Zimmerreisen um 1945

The rooms were small and close and furnished as if in a newly purchased suburban house. In the kitchen were many aluminum utensils, and in the hallway hung gymnastic rings for exercise. The bed was covered in ice-blue satin, and in the nearly empty wardrobes were stacked padded boxes that had probably once held stockings and veils. Crockery and paper lay scattered across the floor, as in all houses that have been looted. Those who had been there had no idea whose house they had searched for food and wine. Yet the portraits of Hitler with tender dedications to Eva were plainly visible, and the stationery was printed with full name and address: at Wasserburgerstraße 12 stood Eva Braun's stucco villa, one of many in that modern quarter of Munich (cf. Miller 2015: 242f.).

What Lee Miller found there was not the lair of power but its underside: the private rooms of a woman who had spent twelve years waiting in them. The aluminum utensils, the gymnastic rings, the ice-blue satin — these are the furnishings of a life arranged around the interior, around the cultivation of the body in the absence of the person for whom it was cultivated. The Damenzimmer in its most extreme form. Padded boxes for stockings and veils — garments of occasion, garments of ceremony, garments waiting to be worn. 

What a looted room records is not only the violence of looting but the strangeness of the life interrupted: the evidence that someone had organized things here, had lived inside a set of assumptions about the future that the future then refused.

Like all German writing desks, Eva Braun's was fully equipped with paper clips, pens, blotting paper, rulers, new pencils, and stacks of letter-paper (cf. ibid. 2015: 244). The full desk is its own kind of document. It speaks of an intention to correspond, to produce, to leave a mark — and the almost total absence of what such a desk is meant to generate. What has survived are not letters but merely a few diary entries, held today in the National Archives in Washington. Braun began writing on February 6, 1935, her twenty-third birthday, and continued sporadically until May 28, 1935, when the last entry breaks off in the middle of a page.

A diary that breaks off in the middle of a sentence is an archive of incompletion. It does not conclude; it simply stops. And what stops with it is the attempt to make the waiting legible — to herself, perhaps, or to some imagined future reader who would understand what it had cost. The handwritten pages that remain are disturbingly narrow in their preoccupations: a lovesick teenager with a tendency toward narcissism, melodrama, and an ever-deepening obsession with Hitler. "I am so endlessly happy that he loves me so, and I pray it will always remain so" (February 18, 1935) — a few weeks later, he broke a promised meeting, and she was again utterly wretched. She began to wish she were gravely ill, for then perhaps he would pay her some attention.

The obscenity of this juxtaposition requires no commentary, and yet it demands one. While Eva Braun wished herself ill in order to be noticed, Hitler was building Germany's Luftwaffe and a submarine fleet, both violations of the Versailles Treaty. He was also promulgating the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship rights. These preoccupations Eva Braun found tiresome and incomprehensible, unable to understand why they demanded so much of his time. For three months Hitler had barely spoken a word to her, and she did nothing but wait in desperation:

"Is this the mad love he has assured me of so many times, when he gives me not a kind word for 3 months. Granted he has had his head full of political problems in this time, but isn't there a relaxation now?"

The political problems she names and dismisses in the same breath — the machinery of genocide referred to as a scheduling inconvenience. This is not naivety in any simple sense. It is something more disturbing: the absolute enclosure of subjectivity within the private, within the waiting room of the self, such that the systematic murder of millions remains, in the diary, a matter of competing for attention. The room with its aluminum utensils and padded boxes is also this: a space in which the political has been successfully expelled, or rather never admitted. A space designed for waiting, and for nothing else.

The long-desired wish to "rise" through marriage would fulfill itself for Eva Braun only after a long season of longing. By then the Third Reich had already collapsed and stood on the verge of capitulation, and on April 30, 1945, the day after the wedding, she went into death alongside Adolf Hitler. The marriage lasted less than forty hours. The waiting lasted twelve years.

“Well then, Hitler was dead. For me he had never really been alive until now. All these years he had been an evil machine-monster — until I saw the places he had made famous, talked to people who had known him, tracked down the backstairs gossip, and ate and slept in his house. He became less grand there and therefore all the more horrible; there were also a few hints that he had some almost human habits, almost like an ape that embarrasses you with its gestures, yes, shames you, because it holds up a distorted mirror. You think: it could have caught you too” (Miller 2015: 229).

For a long time the war correspondent and photographic artist Lee Miller, who wrote these lines, had speculated about where she would be when the time came to celebrate the end of the war. On the first of May 1945, when Hitler's death was announced, she found herself in his Munich apartment, washing the dust of the concentration camps from her body in his bathtub — camps she had moved through with her Rolleiflex to document the incomprehensible as completely as possible.

