LEE MILLER’S “HITLERIANA” AND THE VISUAL CULTURE OF WAR-TIME ENGLAND

Throughout World War II, American photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977) served as a war correspondent for Condé Nast. As she followed the 273rd infantry regiment of the 45th division of the United States Army, Miller published photo essays in American, British, and French Vogue. On April 30, 1945, the day that Hitler killed himself in a Berlin bunker, Miller and her partner, Dave Scherman, found themselves in his Munich apartment. Miller proceeded to photograph some of his belongings, and she and Scherman staged a photograph in the deceased chancellor’s bathroom. This thesis examines the resulting photospread, “Hitleriana,” which was published in the July 1945 issue of British Vogue. Scholars have attended to one of the photographs in the spread, Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bath (1945), and argued that it speaks to Miller’s recent harrowing experience covering the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, her time as a photojournalist, and her interest in Surrealism. Rather than approaching this one photograph biographically, my thesis explains how and why the spread as whole, including Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bath, responds to the visual culture of the Third Reich and of Hitler in particular. Reading the photographs in relation to one another, to the essay that accompanied them, and to the visual culture of World War II more broadly, this thesis argues that the spread worked to counteract more traditional depictions of Adolf Hitler. Official Nazi imagery and popular film depicted Hitler as a larger than life, mythic figure. In “Hitleriana,” Lee Miller reveals his mortality and critiques the culture industry that would have readers see him otherwise.