Column | The Power of Images

Several events triggered the famine in Bengal at the end of 1942. In addition to a cyclone that destroyed rice crops, the war policy of the British colonial government played a key role. The confiscation of boats, the confiscation of food, and political repression contributed significantly to this often-forgotten catastrophe, which claimed the lives of approximately three million people.

Particularly serious was the denial of state aid. The reason given was that it would have interfered with the Allies' conduct of the war. The decision certainly had something to do with racism, but it was primarily possible because the media, in the first year, barely reported on the numerous emaciated corpses littering the streets throughout the province. The government banned the term "famine" through censorship and instead euphemistically referred to it as a "food situation." Only Nazi newspapers reported on the famine in Bengal as early as November 1942—for propaganda purposes, but nonetheless true to reality.

The press's silence only ended with a courageous decision by the editor of "The Statesman," one of the most important newspapers in India at the time. While censorship regulations prohibited certain terms, images were not explicitly forbidden. Thus, in August 1943, the newspaper published five photographs from Calcutta depicting emaciated women and children in its weekend supplement, inconspicuously placed next to the crossword puzzle. The resulting public pressure reached as far as Great Britain and ultimately forced the government to provide food rations.

Defending oneself against emotions in the face of the suffering of others is a form of discipline: if one is not allowed to feel, one cannot contradict.

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Although we are confronted today with a veritable flood of images from war zones, there are still images that break through the indifference and set politics in motion. This was most recently the case with the shocking photos of starving children in Gaza. For people who have long followed the situation on the ground and are accustomed to daily horror stories, the images were initially hardly sensational. According to the New York Times, however, it was precisely these images—and the growing public discontent—that prompted Western heads of government such as Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, and even Friedrich Merz to begin discussing sanctions against Israel's genocidal warfare.

In fact, some of the numerous children seen in the images suffered from pre-existing medical conditions—making them even more vulnerable to the targeted starvation policy. The fact that this very fact was later exploited to cast doubt on the authenticity of the images and the credibility of their source underscores the perfidy of Israel's propaganda strategy.

For example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently described the dissemination of photos of children demonstrably suffering from malnutrition as fake news, anti-Jewish blood libel, and Hamas propaganda in a press conference. A few hours later, the Israeli military murdered a five-member Al-Jazeera crew covering the famine in Gaza City, accusing one of them of being a Hamas member.

In Germany, too, people are working diligently to "protect" the public from uncomfortable images of their own complicity. An example of this is a press release from the German Journalists' Association, which, on the one hand, warns against "attempts at manipulation," but, on the other hand, spreads the false claim that the malnutrition cases shown have no connection to the Gaza famine. Leading German media outlets also participated in this scandalous campaign.

For example, the Italian correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported on the pre-existing medical conditions of a small child without consulting doctors or journalists on the ground, failing to mention that the doctors had indeed attributed the child's condition to malnutrition . Meanwhile, the Swiss correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung spread baseless allegations against photojournalists for taking pictures shortly before food was distributed in a soup kitchen, branding them Hamas propagandists.

A retired German history professor, who seemed to know exactly the conditions under which journalists work in Gaza, proved particularly useful in this life-threatening discrediting effort – even though he claimed to no longer even look at the images from there. "I can imagine what it means when a person starves to death," the emeritus professor, who has also researched photography in the Third Reich, is quoted as saying. "I don't need the image for that. It's all about emotionalization."

This kind of emotional defense against the suffering of others is a form of discipline: Those who are not allowed to feel cannot object. Thus, social coldness becomes the leitmotif of a militaristic restructuring that celebrates toughness as a virtue and dismisses empathy as a sentimental disorder.

Anyone who professionally deals with the history of the Third Reich must be familiar with this connection. As early as 1966, Adorno described this kind of ostentatious coldness and the refusal of compassion in "Education After Auschwitz" as the conditions of disaster that make genocide possible in the first place. The emotionalization through real images of human suffering—and the resulting refusal to support war—is like a spark of hope in a dark time.