As Cora Sol Goldstein writes in her Acknowledgments for this informative and crisply written book, American military occupations are once again of more than merely historical interest. More to the point, contemporary political life is even more saturated with visual imagery than was the case during the years following World War II. Our need to describe and explain the role played by carefully crafted and skillfully deployed visual images in the governance of contemporary societies suggests that Capturing the German Eye may not only contribute to our historical and political understanding of a successful American military occupation but also be part of the “genealogy” of modern approaches to government. The extraordinary degree of control enjoyed by the American occupiers, and the enormous resources they were able to put into play, constitute something like a laboratory in which especially pure (albeit dauntingly complex) conditions make possible unusually precise observations of the theory and practice of visual political propaganda.

Over the course of five chapters, together with an introduction and conclusion, Goldstein analyzes how the Americans, who initially concentrated on photography and film (with whose propaganda uses the military was already intimately familiar), gradually extended their efforts to painting and sculpture as they grasped the significance of these fine arts to the cultural consciousness of ordinary, as well as educated, Germans. In the first chapter, she examines the occupiers' early tactic of exposing the defeated population to evidence of the atrocities carried out by their leaders during the war. This sometimes took the form of compulsory visits to concentration camps and killing centers, such as Flossenbürg and Buchenwald, where, as official photographs reveal, even very young children were made to view corpses. The horrors of the camps were conveyed more broadly, however, through posters, pamphlets, exhibits of photographs, and documentary films such as Todesmühlen (“Mills of death”), which was produced in 1946 by the Office of Military Government U.S. in Germany (OMGUS) and which civilians were also forced to view. The aim, of course, was to persuade ordinary Germans to face up to the criminal legacy of national socialism and, in particular, to their responsibility for its crimes, carried out in their name. (Goldstein describes a complementary effort to extol the virtues of American civic life by means of documentary and feature films, in Chapter 2.)

If American authorities expected the Germans to react to all of this by expressing contrition, they were wrong. More common reactions, it seems, were to minimize the scale of the atrocities, attribute responsibility exclusively to the political and military leaders of the Third Reich, insist that the evidence of atrocities presented by American authorities had been fabricated, and in general assume an attitude of resentment and hostility to the propaganda's purveyors. Alarmed by the angry reaction of the population and worried that this would give the Soviet Union a competitive advantage in the battle for hearts and minds, the campaign was soon called off. As early as November of 1945, Byron Price, a special advisor to Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lucius D. Clay, was urging that “[o]ur propaganda needs to be given an increasingly positive character, in contrast to the long-continued attempt to impress the Germans of their collective guilt, which from now on will do more harm than good” (p. 36).

Chapters 3 and 4 show how the American Information and Control Division's initial “blind spot” with respect to the fine arts was gradually overcome through a series of overt and covert initiatives to “reorient” German culture away from “extreme cultural nationalism and antimodernism” and toward what Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, a German-born American who served during the occupation as an art intelligence coordination officer, saw as the inherently more democratic and antiauthoritarian tendencies of modernism (pp. 84–85). Of course, it is understandable that American military authorities of that era would find it difficult to grasp the opportunities for propaganda present in a society in which all classes professed so profound a reverence for Kultur. Together with Captain Edith Appleton Standen, the director of the Wiesbaden art-collecting point of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section of OMGUS, Lehmann-Haupt nonetheless succeeded in making the fine arts an important part of the “American cultural propaganda agenda” (p. 87) by persuading his superiors, as one of his memos puts it, of the use to be made of the “authority and prestige which all manifestations of cultural life enjoy in the German community” (p. 84).

These chapters include some of the most fascinating material in Goldstein's book. Although, as she writes, the “resurgence of modern art in Germany after 1945 is often depicted as a grassroots phenomenon,” it was in fact “a small group of American cultural officers [who] created the context for this revival” (p. 90). This was achieved by the success of these government officials in soliciting private funding to sponsor cultural associations, prizes, exhibits, and publications that supported “political and personal links between German artists and the democratic West” in ways that, as the author points out, “provided a model of intellectual warfare and cultural control that later became—greatly developed and lavishly funded—the modus operandi of the CIA in the cultural field” (p. 90).

Here too, as with the effort to make ordinary Germans feel responsible for their leaders' atrocities, there were unintended consequences. But these related not to unexpected or unmanageable German reactions, but rather to cultural politics in America. In the sphere of the fine arts, American propaganda efforts conflicted with members of the U.S. Congress who were inclined to view modern art not as democratic but, very much in tune with their reactionary German counterparts, as “decadent,” “Communistic,” and certainly anti-American. Anticipating such opposition is what drove the use of private funding for the effort to begin with, but that was not always successful in avoiding congressional scrutiny and opposition. Such conflicts are front and center in the final chapter, on “Iconoclasm and Censorship,” which through close case studies analyzes the double bind of a military occupation that aims to engender a freer, more tolerant society.

Goldstein is very much alive to the implications and provocations of what her research puts on display, but however much historical and political analysis one reads, it is still hard to shake the idea that in the case of the American military occupations of Germany and Japan, the successes were little short of miraculous. The idea that they could form the basis of “models” to be applied elsewhere seems to have led to endless disappointments. Perhaps the problem lies in the very idea of a model. This book suggests that the successes of the occupation stemmed from its ability to improvise, to take seriously the observations of special people with unique insights into a concrete situation, and, trusting them, to change its ways to achieve its aims. Obviously, the American occupiers of Germany after World War II felt that the stakes could not be higher. One wonders whether our failures (so far, at least) in Iraq and Afghanistan have something to do with the perception that the stakes are not so absolute, that there are scripts to be followed, and that one's career depends, not on success, but on one's efforts to implement the assigned model.