Stunning documentary photographs are the focus of this compelling study of postwar Germany and the battle over history, memory, and the German past. After half a century, Germany's coming to terms with Nazism remains a subject of debate. This investigation of the photographic record shows that such debates have overlooked the actual conditions in which postwar German memory was first forged. The Allied forces that entered Germany at the close of World...

"As an Official Army Photographer, "Mac" Fleming's assignment was to take motion pictures of significant wartime events for the U.S. Army. In the first-aid kit on his belt, he also carried a small personal camera, which he used to take pictures of the people and places that interested him, capturing in his field notes details of the life he observed. From these records, Fleming has assembled this absorbing private chronicle of war and peace. Assigned...

Analysis of the German problems and a criticism of American policy in Germany.

"In post-World War II Germany, a small boy who survivied Auschwitz wanders alone -- feral, mute and terrified. He finds a makeshift home with a big-hearted GI, while the mother he does not remember searches desperately for him. Starring a then-unknown Montgomery Clift in his movie debut, directed in a near-documentary style by Fred Zinnemann and filmed in the ragged, rubble-strewn skeleton of Nuremberg, The Search vividly captures the horrifying human...