Photo of our age: A Pieper Story

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In October of 1943, when Josef Pieper was temporarily on leave from military service and at home with his family in Münster, he and his wife decided to take their three young children to the zoo on a lovely, almost summery, afternoon. He took along his camera for the occasion and had taken pictures of the children just a few hundred yards from the house when they heard the air raid sirens begin to sound. As they got down into a trench, he suddenly recalled that he had not closed the garden door of the house. Running the short distance back to do that, he saw the American planes over the very center of Münster, and in a matter of moments the heart of the city was ablaze. Camera still in hand, he ran to the attic and took pictures of the city in flames.

And so it happened, he recalled, that on a single roll of film the contradictions of our century-and of human life more generally-are captured. Pictures of happy young children with their parents, heading off for an afternoon's enjoyment on a lovely October day. Pictures of the burning cathedral and town hall-surely not military targets-in the heart of the city. This is the world in which justice is hard to discern, courage not easy to come by, and hope difficult to sustain.

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