ABSTRACT
Young, handsome, German men posing, often against a lush German landscape some sixty years after the end of World War II in Nazi uniforms.1 What do these photos perform? How do we read them? And how do we contextualize them both within Collier Schorr’s other work and within the landscape of Holocaust postmemory? This work produces curious results and forces the viewer to confront his or her own position vis-à-vis the enduring presence of the past within the present; for the images appear as though, in Schorr’s words, a “soldier rose up [from the landscape] with that helmet,” as though the past were still visibly with us. Schorr describes the thickly embedded palimpsest of the current German topography as “fi lled with relics and memories. So many things are buried in the landscape in Germany” that, for Schorr, “the landscape feels so loaded” (art:21). Concurrently with the Nazi images, Schorr had been working on a text that rewrites the American painter Andrew Wyeth’s Helga series. In that context Wyeth had declared, “I’ve had people say, why paint American landscapes? There’s no depth in it-you have got to go to Europe before you can get any depth. To me that’s inane. If you want something profound, the American countryside is exactly the place” (Wilmerding 90).
