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This is a documentary photograph. It captures an important-if also unpleasant-moment in German history.

This image has a lot to look at. I was first drawn to the gaping whole in the ground, wondering exactly what it was that I was looking at. Next I noticed the people caught in action, working at this construction site. One can tell that it is a considerable undertaking, but it is not obvious (at least not to me) what exactly is being undertaken.

The absence of color, the heavy reliance on wood for scaffolding, ladders, and other equipment, along with the style of clothing and absence of safety gear all point to the fact that the photograph was taken many decades ago. The caption further explains that the photo was taken in Germany during the Nazi era. Paul goes on to describe how the meaning of this preserved historical moment has become controversial in contemporary discourses around the meaning of Germaness in contradistinction to Naziism.

Toxic Legacies.

Paul frames this image as a "toxic subject for Germany's cultural memory," and he uses this image to argue against the simple distinction between Germaness and Nazism. He supports this refusal by arguing that the image depicts "a monument for Nazi barbarity as [much as it depicts] a monument for German technological expertise." Is this meant to suggest that there are "survivals" or perhaps a "specter" of Nazism that still haunts the contemporary, embedded in the infrastructures that rely upon technologies developed under the Nazi regime?

This image conveys the duality of innovation, where the ambitions of modernism sour into fascism and back again. 

Visceral. The context of the image has a lot of dark connotations which I experience immediately before properly taking it in.

It's emblematic of the complicated arguments around innovation through barbarous regimes. 

The caption pulls me into major scholarly debates about troubling binaries, like German-ness/Nazism, tradition/modernity, etc. That said, I cannot immediately recognize this imagery as evoking those debates without resorting to the caption. Adding words to the image would cue me that this massive pit is German (unrecognizable from the imagery alone) and when it was taken. A major theme communicated via the image is scale. The hole is enormous, yet I'd expect it to be even bigger knowing already the weight of concrete involved in the finished project.

The ethnography situated in this staged image, Paul's curation, and my viewing of it has to do with the intentionality gap between figures shaping these acts. No participant in the making of Speer's arch seemed all that aware that their work would have the legacy it has. Sometimes I wonder in memory studies about scholars assuming their subjects to have been aware folks in the distant future would remember them. The Nazis aspired to be remembered for millennia, this I do know, but did their workers?