I would like to defend that in the period between the two World Wars there was a remarkable awareness of the inadequacy of words to give an account of the horror of the mass slaughter of the First World War. Also, that this awareness is coincident with the appearance of the the photo book genre. That is, I want to show how the working-out of the experience of war in that period produced a shift in industrialised societies, irrespective of their political orientation, in relation to the ways in which they described themselves, turning from descriptions based on written accounts to representations based on photographs and films. This change was observed especially by a great many theorists and artists in Germany during the Weimar Republic. To conclude, I shall indicate that not only do some conceptions and uses of photography in connection with the memory of war, especially those of the writer and philosopher Ernst Jünger, constitute an interesting historical document, the scope of which I shall define, but also many of their observations can profitably be used to assess how far the photographic image can constitute a medium for historical research. So, I am going to compare three photo books that are based on the memory of the First World War that correspond to three very dissimilar political viewpoints and that imply very different conceptions of photography: 1) Krieg dem Kriege!–Guerre à la guerre!–War against war!, published by Ernst Friedrich in 1924; one of the first examples of the mobilisation of the Left in the field of photography; 2) Kamerad im Westen. Ein Bericht in 221 Bildern [Comrade in the West. A Report in 221 Pictures], published in 1930, anonymous 3) Ernst Jünger’s two photo books, Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges. Fronterlebnisse deutscher Soldaten [The Face of World War. Experiences of German Soldiers on the Front]1 and Hier spricht der Feind. Kriegserlebnisse unserer Gegner [Here the Enemy Speaks. War Experiences of our Opponents],2 published in 1930 and 1931 respectively.