Picturing Displaced Persons (DPs), Exhibiting French Prestige?

Abstract

This article explores how photography documenting humanitarian aid in French-occupied Germany was mobilized to enhance France’s image, against the backdrop of increasing anxieties about its international standing. It draws on images found in the archives of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the French occupation zone , which sat between the ‘official’ and the ‘private’. In doing so, it calls for a recognition of the role of amateur and relief workers photographers in sustaining post-war visual discourses of internationalism and national-self fashioning. Although largely overlooked today, these images play a role in wider debates about what it meant to be ‘French’ in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation. Relief workers and amateur photographers built on and reproduced aspects of the widely disseminated narrative about the universalism of resistance to disrupt images of the zone as a refuge for wartime collaborators. This neglected aspect of humanitarian imagery offers fresh insights into the contribution of these photographers to post-war diplomatic strategies.

Keywords:

• photography
• Second World War
• displacement
• humanitarian aid
• French occupation zone

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Frances Houghton, Charlotte Faucher, Antoine Burgard, Craig Griffiths and the editors of this special issue, Tom Allbeson and Claire Gorrara, for their feedback on drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laure Humbert

Laure Humbert is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the history of humanitarian aid, gender and population displacements. Her most recent book examines the everyday encounters between French officials, members of international organizations, relief workers, defeated Germans and Displaced Persons, who remained in the territory of the French occupation zone in the aftermath of the Second World War. (Reinventing French Aid: the Politics of Humanitarian Relief in French-Occupied Germany, 1945-1952, Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project entitled ‘Colonial and Transnational Intimacies: Medical Humanitarianism in the French external Resistance’.