Heinrich, the Camera and Military Service

An Attempt to Understand the Wartime Photography of an Adolescent Villager

Abstract

Social historians increasingly adopt a new perspective by concentrating on behavioural clusters, and attempt to reconstruct „alien" social worlds on the basis of written, oral and visual „texts" and the help of new hermeneutical tools. The author tries to reconstruct relevant mental structures of adolescent villagers in the military context of the Second World War by analysing the war photography of a soldier of the German Wehrmacht. Abroad - ambivalently experienced as fascinating and threatening - Heinrich produces a specific identity. His capital resources - his truck, his professional logic as a mechanic, the relationship with like-minded „comrades" - enable him to distance himself, at least partially, from the type of the „German soldier". He can not free himself, however, from his entanglement in the military organization. Heinrich does not want to be a soldier; but this is exactly how he becomes a „Mechaniker-Soldat", a mechanic-soldier.