Van Alphen, Ernst. “Nazism in the Family Album: Christian Boltanski’s Sans Souci

Literary scholar Ernst van Alphen discusses Christian Boltanski’s art work based on photographs. Van Alphen explains that Boltanski’s work enacts what he calls the ‘Holocaust effect’ in three ways, even in work that is ostensibly not connected to the Holocaust, although Boltanski claimed that all of his work somehow relates to the Holocaust. Firstly, in his work The Dead Swiss (1990) Boltanski evokes absence and loss by showing large numbers of portraits which are enlarged, causing a dehumanising effect. Secondly, he shows how what we perceive is based on lies, and thirdly, that we when we look at portraits we tend to fill in information that we already know: family portraits activate the ‘familial gaze,’ a concept developed by Marianne Hirsch. Van Alphen explains that family portraits “[elicit] specifically relational forms of reading” (46). Whenever we look at a family picture, “[w]e almost immediately assume the potentiality of a whole network of familial relations and an intertextual network of family pictures” (46): we add the photo to our own familial narrative. Although familial gazing can only be fully pursued when looking at a picture of one’s own family, it is nonetheless activated when looking at someone else’s family photos. Boltanksi’s Sans Souci activates this familial gaze. Sans Souci is presented as the photo album of one Nazi family, although the book is in fact a montage of several “found snapshots of several Nazi families” (32).When we look at these photographs, we will only see the familiar, familial narrative of the men clad in Nazi uniforms. We will see them as “fathers, lovers, and sons” and thereby forget that they were also Nazis: “We are drawn into the world of their families, not into the one of their politics, their ideologies, their occupations” (46).

The spectator of Sans Souci will recognise what s/he has in common with the Nazis portrayed, namely their “familial circumstances” (48), through which the Nazi personality of the perpetrators is relegated to the background. Both the realisation that ‘we’ have something in common with the Nazis in Sans Souci – their “familial circumstances” (48) – and the humanisation of the Nazis through activation of the familial gaze can be unsettling. Upon looking at Sans Souci, we might forget we are looking at Nazis; that we are looking at perpetrators.

Van Alphen also briefly discusses The Archives: Détective (1987) and Réserve: Détective (1988), in which Boltanski again enlarged portraits of both victims and perpetrators to such an extent they became undistinguishable from each other.

Van Alphen provides several ways of thinking about how perpetrators are presented in portraits and how the framing of such portraits can influence our perception of perpetrators.

Author of this entry: Nynke Hartvelt

van Alphen, Ernst. 1999. “Nazism in the Family Album: Christian Boltanski’s Sans Souci.” In The Familial Gaze, edited by Marianne Hirsch, 32-50. Hanover, NH: UP of New England.