Rural Returns – Marshall Plan Photography and the Visualization of a Postwar Greek Community

Greece, despite receiving some of the highest per capita Marshall Plan aid experienced a stunted postwar reconstruction due to the bitter civil war that ended in 1949. The photographs taken by and for the Greek Marshall Plan – somewhere between propaganda and documentation – provide a rich and unexplored vein for historical research. This article demonstrates how a postwar Greek national community was visualized in the Marshall Plan photographs structured around the themes of anticommunism and self-help. By considering the Marshall Plan images of the internally displaced persons’ repatriation after the civil war, this article argues that rural Greeks were imagined by the postwar Greek state and the Marshall Plan as national-minded and hardworking. The visual narrative of the returning rural Greeks shows how reconstruction – both material and social – was refracted through (Cold War) anti-communism as well as amnesia of the recent past, eliding the complexities of the villagers’ displacement and their return. Close examination of the Marshall Plan photographs and their terms of production and consumption show how photographs provide new pathways to the histories of postwar Greece.