Young Soldier, Westerwald. 1945
© August Sander
Images of soldiers pass by fleetingly within news items which show us proud or smiling faces of those who are no more. The distant and graphic realities of death, under the sun, in turn made tranquil and benign as they are hidden behind the images of a transitory moment captured within a safer world and a happier time.
Over the years the work of August Sander has continued to stand out for me, although most recently, one image in particular. His image, entitled: “Young Soldier, Westerwald 1945″ is one that lingers on long after I have walked away from it.
As Roger Hargreaves has discussed, “…the spirit of August Sander’s 1945 portrait of a young soldier standing in a Westerwald farmyard [with] his storm trooper’s helmet and freshly issued uniform….is not [one of] who he is but what he might become.”
Perhaps more than any other genre of portrait, in my opinion, the image of the soldier within photography is a complex and charged one. In this sense, the real power of portraits of soldiers often seems to exist outside of the frame; or more precisely within the realms of what we might perceive to be their future or via the certainties of what we know already has happened to them in the past. Yet of course, It is because of this, that the figure is often strangely made passive - which of course disavows the purpose, identity and role both of the soldier, but also of the masculine identity itself.
The recent and excellent work of Nina Berman and Suzanne Opton has once more focussed my interest on images of soldiers. The question of passivity is drawn clearly within both of their works. Supine and broken figures are in evidence and perhaps what attracts us is that they like us are equally impotent in a war on terror that perhaps cannot be won and is beyond the control of us all.
Kaja Silverman has written eloquently on historical trauma and male subjectivity - a case in point being her deconstruction of William Wyler’s 1946 film ‘The best years of our lives’ within her book ‘Male subjectivity at the margins’. The film follows the return of a number of servicemen from war - each in their own way is a castrated figure that has lost who they are and as such are in search of themselves. They have lost order, a role and a purpose and have become the antithesis of masculinity.
As I look at Sander’s image I forget that this soldier will fight and support a regime that is abhorrent: one that would consider me an enemy….an untermenchen. This is more than just the shifting sands of context and meaning it is the skill of Sander to make me see - or think that I see - the human individual beneath the uniform but whilst unlike Hargreaves, I do indeed think about who this young soldier was..I agree that I also wonder what he might have become; as I look at the words on his belt buckle that proudly proclaims “Gott mit uns” - God with us.
