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As Cora Sol Goldstein writes in her Acknowledgments for this informative and crisply written book, American military occupations are once again of more than merely historical interest. More to the point, contemporary political life is even more saturated with visual imagery than was the case during the years following World War II. Our need to describe and explain the role played by carefully crafted and skillfully deployed visual images in the governance of contemporary societies suggests that Capturing the German Eye may not only contribute to our historical and political understanding of a successful American military occupation but also be part of the "genealogy" of modern approaches to government. The extraordinary degree of control enjoyed by the American occupiers, and the enormous resources they were able to put into play, constitute something like a laboratory in which especially pure (albeit dauntingly complex) conditions make possible unusually precise observations of the theory and practice of visual political propaganda.
Over the course of five chapters, together with an introduction and conclusion, Goldstein analyzes how the Americans, who initially concentrated on photography and film (with whose propaganda uses the military was already intimately familiar), gradually extended their efforts to painting and sculpture as they grasped the significance of these fine arts to the cultural consciousness of ordinary, as well as educated, Germans. In the first chapter, she examines the occupiers' early tactic of exposing the defeated population to evidence of the atrocities carried out by their leaders during the war. This sometimes took the form of compulsory visits to concentration camps and killing centers, such as Flossenbürg and Buchenwald, where, as official photographs reveal, even very young children were made to view corpses. The horrors of the camps were conveyed more broadly, however, through posters, pamphlets, exhibits of photographs,...