Abstract
The years following Greece's 2010 bailout deal with the EU featured an understanding of Germany as an executor of austerity measures that descends from the executioners of the 1940s. This chapter sheds light on the political imagination, particularly perceptions of difference and coexistence, by exploring photographs in two Greek–German constellations: images of “traditional” old men and women gifted back to their descendants by grateful German tourists who first visited the mountainous Cretan area of Sfakia in the 1960s; and black-and-white photographs of survivors of atrocities perpetrated by German troops in the 1940s, held up today as reminders of victimhood in the towns of Kalavryta and Distomo. By unpacking the experiences afforded by these photographs, the chapter rethinks classic themes such as hospitality and postmemory while theorizing the limits of “citizenship” between those who see themselves as inhabiting Europe's center and those who claim to speak from its periphery.