Lee Miller’s “Hitleriana”, “Partial Witnessing”, and the Line Between “Document” and “Art”

This is (almost) verbatim text from a journal entry I wrote for a seminar I took on immersive documentary. I thought it was interesting enough to put here, even though parts of it might not make sense if you haven’t read the works I’m talking about. For context, my class had previously read an essay called “Disaster City” by Barrett Swanson, in which Swanson participates in a disaster recovery simulation, explores his personal fascination with disaster scenarios, and explores the blurring between reality and fiction that occurs in those simulations. A lot of our conversation had to do with rituals and performative preparedness and how they can be used to enable cognitive avoidance of the root causes of certain issues, creating a false sense of safety for the person practising (or even observing) the rituals.

Here are all of the texts mentioned in this journal entry:

I really, really love “Hitleriana”. I find the contrasts within the essay fascinating, and it gives me a lot of flashbacks to our conversation about Barrett Swanson’s “Disaster City” in class. The main thread that runs through this text is the constant juxtaposition of normalcy and horror. Miller takes great pains to describe the banality of Hitler’s apartment, the banality of the objects in his home, how the people he lived with thought he was a mostly nice and reasonable person, and so on. The backdrop infusing this entire piece is the knowledge of the atrocities Hitler has committed, which aren’t really mentioned; instead, Miller describes the domestic minutiae she comes across while exploring and documenting the remnants of the life Hitler once lived. While inside Hitler’s apartment, she is struck by the fact that others are behaving as if “they [aren’t] living in a museum.” When she visits Hitler’s wife’s house, she is struck by how normal it is. And again, where Miller visits the Sterneckerbrau Haus, a bar/beer hall where Hitler frequently had planning meetings with his disciples, the focus is on how normal the caretaker is acting, and how Miller somehow expects to see a pilgrimage shrine, some sort of acknowledgment that this place was an important site in the staging of the horrors that she saw.

The essay reads like Miller is working through trauma, working to process the enormous tragedy she has just witnessed in Dachau, and being hindered by the utter mundanity of what she is seeing. Miller is trying to grapple with the inexplicable and coming up short. What she saw feels impossible and unreal, so she seeks context to understand what came about. But as she delves deeper into Munich and Hitler’s life, the normalcy of it disturbs her. She’s searching for something out of the ordinary to validate the out-of-the-ordinary horrors, but there is nothing, and this incongruence disturbs her so much that she spends the entire essay ruminating on it. She can’t make sense of Hitler’s private life and public actions together, so the only option she has left is to present them side by side. This is made explicit on page 200, where she mentions being served dinner in a restaurant, and also that the restaurant had plainclothes Gestapo (since captured) in it in the morning, in the same breath.

In “Visual Testimony: Lee Miller’s Dachau”, Sliwinski argues that things we cannot process or understand cannot be described, only partially witnessed, and that the photograph is a method of partial witnessing – of representing things we don’t yet understand. She also talks about how what isn’t and cannot be in the photo is just as important as what is. I feel like we can apply this philosophy to Miller’s essay as well. Miller isn’t explaining anything here; she is only describing, through imagery. The elaborate descriptions of the domestic settings, of the objects, of the paraphernalia in Hitler’s life, can all be seen as a textual analogue of photographic partial witnessing. Nothing is ever explained or defended, only presented or questioned. What happened in Dachau is an important part of this story, but it’s left out of the frame. This contradiction between the mundane and the atrocious is something Miller cannot describe or understand, so she can only partially witness it.

Another interesting idea from Sliwinski is where she quotes the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann on page 392. He argues that pictures function as a protective shield against the true horrors of reality, “inciting a false sense of knowledge.” This calls back to “Disaster City”, where Swanson suggests that he is engaging in a sort of performative preparedness ritual that tries to make people feel protected from the true horrors of the real world, containing them all in this staged playground of tragedies. There as well, there is this allusion to a false sense of knowledge possessed by the governments who sanction these disaster recovery exercises, since when real disasters occur they still invariably find themselves underprepared and overwhelmed.

Sontag also makes an allusion to photographs being used as a method to “package the world,” and implies that tourists used photography as a method of hiding from reality. That leaves me with the following question: Is photography a means of witnessing or containing?

There’s also this very interesting idea on page 195 of “Hitleriana” where Miller talks about explaining several times that she is making “documents and not art”, which I think is an interesting claim and found quite jarring to read in the moment. The word “document carries, to me, a notion of asserted objectivity, but as far as I’m aware, Miller was not particularly concerned with trying to appear objective. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t. A photograph, as Sontag argues, is still very much an interpretation – it is a representation of a part of reality that exists, but filtered through the eye and the hand of the photographer, who makes choices that deeply influence the image. Barring that, however, I don’t even know if “art” and “document” should be considered mutually exclusive terms.

I often see art as a form of document, as an interpretation of the world that contains information about its realities. I have also always seen documentary as a form of art – it is breaking down reality into a digestible form so that it can be understood, and that process inherently involves some filtering, interpretation, and curation, no matter how limited or subconscious. But maybe this is just me; I consider my personal writing practice to be very in line with the creative nonfiction and literary journalism traditions. In my opinion, Swanson’s “Disaster City” is more about contextualizing the reporting that he did than it was about the place he was reporting on, but I still consider what he was doing to be a form of journalism and therefore documentary. Yes, there are memoirists who blur the lines between memory and fiction, but that is not what Swanson was doing or what my practice is about. I just happen to believe that choosing to focus on facts and accurate representation of real events isn’t a disqualification from a work being “art”.

Lastly, I found it interesting that Sontag wrote the following quote in “Plato’s Cave”: “The picture may distort: but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.” This phrase has not aged well; this is absolutely untrue in the age of generative AI. What is the current role of the image, in a time where it can no longer be seen as a reliable source of truth?