5/21/2023 0 Comments Luto negroPrinted on cheap paper for cost-effective and timely distribution, emphatically "gray" in its use of conventional journalistic photographs, organized in visual configurations reminiscent of daily newspapers, offering itself, so it would seem, under the sign of the evidentiary, as an illustrated catalogue, an "encyclopedi," even, of Nazi terror and atrocities: Everything about the volume suggests the aim of providing an irrefutable account of Hitler's domination of Europe as a persuasive argument for antifascist action. An initial glimpse at its pages may well tempt readers to think of the volume as a predictable, socially conscious project, conducted in an expressive register in which commitments to documentary authenticity and to sympathetic social action were made problematic by the realities of state propaganda. Less obviously, however, El libro negro also embodies key issues defining the afterlives of documentary imaging as a cultural practice. 4 Self-evidently, El libro negro embodies the life and career of internationalism, and more specifically, the urgent project of identification across color lines, national borders, and social boundaries following the demise of the Popular Front and the grim march of world war. 3 The volume was sponsored ( patrocinada) by the presidents of Mexico, Peru, and Czechoslovakia, the latter of whom was in exile. The publishing venture has been called "perhaps the most important émigré publishing firm in the world" during the tempestuous wartime era. It included testimonials, manifestos, and other texts by more than fifty writers-including Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, Russian novelist Alexei Tolstoy, and Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch-hailing from sixteen countries across Europe and North America ( Figure 1.) 2 Its publishing house, El Libro Libre, had been founded in Mexico City in 1942 by communist exiles from Hitler's Germany, including publisher Hannes Meyer, the former director of the influential Bauhaus school of art and design. The volume, titled El libro negro del terror Nazi en Europa ( The Black Book of Nazi Terror in Europe), appeared in two editions of ten thousand copies. In 1943, a group of writers and artists working in Mexico City, many in exile, published an anthology of responses to the terrifying realities of the new global disorder. El libro negro del terror Nazi en Europa (Mexico City: El Libro Libre), 1943, second edition.
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