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Focus on Strangers — Photo Albums of World War II ······································································································ The individuality of the war stories and personal fates often reveal themselves on the final pages of the album. Death, injury or imprisonment put an abrupt end to the pictures; pages are left empty. The group portrait with the family symbolizes the return home; photos of get-togethers with fellow veterans carry the war album forward into the 1950s. The exhibition offers interpretations and perspectives for a better understanding of these photo archives. Some 150 privately owned photo albums – loans from former Northern German Wehrmacht soldiers and their families – as well as albums from museums and archives form the basis of the exhibition. The latter is the result of a research project carried out at the Universities of Oldenburg and Jena with support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) and the Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur (Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Scholarship and Culture). The pleasure taken by the soldiers in observing and photographing what they witnessed has already long been a subject of study. The discussions revolving around the so-called “Wehrmachtsausstellungen” (German Army exhibitions) over the past ten years have heightened our awareness of the complexities of using photographs as historical sources on the history of World War II. New research on the contexts in which the pictures were taken and the purposes they served contributes to the further examination of the existing approaches to explaining and understanding these phenomena. The photos are analyzed with a view to both their historical-political and their aesthetic context. The chief focus of this project is a well-differentiated approach to photography – without neglecting what occasioned the taking of pictures in this ideologically charged war of racism and extermination. The exhibition presents original albums, black-and-white reproductions, and slide and movie projections, for the most part privately owned. Interviews with the photographic subjects shed light on the photographers’ intentions. The specific sense of aesthetics possessed by these hobby photographers of war is addressed with a view to the context in which the photos were taken. The show presents a private pictorial history of World War II. Translation: Judith Rosenthal