A young woman can be seen on a black and white photograph. She is wearing a buttoned-up plaid blouse with large shiny buttons tucked into a dark skirt. Her brown, wavy hair is kept in an elegant, relatively short hairstyle that does not extend past her shoulders. It is gracefully brushed and falls gently over her forehead above her right eye. She appears to be standing with her hands clasped under her hips. Her posture is upright and her head is held high. She is not looking directly into the camera, but slightly up to the left, towards the right side of the picture.
The background is covered in snow. Behind the woman is a steep slope engulfed by dense bushes and trees, which crosses the picture from right to left. Further back, a gently sloping hillside stretches from right to left, covered with sparse vegetation. The immediate background is exposed and fallow. It is snow-covered, tilted slightly to the left of the picture and leads to what looks like a shack made of light-coloured wood, with a small window and a gabled roof covered by a thick layer of snow, concealing a similar structure behind it.
The woman depicted is Dora Schaul, a 29-year-old inmate of the Camp de Rieucros Internment Camp in the town of Mende in the south of France. Schaul was born into the Davidson family in Berlin in 1913. She spent her childhood in Essen and later attended a business school before working as a commercial clerk in Berlin. In 1933, Schaul emigrated alone to Amsterdam, where she met Alfred Benjamin.1
Benjamin, known as Ben, was born in Elberfeld in 1911. He, like Schaul, was a German Jew, but the reason for his exile lay mainly in his membership of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). After the Nazi seizure of power, he was persecuted and subsequently imprisoned. Following his release in 1934, he left Germany and moved to Amsterdam. There he met Dora and the couple moved to Paris together, where they took part in KPD resistance activities. In October 1939, one month after the invasion of Poland, Schaul and Benjamin were arrested as “feindliche Ausländer” (enemy aliens) and imprisoned in Camp de Rieucros.2
At the time the photograph was taken, the couple, who in the meantime had been able to marry, were planning their escape from the camp. In February 1942, however, the Rieucros internment camp was closed in anticipation of the imminent deportation of Jews from France and the couple was separated: Schaul was transferred to the Brens Internment Camp and Benjamin to the labour camps in Chanac.
In the summer of the same year, Dora and Ben managed to escape separately. According to their plan, they were to hide in Vichy France and reunite at a later point.3 In fact they would never see each other again: Attempting to flee across the Alps to Switzerland, Ben had a fatal accident on a mountain shortly before crossing the border. His body was found some time later. At the time of his death, he had around sixty documents and photographs with him – including the portrait of Dora Schaul.
Using forged documents and fictitious identities, Dora Schaul survived the war and the Shoah in France as a member of the Resistance.4 After the end of the war, she returned to Germany and settled in East Berlin. The documents found alongside Benjamin’s body were later handed over to her. In 2017, Peter Schaul, Dora Schaul’s son, left his mother’s estate to the Jewish Museum Berlin, including the documents Benjamin carried with him during his attempted escape.
The picture undoubtedly appears staged, as if an effort had been made to push reality beyond its limits: You see neither barbed wire fences nor guards or other camp inmates. Only the barracks with their gabled roofs, which could look like chalets in the Alps, serve as the only traces indicating that this could be an internment camp.
Stylistically, the image belongs to a genre that was widespread among the German bourgeoisie in the 1930s: vacation pictures with rural and mountainous landscapes that emphasize the connection between people and nature and follow the tradition of the homeland. In his analysis of photo albums of German Jews from the 1930s, Ofer Ashkenazi emphasizes that the changes in these photographs are an expression of an identity crisis resulting from the external and internal exile experienced. This manifests itself, for example, in the depiction of vacation photos that were deliberately taken in such a way that the place and time are not recognizable.5 This observation also applies to the portrait of Dora Schaul: at first glance, one might assume that it is a vacation picture. In this sense, the photograph creates an image that does not correspond to the real state of things – i.e. the imprisonment in the camp – but goes beyond it and surpasses it towards a desired, fantastic space.
