Inkongruente Bilder. Ernst Jüngers Pferde

Abstract

Photobooks played a central role in Weimar Germany’s memory culture. They served as a medium for preserving and archiving, illustrating and communicating recollections of WW I. In the politicized climate of the Weimar years, photobooks spoke to distinct memory communities situated at different points on the political spectrum. This article considers the photobooks of Ernst Jünger, an important figure in the memory culture of the political right. It focuses on a number of incongruent images in Jünger’s Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges: photographs of dead and dying horses that extend the notion of wartime suffering to animals. Because they do not sit easily within the book’s program of a commemoration of the dead, and because they do not fit Jünger’s explicitly stated understanding of the War as a crucible of modernization, these images provide the opportunity for a more differentiated consideration of Jünger’s contribution to Weimar memorial culture.