Jahrgang 10, Nr. 7, ISSN 2363-6513, Dezember 2024

Translation of: Miriam Y. Arani, Die fotohistorische Forschung zur NS-Diktatur als interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 5 (2008), S. 387-412, URL: https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/3-2008/4393 ; with the friendly permission of > Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History via Jan-Holger Kirsch. Translated by Gita Marta Yegane Arani for Tierautonomie, Edition Farangis, Usingen, 2024.

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Photo-historical research on the National Socialist dictatorship as an interdisciplinary visual science

Miriam Y. Arani

1. Beginnings of photo-historical research
2. Research into photography of the Nazi era since the 1980s
3. Images in the (digital) archive
4. Which questions about the Nazi dictatorship can be answered by photos – and which cannot?

Archives have long included posters, photos and films in their collections because they consider them to be historically relevant. Under the Nazi regime, “new” mass media captivated the public: print media richly illustrated with photographs, radio, sound and color film. Only the medium of photography is dealt with here. It is often misunderstood as a “self-print of reality” – as if it were not also the artifact of people who procured a camera with film, selected the image section and pressed the shutter release at certain moments. The history of research into photography during the Nazi era is roughly outlined below as the subject of interdisciplinary studies. [1] An outline of the first photo-historical research during the Nazi regime itself and the more recent research paths since the 1980s is followed by a discussion of the special features of photographic sources, their archival indexing and digitization, as well as the possibilities of gaining knowledge in an interdisciplinary field of research.

1. Beginnings of photo-historical research

The beginnings of German-language research into the history of photography have been recognizable since the early 1930s.[2] Walter Benjamin first published his “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” in 1931 and the essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” in 1936. Two years later, he reviewed the photo-historical dissertation of his contemporary Gisèle (Gisela) Freund.[3] Both had already fled Germany because of their Jewish origins. Philological research on photography later favored Walter Benjamin’s approach to the aesthetics and theory of reception,[4] which, however, obscured what had connected him to Gisèle Freund before 1933: the scientific program of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which became known as Critical Theory.

The social researchers’ shared experiences at the time included the spread of new mass media and their use by totalitarian systems, but also by commercial actors and interests in democracies. It was in this context that the first research on the then “new” media was conducted.[5]

Gisèle Freund achieved greater recognition in art studies than in literary studies and sociology. Her book “Fotografie und Gesellschaft”, initially published in France in 1974, was first published in German in 1976. In this overview of social uses of photography since its invention in 1839, she also included examples from the time of the Nazi dictatorship.[6] In her introduction, Freund wrote: “Photography plays a very important role in modern life. There is hardly any human activity that does not make use of it in one way or another. It has become indispensable to both science and industry. […] Every day it is spread across thousands of newspapers and magazines. Photography has thus become an everyday phenomenon. It is so much a part of social life that we no longer notice it because we see it all the time. Its characteristic feature is that it is equally accepted by all levels of society.“[7]

Gisèle Freund did not see photography as art – she emphasized its mass appeal and its acceptance across all social classes. Inspired by Norbert Elias, she used the examination of photography as an opportunity to analyze society. Her sociological approach to the history of photography implied a new methodology of empirical social research, which was to be based on the collection and analysis of data with and about photographs.[8] In contrast, as early as the 1930s, there was a national-historically oriented photographic historiography that was easily adopted by the Nazi state. In 1938, for example, Erich Stenger published his book “Die Photographie in Kultur und Technik” in Leipzig, in which he presented the history of photography as a national history of technical and cultural progress.

After the liberation of Germany in 1945, photographs played an important role in the Nazi trials, but they were mostly understood as objective depictions of reality, without their contexts of origin and their source value being problematized in the academic discussion of the time. The incipient historiographical research into the Nazi era concentrated predominantly on files and other written documents, while the social research based on photographic sources that Freund had suggested initially fell into oblivion.

