During the Nazi period, media and propaganda played a crucial role in redefining civic duty as loyalty to the state, replacing a sense of responsibility toward fellow citizens with fear, complicity, and ideological support for the regime. Historiographical studies often focus too narrowly on either the Nazi leadership or the general public's ignorance, ignoring the social dynamics that shaped different groups' reactions, especially women, youth, and local populations.

This project explores how Nazi propaganda influenced women's responses to political and cultural oppression, particularly after the war, questioning whether reactions to concentration camps were due to ignorance or social pressure. It aims to provide a more nuanced analysis of social behavior , and it leaves open the question whether these reactions were genuine, whether they were staged by the filmmakers, or whether they were 'performed' for the camera by the German women by their own initiative and agency. Subsequently it leaves open the question how we as viewers should regard these women within the 'civil space of photography' as conceived by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.

The video is divided into two parts, left and right, the left side loops the smiles of German women from infancy to youth in 1930 and during the Nazi regime and the smile of 1945,by simulating memories in this way and trying to bring the audience into the character's identity, I call this part the smile memory, while the right side explains the relationship between German women and the photographer and the smiles of the three phases by zooming in on parts of the image as well as screenshots of the facial details and the physical behaviours.