ing to fit into the racist scheme of the Nazi regime.
Most of the images that depict the Holocaust are
derived from material seen, taken, and supplied
by the perpetrators themselves, thus showing only
one side of the truth. Crimes against humanity, as
executed openly among the German people, were
set into scenes in order to be photographed and
recorded in a matter similar to documentary film-
ing. Photographs of concentration camps are rare,
and even rarer are images like those by Mendel
Grossman of the Ghetto in Lodz, Poland, which
had to be smuggled out shortly before he was
transported to another camp, where he died. The
rarity of these photographs quickly made them
icons of the Holocaust, contrasting sharply with
the masses of propaganda photographs taken by
amateurs and professionals alike, as these few
images show the actual horror of people willing to
look away from what was done in their name.
After 1945, Germany lay in agony, and so did
German photography. Only a few photographers
documented the damage and destruction of the
country’s cities, as Robert Capa had done on his
assignment in Berlin in August, 1945. Eva Kemlein
worked in Berlin, Hermann Claasen in Cologne,
Erna Wagner-Hehmke in Dusseldorf, Karl-Heinz
Mai and Renate Roessing in Leipzig, Lala Aufsberg
in Nuremberg, and Herbert List and Tom von
Wichert in Munich. Many others did not wish to
know anything about war and its results. The older
photographers who had participated in propaganda
and other war crimes now took their motifs from
nature, so as to deny that they had helped to destroy
a cultivated country. Younger photographers fled
to abstraction as a manifestation of their amnesia.
In 1949, a group of young photographers was
formed which was to become the nucleus of 1950s
modernism; its name wasfotoform, and the more
famous members were Peter Keetman, Otto Stei-
nert, and Ludwig Windstosser. Keetman repre-
sented the purest form offotoform; Steinert had
incredible impact on the German photographic
scene as teacher, and Windstosser presented Ger-
man industry after its remarkable postwar recovery.
The group offered membership to two older avant-
gardists—Raoul Hausmann, the formerdadasoph;
and Heinz Hajek-Halke, who had played a minor
but prolific role in the 1920s.
Hajek-Halke taught on a part-time contract at
the Berlin Academy and helped a number of stu-
dents to find their way, among them characters so
diverse as Dieter Appelt and Michael Ruetz. Otto
Steinert taught in Saarbrucken until 1959, where he
helped important artists like Monika von Boch,
Kilian Breier, and Detlef Orlopp start their careers,
but he switched to teaching straight photo-journal-
ism upon moving to Essen. Among his more
important students were Hans-Joerg Anders, Hen-
ning Christoph, Juergen Heinemann, Bernd Jan-
sen, Dirk Reinartz, Heinrich Riebesehl, Guido
Mangold, Rudi Meisel, Peter Thomann, Walter
Vogel, Wolfgang Vollmer, and Wolfgang Volz. A
few of Steinert’s students in the 1960s moved to art
photography (e.g., Arno Jansen, Andre ́ Gelpke,
and Timm Rautert).
The situation in Austria after 1945 was slightly
different: U.S. propaganda magazines likeHeute
encouraged a number of very young photographers
like Ernst Haas and Jewish immigrants like Erich
Lessing to create a fresh scene of a life magazine
journalism nearly unknown in any other European
country. From the same ground, the career of Inge
Morath emerged.
There were important exponents of 1960s photo-
journalism in Germany besides Steinert’s students.
On one hand, men like Robert Lebeck and Thomas
Hoepker pursued their own careers within classic
journalism, whereas other photographers like F.C.
Gundlach, Walter Lautenbacher, and Charlotte
March laid out new goals for fashion photography;
even Helmut Newton returned to the German-illu-
strated papers via France. Advertising and industry
instigated a number of photographers to produce
masterworks in this field, among them Robert Ha ̈us-
ser, Franz Lazi, Will McBride, Karl-Hugo Schmo ̈lz,
and Walde Huth, and, above them all, Reinhart
Wolf. While there were many developments in pol-
itics and society during this era, art was not yet a real
theme in photography until the mid-1970s. The only
movement that quietly blossomed in the 1960s was
calledGenerative Fotografie, which indicated a self-
referential, extremely abstract form of autopoeti-
cally generated images in photographic techniques,
including micrography, chemigraphy, and multiple
pin-hole photography. This movement was led by
Gottfried Ja ̈ger and embraced figures as diverse as
Hein Gravenhorst, Karl-Martin Holzhaeuser, and
Manfred Kage. This movement stimulated early
experiments in computer graphics as well, as seen
in the work of Herbert W. Franke, Manfred Mohr,
and Frieder Nake.
Parallel to the renaissance of interest in class-
ical photography as seen in the art market in the
1970s, there were two chains of development that
represent German photography for the next 20
years. One received the name ofauteurphotogra-
phy, after film theory’s use of the term, with An-
dreas Mu ̈eller-Pohle and Wilhelm Schuermann as
its main protagonists, following in the footsteps
of Steinert students Arno Jansen and HeinrichGERMANY AND AUSTRIA, PHOTOGRAPHY IN