2. Research into photography of the Nazi era since the 1980s

Since the early 1980s, a number of art scholars have repeatedly published articles on photography from the Nazi era, including in particular Detlef Hoffmann, Diethart Kerbs, Ulrich Keller and Rolf Sachsse.[9] From the very beginning, research into the photographs taken under the Nazi regime raised the question of the connection between the surviving images, the ideology and the crimes. The aforementioned researchers pursued this question partly explicitly, partly implicitly; however, their answers could sometimes only be justified by the political conviction that the Nazi dictatorship had brought forth previously unimagined dimensions of crime and that the photos of that time should therefore be interpreted in this light.

Already since the 1980s, the American historian Sybil Milton had also been publishing on photographs of the Holocaust.[10] The fact that only a few historians attempted to use source criticism to assess photos at this time is demonstrated by an article by Ulrich Herbert from 1983, which problematized the illustrated books on the Nazi dictatorship that were commercially typically published at the time. Referring to such an illustrated book on “everyday life” in the “Third Reich”, Herbert asked pointedly: Referring to such an illustrated book on “everyday life” in the “Third Reich”, Herbert asked pointedly: “Is this how the Germans lived?” He came to the conclusion that the photos published in it continued the self-stylization of the Nazi regime uninterrupted.[11] Sybil Milton, on the other hand, emphasized that, with adequate methodological reflection, photographs certainly enable a gain in knowledge that cannot be achieved on the basis of written sources alone.[12]

In the 1980s, art historians researching photography under the Nazi regime not only analyzed individual images, but also asked about the specific contexts in which they were created and used at the time. This more comprehensive approach to the object of investigation lost importance in the 1990s, at least within art studies. Photographs now increasingly attracted the research interest of philologists, political scientists and historians, who developed other questions from an angle of their own disciplines.[13] Art historical research on photography during the Nazi dictatorship was increasingly limited to a person-centered analysis of the creation and significance of artistic photographs. This narrowing down to “work biographies” [Werkbiographien] of individual photographers with a legacy judged to be of higher aesthetic value can be understood as an adaptation to the form of presentation of artists’ vitae. The biographical approach means that the criminal character of the Nazi regime usually becomes marginal if no person persecuted by the Nazi state is at the center of the investigation.[14] The fact that German professional photographers successfully cooperated with the NSDAP despite their reservations about it was rarely discussed.[15]

Although no clear caesura is discernible in art historical research on photography under the Nazi regime in 1989/90, the question of the source value of photographs from the eastern sites of the Second World War gained in importance in the 1990s due to the political changes in Eastern Europe. The murder of the Jews of Europe carried out there had long stood in the shadow of the war, which had been visually trivialized and stylized as a “clean” war in the visual media of the Nazi state as well as in those of German post-war society.[16] In Germany, destroyed or chaotically privately handed down – also socially tabooed – image material from private “snappers” of violent acts committed by their own side in the war was purposefully collected in some archives of the “Eastern Bloc” in the post-war period in order to provide evidence of war and Nazi crimes – resulting in an almost complementary visual memory to that of the old Federal Republic.[17] Since the 1990s, these internationally different collective visual memories have increasingly been confronted with each other, sometimes in conflict.

The historiographical research into photographic and filmic representations of Nazi crimes that began in Germany at the end of the 1990s primarily highlighted their de-realization in post-war West German visual publishing.[18] The research was primarily limited to a history of the reception of images already published in Germany. The photographs of Nazi terror in occupied Europe that survived outside Germany thus remained largely “invisible” to the German public. One important exception, however, is the work of Hanno Loewy, who since 1989 has published previously unknown photographic sources on Jews in German-occupied Poland.[19] A few years ago, Janina Struk also presented general problems of determining the origin and transnational reception of photographs of the Holocaust.[20]

