The article inquires into the marked absence of aesthetic innovation in postwar German photography during the five years that followed the Second World War's conclusion. Looking specifically at the genre known as Trümmerfotografie (rubble photography), it asks why this corpus of images was so conventional both in content and style, despite its shocking subject matter? The article suggests that after the horrors of fascism and war, psychological denial, a guilty conscious, and deep melancholy

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... rtook German image making. As a consequence, the country's increasingly thriving industry of illustrated periodicals and photobooks pursued tepid pictorial approaches that effectively sought to assuage and reconstruct the traumatized capacity of visual perception.