The photograph Miller's colleague David Scherman took of her in that bathtub has become iconic in ways that still sit uneasily. Miller, naked, composed, washing herself clean, while on the floor beside the tub sits a muddy boot that has walked through Dachau, and on the ledge above the taps, propped against the wall, a small portrait of Hitler watches. The image has been read as transgression, as desecration, as dark humor, as testimony. It is all of these, and it is also something harder to name: a document of the impossibility of cleaning oneself of what one has seen. The water is running but the boot stays dirty. She is in the room of the monster and the monster is still there, watching. The body that moves through history cannot step out of it simply by stepping into a bath.

The concentration camp at Dachau had everything one would ever hear about a camp, or refuse to hear. The great dusty expanses, for instance, trampled by a thousand damned feet: "feet that ached and shuffled and stamped away cold and moved to relieve the pain and finally only served to lead them to the death chamber" (Miller 2015: 230). As with almost every camp system, no complete count of victims exists. In total, the Holocaust resulted in the murder of up to six million Jews, seven million Soviet civilians, nearly two million non-Jewish Poles, two hundred thousand Roma and Sinti, and more.

The numbers accumulate and resist accumulation. They are the opposite of the diary entries: where Braun's pages narrow and narrow toward a single point of private feeling, the statistics of the Holocaust expand beyond what any single consciousness can hold. Miller's photographs attempt something between these two failures of language — neither the enclosure of the diary nor the abstraction of the statistic, but the specific, unignorable face of the singular case. The foot in the mud. 

"After the liberation, the corpses were cleared away and those who looked as if they might fall dead at any moment were in hospitals. All had already had one or two meals and felt ill in accordance with their shrunken stomachs and their feelings" (cf. ibid. 2015: 202f.).

The body as archive. Shrunken stomachs, hair fallen out, skin over bone — the body that has been made to record what was done to it, whether or not words are ever found. Miller photographed these bodies too, and Vogue published the photographs, to the editors' visible discomfort. The images did not fit the magazine's logic of consumption and desire. They exceeded it. They were meant to.

The more Lee Miller saw of what the Nazis had done, the more outraged she became at a people that denied all guilt and shared responsibility for the catastrophe. Many contemporaries — accomplices and fellow-travelers, opportunists and the indifferent — simply had difficulty accepting that the war was over; the proportion of those who regarded National Socialism as a good idea badly implemented stood at 50 percent at the end of 1945 and at 55 percent by 1947, reaching 68 percent among those under thirty-six (cf. Bittermann 2015: 263). Hitler's Reich, with its hypertrophied national pride and its racist delusion, had been crushed:

“Yet nowhere is this nightmare of destruction and terror less felt, and nowhere is less said about it, than in Germany. One notices everywhere that there is no reaction to what has happened, but it is difficult to say whether this is some deliberate refusal to mourn or the expression of a genuine incapacity for feeling. Among the ruins the Germans are sending one another postcards of the churches and market squares, the public buildings and bridges that no longer exist. And the indifference with which they move through the rubble finds its exact correspondence in the fact that no one mourns the dead; it is mirrored in the apathy with which they react, or rather fail to react, to the fate of the refugees in their midst. This general lack of feeling — or at any rate the evident heartlessness, which is sometimes masked by cheap sentimentality — is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn, and occasionally brutal refusal to face and come to terms with what actually happened” (ibid. 2015: 266f., cited after Arendt, A Visit to Germany, 1950).

Hannah Arendt and Lee Miller arrived at the same observation by different routes — Arendt through the systematic thinking of the political philosopher, Miller through the camera's enforced proximity to the thing itself. What Arendt calls the refusal to mourn, Miller experienced as a kind of violence directed against her own seeing: she had looked, and the looking had cost her something, and then she was surrounded by people who had not looked, would not look, and expected her to accept their not-looking as normal. The Verdrängung — the repression, the displacement — was not passive. It was organized. It had a social architecture as deliberate as the Damenzimmer with its padded boxes.

This hypocritical peace was for Lee Miller like a shock. She could not bear that the Nazis were soon again respectable citizens, and she could not bear that her articles accomplished so little — as if they had been written in invisible ink and thrown to the wind. Her photographs Lee Miller stored in nothing more than shoeboxes in the attic of an English country house, where they outlasted the years until her death in 1977 — hardly waiting, one might say, but without any doubt ripening: they belong today to the most significant photographic works of the twentieth century.

The shoeboxes on the attic floor. The stacked padded boxes in Eva Braun's wardrobe. The diary that breaks off mid-sentence. The photographs that were not published, or published once and then forgotten, or published and disbelieved. The archive of the twentieth century is full of things that had to wait — not patiently, not willingly, but simply because the world was not yet ready to receive them. Whether it is ready now is a question the shoeboxes do not answer. They only establish that the images survived. What we do with that survival is, as always, still open.