In particular, the publication of photos of war and Nazi crimes in Eastern Europe was long opposed in the old Federal Republic of Germany with the claim that they were “falsified” by “the communists” in order to simultaneously deny the crimes as such. This defensive strategy reached both its climax and its conclusion in the German-language controversies surrounding the first “Wehrmacht Exhibition”. The political disputes surrounding the exhibition, which had been escalating since 1997, took on the form of an academic debate about allegedly “faked” photos in 1999.[21] The most important methodological contribution during these controversies was formulated in 1999 by Wolf Buchmann, a senior archivist at the Federal Archives.[22] He had to take a stand on the issue because, apart from the media public, photos of the Wehrmacht propaganda companies from the Federal Archives that were shown in the exhibition had also been attacked as “forgeries”. Alongside the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the largest archive in the Federal Republic of Germany was confronted with the accusation of disseminating “forged” photographs. In 1999, the two institutions jointly organized a symposium on photographs from the Second World War period, which formulated a groundbreaking resolution on the handling of photographic sources.[23]

The forgery allegations triggered a broader debate in German about the “correct” handling of photographs and led to a noticeable sensitization of historians and archives to this topic.[24] To date, there have been no systematic studies of photographs as sources on the Nazi era. There are also only isolated, scattered studies on the use of photography in the German-occupied countries during the war.[25] However, the source value of photographs of the propaganda companies is now distinctly questioned.[26] There were also an increasing number of articles on the private photography of Germans and their soldiers.[27] Around the turn of the millennium, there was a change in awareness in dealing with photographs of Nazi crimes in Germany and its neighboring countries. This can be seen, for example, in a recent Austrian exhibition catalog on photographic sources relating to the Mauthausen concentration camp, which allows a source-critical perception of the images: groups of photos are differentiated according to their respective contexts of origin, which are explained in short introductory texts.[28]

What relevance does the context in which photographs were taken have for their representation of reality? This question recently became the subject of controversy in France. In 2008, 270 de-contextualized Agfacolor colour slides by the photographer André Zucca, who had worked for “Signal”, the Wehrmacht’s foreign magazine printed in colour, under German occupation, were exhibited in Paris. The French critics objected that Zucca’s photographs concealed the repression of the German occupying forces and that the responsible curator had not sufficiently checked their production context.[29] As in many other cases, the aesthetic value judgment was given higher priority in this exhibition than the question of historical source value. Such a hierarchy of evaluation criteria proves to be particularly problematic in the case of those photographs from the Nazi era that were purposefully produced for press image propaganda at home and abroad. This type of photographic source is aesthetically very appealing and well crafted, but its overriding purpose – documented in numerous press releases and other written sources – was to visually disseminate Nazi ideology while at the same time concealing Nazi crimes. The historical source value of these press photographs taken under the conditions of a totalitarian system cannot be reliably determined without considering their original intention. This shows in particular the methodological limits of a conservative approach to art history, which does not ask about the source value of photographs. In 2001, another French exhibition made the first attempt to document the photographs from the Nazi concentration and extermination camps as comprehensively as possible.[30] The exhibits included reproductions of the only surviving photographs of scenes before and after the murder of Jews in a gas chamber in Auschwitz-Birkenau.[31] Two polemically arguing critics in France attacked Georges Didi-Huberman, author of an accompanying text to these photographs, and, referring to the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, argued that the Holocaust was unimaginable and therefore could not be depicted. Didi-Huberman defended the presentation of the photos with extensive considerations of reception theory.[32] The controversial pictures were taken by the Polish and Jewish resistance in the summer of 1944 at great risk in order to provide the world with credible evidence of the unbelievable events. A more precise distinction between film-theoretical discourses and unquestionable photographic acts of resistance is therefore useful. Photographs were taken in 1933-1945 under different conditions than film images; they can potentially convey events from the perspective of contemporary resistance organizations more frequently. Moreover, the figures of argument used by Lanzmann and others try to justify a kind of ban on images depicting the Holocaust appear all too apodictic and detached from any research. Recent photo-historical studies have shown how necessary and how fruitful a more precise examination of the images themselves and the contexts in which they were created and used is.

