Hitler’s legacy: two books examine different aspects of the horror that was Germany, 1945

Two new books offer very different takes on the utter ruination of Germany in 1945. Each in its own way shows the enfeebling results of our modern obsession with amateur psychologising.

Françoise Meltzer’s Dark Lens is based around a couple of dozen snaps which her mother, a Frenchwoman who had been in the Resistance, took of ruined German cities immediately after the war. This personal angle whets the reader’s appetite, as does the reminder of just how strangely fascinated we all are by ruins. Meltzer quickly delivers riveting information about how truly insane the Third Reich was: when Albert Speer was designing his megalomaniac new Reich capital for Hitler, they deliberately planned that ‘after hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years the ruins would more or less resemble Roman models’.

Unfortunately, this book isn’t really about information. If you genuflect at the phrase ‘Derrida himself’ or think Slavoj Zizek a genius, good luck with it. Everyone else will soon find it a wearying peroration on how we are supposedly manipulated by secret forces. There may indeed be, says Meltzer twice, some parallel between how we see the bombing of Nazi Germany and how we see Palestine today. Because whenever we look at photographs from history, we ‘view them through the filter of whatever reigning state apparatus has educated and thus constructed our gaze’. Is it really the photographs we are seeing at all, or is it not merely a story that has already been put into our own heads, eh, Molesworth 2?

Meltzer’s book becomes a reminder that the wretched equivocation of ‘alternative facts’ was originally cooked up not on the carcinogenic barbecues of the American alt-right but in the grubby Parisian kitchens of the left. A stout British empiricist might suggest that anyone who sees anything like the same tale in pictures of German ruins in 1945 and pictures of Palestine today should visit an optician.