REPRESENTING AND REPETITION: VICTOR GOLLANCZ'S IN DARKEST GERMANY AND THE METONYMY OF SHOES.

Victor Gollancz's book, In Darkest Germany (1947), is compiled from letters written and photographs taken during his six-week visit to the British Zone of Occupation in 1946, and provides a counter to the official British political narrative about the occupation of Germany. This article examines Gollancz's text in the light of more recent theories of photography and of childhood as constructions in order to address his claim that photography is at 'a long remove' from what he saw in post-war Germany, and to discuss the implications this has for our understanding of the German war child. It situates close readings of Gollancz's writing about photography and photographs of '[s]chool children's shoes in Hamburg and Düsseldorf' within the wider contexts of his socialism and the metonymy of children's shoes in post-war Germany, in order to argue that he engages with sophisticated theoretical ideas about the insufficiency of photography and language as means of retrieving a lived reality in pursuance of his efforts to engage a politically apathetic public. The repetitiveness of his photographs of children's shoes positions them as standing in for the situation of German children generally in the aftermath of World War II, with the aim of making these conditions comprehensible to the British public. Underpinning the repetition is the representation of the war child, which seems to escape the issues of photography that Gollancz discusses but which ultimately confirms them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]