War Porn – Christoph Bangert

Kehrer Verlag, Wieblinger Weg 21, 69123 Heidelberg, www.kehrerverlag.com

You open up the book and it starts right away, no empty pages, imprint, etc., no regular books begin like this, but it is not a regular book – the first sentence you read is: „You were not supposed to see these images.“ That should be true, what makes it worse is they are non-fictional.

Those are real people and they are all dead or heavy injured. This book is not censored, not self-censored by the photographer nor by the publisher, so you have to look a some very horrific images. The author explains in a online-interview why the book is called „War Porn“: „Some people say that showing pictures from war zones is voyeurism, pornographic and dehumanizing – that is always a thought-terminating cliché.

Thats why the book title is „War Porn“, to reverse that. Basically it does not matter how you call these images. Even if you attack them as warpornography, one has to look at them and acknowledge the suffering.“ Some might wonder why someone would publish a book like this or why others should look at it – there is a very good reason – that is the realtiy. Still. Sure, everyone knows that war is „terrible“ but if you can not stand looking at how terrible it is, you can not stand looking at realtiy. Still. This is not a book people will look forward to, but hopefully it will serve it’s purpose: Show how terrific war is and that war is still around all over the globe. People die in wars while you read this.

Another reason why Christoph Bangert published this book, his grandfather was a nazi. He wanted to join the Waffen SS but was rejected, then served as a military doctor with the Wehrmacht in Russia. He must have experienced terrible things, but whenever asked, all the storys he would tell about the war, was storys about his horse Malinki. That is not going to happen to Christoph Bangert as he explains in the last paragraph of the introduction: „Ultimatly, this book is my insurance policy for the day that my grown grandchildren ask me what wars and disasters are like. I wont’t talk about horses. I will have to pull this old book from the shelf and say, ‚This ist what it was like for me. This is what I remember. Look.‘ “

The book is 16 x 12 x 2 cm, almost 200 pages with ca. 80 coloured images, hardcover with a „open“ back. Some of the pages are perforated so you need to decide if you want to open them and find out if there is even more terrible images – not always. To be honest, I expected the images to be much more cruel – there is a handfull of photos that some people really should not look at, the rest is alot of dead and bloodiness. Especially nowadays the internet can make you vomit easyier, but, that is not the point to compete on how cruel images are – that is for the perverted.

In the end you get captions of where and when the photos where taken and what they show. I dont wanna sound like a nitpicker, but a bit more then 10% of the photos are from a stampede in Baghdad („A rumour that a suicide bomber was among the crowd of more than a million gathered at a Shiite shrine in Kadhimiya sparked mass panic.“) and a handfull are from the tsunami disaster in Indonesia/Banda Aceh. And while it can be debatable if the catastrophe in Baghdad is part of a war, that is not the case when people die in ecological disasters.

This opens up another topic, what is war? Is it also war when religious fanatics armed with dynamite run into a group of other believers? Is there something like „dirty war“ and „clean war“? Nothing that needs to be discussed here. In the end, it does not matter for the victims, they end up dead. Not sure why the price is so high (29,90 Euro). But that in combination of what people can expect to see might turn some off. Nonetheless a strong and important book. (dolf)
Isbn 978-3868284973

[Trust #168 Oktober 2014]