Title: German occupation photography in WWII Greece. An examination.
Speaker: Carl Mauzy, Marilena Laskaridis Visiting Research Fellow 2023-2024, University of Amsterdam.
Date & Time: 26 January 2024, 3.30 pm.
Location: University of Amsterdam, Dept. of Modern Greek Studies, Spuistraat 134 (building PCH), room 1.05
Language: English
Abstract
This talk will examine the photography taken by German soldiers during Germany’s occupation of Greece in 1941-1944. Such photography is an underexplored aspect of Greece’s World War II social and cultural history, that has only recently begun to be explored. The photographic archive of Karl Rauscher (housed at the NIOD in Amsterdam) will act as the springboard for this talk. Rauscher was a member of the Luftwaffe, stationed in Greece during WWII. Rauscher photographed extensively during his stay in Greece, documenting the daily routine of the German occupiers, visits to archaeological sites as well as the Greeks he encountered. By looking at Rauscher’s war time pictures of Greece, the talk will investigate what place such images can have in the historical narratives and cultural memory of Greece, and more broadly in the historiography of WWII, taking into account the visual practices of the perpetrator. Furthermore, how the amateur nature of Rauscher’s photographs might allow us to examine these images as instantiations of multiple histories, will also be examined.
Bio
Carl Mauzy is a Marilena Laskaridis Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a PhD from King’s College London, where he studied photographic visualizations of collective identities in Greece during the first half of the twentieth century. Previously he worked as a producer and curator at the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden. His academic research focuses on visual approaches to history, photography’s role in historical imagination, and the history of modern Greece.