However, the significance of the portrait goes beyond the mere creation of a lost image of home. One can also interpret it as a rejection of reality and an attempt to change it: By depicting Schaul not as a prisoner, but in the way she intended to be seen, the image confronts the humiliation that Schaul and other Jews experienced because of their Jewishness.
Furthermore, the act of taking the photograph is in itself a form of resistance. The taking of the photograph was deliberately staged, not only to convey a positive image of Schaul in the present, but also to shape future memory. The photograph would later make it clear that the time in the camp and in exile was not a lost time. In this way, the view is not only directed towards the present, but also towards the future, and in turn reflects the will to survive.
The material dimension of the photograph conveys both the pictorial and the biographical history of Alfred Benjamin. The white spots on the edges of the picture, which create a void and threaten to eat away at the image, are a silent testimony to Benjamin’s attempt to escape and his tragic death. The mold damage is not a symbol of death, but death itself. Much like the shadows cast by the shepherds on the unexpected tombstone in the painting of Nicolas Poussin’s “Et in Arcadia Ego”, the flakes of mold on the edges of the photograph are a trace of the reality that the image was trying to conceal.
In a broader sense, the threefold level of meaning of the photograph represents three of the possible courses of action for Jews following the expansion of the National Socialists’ murder policy from the end of 1941: flight, hiding and resistance. Choosing either of these paths involved enormous risks. The stories interwoven in the photograph thus testify to indomitable bravery and determination, which contradicts the common image of Jews as passive victims.
With its special characteristics, the portrait of Dora Schaul reveals another side to the story of the Shoah: the photograph was not taken to document the circumstances under which it was created and was not intended to be published but was taken for private purposes. The point of view is that of the persecuted and it turns inwards by trying to portray itself through the lens. As Ofer Ashkenazi emphasizes, the camera was a tool in the hands of German Jews with which they looked critically at the present and the past and came to terms with the loss of their homeland and identity.6 In this sense, the analysis of Dora Shaul’s portrait complements the visual history of National Socialism and the Shoah by focusing on the perspective and experience of the persecuted.
The interpretation of Dora Schaul’s portrait demonstrates how three dimensions of a photograph as a historical source can include three distinct levels of meaning. Firstly, although the image captures a real moment that happened somewhere, sometime, and in this sense depends on reality, it transcends it and presents a fantastic image of reality. Secondly, the act of photographing is meaningful in itself: in this case it can be understood as an act of resistance, an act that reflects the unwillingness to accept reality and the desire to change it. These two dimensions – the image and the photograph – are at times both directed towards the present, attempting to create an image that challenges reality. However, they also focus on the future: the image strives to shape future memory, while the act of photographing expresses the desire to survive. Thirdly, the material dimension of photography tells its story as an object. The connection between the material dimension of the photograph, the damage present on it and the image represented gives Dora Schaul’s photograph significant historical value. It is a historical source that not only expresses the individual stories during the Shoah, but in a certain way also succeeds in conveying the experiences lived through.
Translation: Nils Bergmann
References
- Cf. n.d., Biografie Dora Schaul, in: Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand online, https://www.gdw-berlin.de/vertiefung/biografien/personenverzeichnis/biografie/view-bio/dora-schaul/, accessed on 03.01.2024.
- Cf. Ulrike Neuwirth, video “Our Stories: Alfred Benjamin”, in: Jüdisches Museum Berlin online, 2023, https://www.jmberlin.de/dauerausstellung#lightbox-3676, accessed on 05.01.2024.
- Cf. Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Das Familienalbum. Podiumsgespräch mit Stifter Peter Schaul und Mitarbeiter*innen des Museumsarchivs am 09.11.2020, in: Jüdisches Museum Berlin online, https://www.jmberlin.de/familienalbum-podiumsgespraech-livestream, accessed on 03.01.2024.
- Cf. Dora Schaul, “Als ‘Französin’ in Dienststellen der Wehrmacht”, in: Dora Schaul (ed.), Résistance – Erinnerungen, Berlin 1973, p. 329.
- Cf. Ofer Ashkenazi, Exile at Home. Jewish Amateur Photography under National Socialism 1933–1939, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 64 (2019), p. 123–133.
- Cf. Ashkenazi, Exile at Home, p. 117–119.