Oldal 14 [14]
OCR
12 Dagnoslaw Demski, Liisi Laineste, Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska WWII changed worldviews, perspectives on enemies and allies, everyday beliefs, and existing social, political and value hierarchies. It also changed how these views, beliefs and hierarchies were expressed visually. Ihe aim of this volume is to examine how the Other is represented visually during WWII (but also the pre-war and post-war decades in order to account for the wider context), as well as providing a longitudinal perspective on the material by referring to the two previous volumes. Although our focus is set particularly on Eastern and Central Europe, we are equally interested in understanding the processes by which they represent the Other in the context of a global war (i.e. a war that was wider than the European context alone). During WWII, the number of groups considered alien or dangerous grew quickly along with their geographic scope. The examples of this volume come from pre-war, wartime and post-war Poland, Latvia, Russia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Slovakia and Great Britain. ‘The representation of the Other in the time of war, on the one hand continued pre-war patterns, while on the other gained a new, more aggressive form fuelled by rising nationalism and hatred, causing a change of targets that needed to be represented (for example as a mortal enemy) as well as visualised. Susan Sontag (2003) has argued that we consider the Other—even if the Other is not seen as an enemy—as someone whom we observe, not someone who would also observe us; we consider the Other someone to be seen, and not as someone who also, as we do, sees. In the growing aggression of wartime images, the dehumanised Other, who can be observed but does not observe him/herself, is highly present (see Kleemola, this volume). We can easily observe that different images have different purposes. Some are used for information, others for aesthetic experience, still others for documentation and archiving. As with any product of culture, they are strongly related to the context that has created them; they also change as the context changes. It is obvious that the greater the change in the society, the more evident the transformations in the way of representing. We will look more closely at what happens to images when war starts. How does it change the images themselves and also their usage, and, more generally, how does war matter in relation to images? This volume will try to answer questions concerning the interrelations of three important variables: war, images and the Other. The most evident change is that when countries are at war, they markedly focus on the negative sides of the enemy, wanting to capture their shortcomings, weaknesses and ridiculousness in contrast with their own advantages, strengths and sensibility. Quite often, these generalisations are based on (deliberate) ignorance (see also Davies, this volume). In documenting and analysing this, we have to pay attention to what is not depicted in the pictures equally along with what can be seen and noticed. The concealed is as important as the evident, if not more so, when it comes to studying societal processes. What is communicated explicitly and what is left implicit may inform the attentive observer about the aims, motives and ideas of the sender of the message.
