WRITING IN 1982, THE PHOTOGRAPHER and curator Janos Frecot claimed that “die Stunde Null in ihrer Offenheit scheint aktueller denn je” (the Zero Hour in its openness seems more urgently contemporary than ever). If, given the manifold continuities in societal and political structures that followed the end of the war, particularly in West Germany, the caesura of the “Zero Hour” (or “Stunde Null”) is a myth rather than a historical fact, its value as the emblem of a missed opportunity was nevertheless something that was invoked, as here by Frecot, in attempting to imagine an alternative German society. Already in 1965 Alexander Mitscherlich noted the “inhospitability” of West Germany's reconstructed postwar cities and the failure of the nation to show itself differently: “Wir haben nach dem Krieg die Chance, kluger durchdachte, eigentlich neue Stadte zu bauen, vertan. Oder anders ausgedruckt: wenn Stadte Selbstdarstellungen von Kollektiven sind, dann ist das, was uns hier an Selbstdarstellung begegnet, alarmierend.” (After the war, we missed the opportunity to build more thought-through, genuinely new cities. Or, to put it another way: if towns and cities are self-representations of collectives, then that which we encounter in Germany in terms of self-representation is alarming.) Mitscherlich considers the built environment to be the expression of a collective state of disavowal, cityscapes re-constructed “als hatte es keine Katastrophe gegeben” (as if no catastrophe had taken place). Architecture critic Dieter Bartetzko would later reinforce this idea, suggesting that the rebuilt German cities became the architectural expression of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's central socio-psychological concept, the German “inability to mourn.”

Nevertheless, Mitscherlich also claims, “eine solche Gesellschaft erwacht … unterschiedlich schnell, aber sie erwacht” (such a society awakens … at different speeds, but it does awaken). This article considers how photography and the photographic archive have been used as an archaeological tool since the 1960s in the reawakening of an awareness not only of the period before 1945, but also of the immediate postwar period. Rather than discuss “rubble photography” per se, this article is concerned with photography and photographic archives that record the traces of the rubble that are still evident in the reconstructed cityscape, but which urban planners consider to be of no value.