” among broader society also.

Societies' social constructions of history are informed through photographs, films and books. They are vectors of memory that morph over the years and, collectively, form an important part of how we memorialize the Second World War and its stories . One example are the photographs taken by Miller.

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

She recorded evidence through photos, not realizing their resurgence decades post-liberation. Miller captured photographs of the Dachau camp, its liberation and the people held there . By doing so, she provokes the viewer to participate in making sense of the past.

Through the film, viewers can learn how Miller's photos humanized those who perished specifically in the closing, brutal days of the war. Miller's photographs show the raw, unfiltered truth - and as the film shows, were initially deemed unpublishable .

Seeing Miller's images today, or a fictionalized treatment of her work through the film LEE can help people imagine circumstances and perspectives lived in the past. This can help us critically reflect on how we imagine standards we should abide by, and how we understand who we are accountable to .

Miller's experience at Dachau also reminds us of the importance of photojournalists in war zones today. War, suffering and death underscore the realities of death and the precarity of life.

Social psychologists drawing on anthropologist Ernest Becker's ideas through terror management theory explore how such confrontations can evoke feelings of shame or denial . These feelings give rise to potentially debilitating terror that people“manage” by adhering to specific cultural worldviews.

Miller's photos captured the unfiltered truth at the camp. Today, visitors to concentration camp memorial sites take photos as an act of memory-making which scholar Alison Landsberg sees as an extension of self, therefore a kind of“prosthetic memory .”

This enables humans to create empathy and a more meaningful connection to what they are observing. On the other hand, the act of taking photographs, in the form of selfies at sites of trauma can be distressing for intergenerational survivors and has been debated among scholars. As a form of witnessing, photographs can erupt with ambivalence and visitors to such sites must remember that“Dachau is not Disneyland .”

The shadows of the past continue to haunt the present. It has been just over a year since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack in southern Israel. Thousands have died through war crimes and mass destruction in Gaza that United Nations experts and Holocaust scholars have described as including dangers of genocide .

Holocaust educators must now reckon with the challenge of addressing geopolitics in order to reconcile with a collective troubled history.

For many Germans, guilt continues to frame the ongoing call for Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), while society aims to address and implement lessons learned from history.

A road to remembrance of the Holocaust remains brittle, in Germany , and across other Western countries.

Some believe banning literature such as the graphic novel Maus or political parties repackaging fascist ideologies should inform today's approach of coming to terms with the past.

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

More work is needed to oppose denial, silencing and forgetting of the horrors of the Holocaust.

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