112. Truth in Pictures.

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Bee Wilson, in the London Review of Books, says that Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress, made her photo albums for the normal reason: to "preserve and then display an idealized version of home life — aren't we happy!" And there in the selected photo (5 January, p. 27) are Adolf and Eva, Adolf pressing one child to his side and holding the other by the hand. Eva, squeezing the child's other hand, smiles down at her. All that's missing is the faithful dog.

At the time of the sample picture the Allies were taking Rome, landing in Normandy, and rolling toward Germany's eastern borders. Within a year Eva would fly to a besieged Berlin so that she could take poison and die with Adolf — after he had poisoned his beloved dog. At the time she made the album she must have known how far her and Hitler's life was from normal home life. She must have felt the stretch when she set up the picture (the children were a friend's; Hitler was dragooned). It's hard to imagine anybody saying, "Aren't we happy," with greater strain.

In one respect Eva's pictures of happy family life can easily be classed with the SS officer's pictures, taken in Germany's same grim hours, of happy garrison life at Auschwitz. The happiness in both of them looks heedless, unaware. We who look over the album-maker's shoulder know that.

What we don't know is the degree of strain with which the happiness is maintained, or displayed. At Auschwitz we (I at least) listen in vain for the voice that strains to say, "Aren't we happy?" They all just seem to be enjoying themselves, without stress. The photographer sees people who really are happy, and thinks his album presents the truth about them. He's happy.

This absence of strain gets to us every time we think of the gas chambers. How can these killers sing? Surely, the protecting mind says, they won't sing well. Bad people must sing badly. That's certainly what John Milton thought. Listen to his bad people and you'll hear "lean and flashy songs" grating on "scrannel pipes of wretched straw." Plato, Milton's guide, believed that if you're good you'll be happy, and if you're happy you'll be beautiful. For a long time many of us, among them my Sunday School teachers, believed the converse: if you're bad you'll be unhappy, and if you're unhappy you'll be ugly.

Now we have grown-up learning. We know that good, beautiful things can come out of bad, ugly people. Moral snakes can dance like angels. So we shouldn't be shocked when we hear heavenly music coming from Nazi killers — shouldn't, that is, if we really do believe what we have learned as grownups, and aren't clinging to any of the old belief. It's uncertainty about this that makes us want to test ourselves. Bring on the "Abendlied" for another try. How grown up am I? (My own answer: not sure.)

But Wilson, the LRB author, provokes a perhaps more interesting test. She shows us how Eva Braun's picture of the happy Hitler family is a lie and then, when she says it's told for the normal reason, to demonstrate domestic happiness, she puts it to all us family album makers: how big a lie are you telling?

I, myself, don't think I'm telling a very big one. Of course I pick the smiling faces and leave out the pouty ones, and I do work in the neater activities and select the classier decor. I've even staged some shots, though not going as far as Eva went. But on the whole my pictures tell the truth. We really are happy.

I hear, "Yes, that's what the maker of the SS album was saying. He thought his pictures told the truth." The voice is that of the observer looking over all our shoulders, and the test in it for us is in whether we let him get us down or not. If we collapse before his reminder of the subjectivity of all judgments we have failed. If we say "so what " we have passed. We're telling him that we can still discriminate among lies. Pictures might lie but words, like Bee Wilson's, can always correct them and bring us closer to the truth. There's no reason for a normal album-maker to lose confidence in his albums.