Part of The Wiener Holocaust Library’s PhD and a Cup of Tea doctoral seminar series.

Clandestine death march image taken by Benno Gantner in 1945. USHMM.

This talk examines the clandestine nature and cartographical significance of a series of death march images taken by Benno Gantner from the window of his home in Percha, just outside Munich, as prisoners were marching southeast from Dachau after its liquidation in 1945. Via a reading of clandestine wartime photography as a critical cartographical practice that binds victims to their environments, this talk brings Gantner’s images into dialogue with emerging scholarship on the spatial organisation of the Holocaust. In so doing, it examines the unique tension between clandestine photographs as forensic tools with which we can verify the journeys taken by the prisoners they depict on the one hand and emotionally affective visual devices that immortalise the public suffering and humiliation of these subjects on the other.

About the speaker:

Emily-Rose Baker is a recently submitted PhD student in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis is titled ‘Postcommunist Constellations: Decolonial Cultures of Holocaust Memory in Central-Eastern Europe’, and examines localised literary and artistic interventions into state-sponsored narratives of Holocaust revisionism and appropriation after 1989.

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