Customer Reviews

SHADOWS OF WAR: A German Soldier's Lost Photographs of World War II

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There are hundreds of books on World War II. This one is unique. Willi Rose was drafted into the German Army in 1939 and served as a motorcycle messenger until captured in Poland in 1945. Throughout his service he carried a camera and took some 500 photographs from France to Russia. These are photos of ordinary German soldiers going about doing ordinary things eating, playing cards, talking. There is a almost nothing of war in the pictures, except of course the uniforms and equipment.

This book presents a view of the war seldom seen, and in my memory, never of the German side. You just don't think of the German soldier as a man like the rest of us. It changes your whole view of history.

As remarked by others, the "banality of evil" is a pretty feeble description of Shadows of War. If nothing else, any "banality" of this volume illustrates two essential points. The first point is the axiom that war is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror. Whatever one might think, even German soldiers spent a fair amount of time away from combat, resting, playing, or just looking around at the world. Shadows of War illustrates this side of the enemy's war that we seldom see illustrated so vividly. Indeed, as a combat soldier and not a propaganda photographer, Rose was hardly in a place to put down his rifle to take politically meaningful photos of combat. The second point is that the term "evil" is not terribly useful when describing an entire nationality. Were the German people as a whole irredeemably evil? Is every German soldier, willing volunteer and unwilling draftee alike, a war criminal? Indeed, can one be involved either personally or institutionally in the commission of evil while still maintaining one's essential humanity? Shadows of War is a useful testament to the idea that humans are humans regardless of what uniforms they happen to be wearing. Rose's photographs are his own perceptions of the world around him, nothing more and nothing less. They illustrate the things that caught his eye, the things that he found to be of interest or of artistic merit, and the things that he wanted to remember. While many of these photographs are indeed visually exciting, Rose can hardly be held responsible for not making any larger commentary of the evil of his regime or the evil of his crimes with his photographs.

Where Shadows of War comes up short in my own mind is the lack of context for the photos. This is an "art" book rather than a historical document. Therefore, the photos stand or fall on their own artistic merit and are not ordered to tell any particular story. Those readers with a more historic interest in these photos might find themselves wishing for something more than the extremely sparse captions and historical notes on Rose's regiment. All told, though, Shadows of War is well worth its very reasonable price. It shows the all too easy to forget human side to the people who lived through World War II from a perspective that many of us have not seen before in such detail.

This is ultimately a disappointing collection, in part because the editors thought they were putting together a photographic art book rather than an historical photo archive. Some of the photos would be of historical or technical interest had they been reproduced close to the full size of the page. Instead, we have a pretentious, "minimalist" layout with tiny photos lost in the middle of huge white spaces (perhaps suggesting a gallery wall or some such nonsense). Captions contain little contextual information, and several are wrong in identifying the equipment shown. As an historical document this volume has little to offer. Even as a coffee table art book, it is bland, because these are for the most part just mediocre snapshots.

This is to agree with a previous reviewer, regarding the poor value of this book for anyone who cares about the correctness of the information presented. The impression I got from this book was that whoever put this together wanted a quick way to bank on the recent surge in interest in everything WW2. The photos here are in most part minimally presented, but still allowing in numerous mistakes.

If you don't pay the list price you may still feel ok about it, since the photos are indeed not seen before.

Anyone that uses Hannah Arendt's tired old clique on the "banality of evil" should be stoned to death! I think it is an expression easily used by the uneducated to sound intelligent or philisophical about the subject of Germans or the Nazis during the second world war of which they know little or nothing!