GRETE WEIL's AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Leb ich denn, wenn andere leben (Can I Live If Others Live?), was published in 1998 and contained many episodes already known to readers of her fictional work. She justified her decision to return to these events within the framework of a more explicitly autobiographical text on two grounds: first, on the basis of her position as a witness who also had the ability to write (L 7) and, second, because she felt that she had maybe not said certain things clearly enough in her previous work. However, while it seems in many ways legitimate to view her fictional texts and essays as, in Owen Evans's words, “an early synopsis of the autobiography,” there is one significant difference in the text from 1998: the use of photographs. In this essay I consider the ways in which the photographs, used as part of the autobiographical genre, might contribute to Weil's stated aim of clarity. In particular, I take issue with a reading of Leb ich denn that sees it as a “traditional autobiography,” “seamlessly accompanied by photographs,” in which “Weil has largely reconciled herself to the tragedy of her young life” (E 257, 260, 285). I maintain that it is not enough to say that the these photographs “speak volumes” (E 285), but rather that one must ask what they are trying to say.

It is now axiomatic that narratives and memories are shaped by the genres chosen. Weil's explicit turn to autobiography in 1998 may accordingly suggest certain expectations about the way this genre would convey her memory. However, this representation of her life story did not happen in a vacuum, and a contextualized reading of it needs to consider certain elements of the fictional representations of her story in order to emphasize that remembering is an accumulation of past reworkings of past and present relationships. Weil's autobiographical fiction is, to varying degrees of explicitness, a point of “genre contact” to the text from 1998. Within the context of life writing by German-Jewish Holocaust survivors, I therefore explore the significance of photography in Weil's life during persecution and exile and its relationship to conceptualizations of resistance, surveillance, and nationhood.