Looking back on around three decades of German-language and international research into photography during the Nazi era, it is astonishing how many specialist disciplines have opened up to this subject. In particular, the sources used, the methods applied and the area of applicability made on this basis remain in need of discussion. Since photographs are undeniably visual mass sources, methods of source analysis and interpretation should also be chosen that are adequate to this mass nature. The socio-philosophical approach of the Frankfurt School, for example, makes it possible to understand repeatedly reproduced photos as products of a “culture industry” or “mass culture” that occurs in totalitarian systems and in democracies. In both social contexts, photographs can become visual symbols of popular myths, as leading media [Leitmedien] of world perception that superficially guarantee factuality. Such processes of symbolic condensation (before and after 1945) are undoubtedly a fruitful subject of investigation at the intersection of history, cultural studies and social sciences. In order to determine the potential cognitive value of photographs for the research of the Nazi era, it makes however sense to also problematize the archival transmission situation and the possibilities of accessing the photo collections via the Internet.

3. Images in the (digital) archive

In view of the limited repertoire of repeatedly reproduced photographs of the Holocaust, Sybil Milton pleaded as early as 1988 for new image collections to be made accessible through source criticism.[33] As only a small proportion of the photos from the Nazi era have been researched in detail to date, the proposal has lost none of its topicality. There are no scientific aids for the millions of photographic sources that have come down to us from this period. The transmission is fragmentary, and they are also influenced by the media policy interventions of the Nazi regime. Even at the time the photographs were taken, Nazi press control in German photojournalism led to a quantitative over- and under-representation of certain topics and modes of representation. As a rule, Nazi-conformist perspectives on the event field are overrepresented.

For example, it remains a challenge to critically reflect on the images glorifying Adolf Hitler.[34] Heinrich Hoffmann’s political advertising photographs for Hitler and the NSDAP are available worldwide on the Internet. They were acquired by the Bavarian State Library with funding from the German Research Foundation, digitized and made publicly accessible a few years ago in the form of an image database. The introductory page briefly states that the Heinrich Hoffmann photo archive contains “materials about the NSDAP”; the context in which the photographs were taken and their original purpose is not explained.[35] Apparently they arouse little scientific interest and are primarily used by picture editors of non-scientific print media and television channels.[36]

Screenshot of the data record for a photograph of the Heinrich Hoffmann company in the image database of the Bavarian State Library. The photo shows Hitler at the victory parade in Warsaw in October 1939. The relatively extensive archive text accompanying the image, which also contains information about the fact that this photograph was published in the party magazine “Illustrierter Beobachter” at the time, does not provide any information about the format of the digitized paper print; it only provides information about the resolution of the digitized image. The image description is primarily concerned with the identification of people, uniform parts and war equipment. The occupying forces’ repression of the Polish civilian population of Warsaw to ensure that the victory parade proceeds without disruption and to stage these official images of victory is not mentioned.

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The euphoria at the end of the 1990s about the seemingly unlimited possibilities of digitization has slowly given way to an awareness of its limits. Paradoxically, the increasing digitization of images does not solve the problems of evaluating and indexing photographic collections, but rather exacerbates them.[37] The image databases of German institutions made publicly available on the internet make the overrepresentation of a Nazi perspective even more apparent, including in the case of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. Most of the photos used today to illustrate the events on the camp grounds during the years 1940-1944 were taken by SS men. More than 99 percent of the surviving photographs were taken according to the instructions of the SS and the police; not even 1 percent of the photos depict the events from the perspective of the prisoners. Anyone entering “Auschwitz” and “1939-1945” as search commands in the digital image archive of the Federal Archives[38] will initially be overwhelmed by many technically brilliant factory photographs [Werksfotografien] depicting the I.G. Farben factories located in Auschwitz at the time in carefully composed exterior and interior views. The interior shots show large, clean factory halls with visually inconspicuous (forced) laborers. The database also lists a frequently reproduced photograph of the gatehouse in Auschwitz-Birkenau, taken by the Pole Stanisław Mucha shortly after the camp’s liberation.[39] The archive caption does not name the author, so users looking specifically for this image would not find it under the photographer’s name.

Screenshot of the data record for the well-known photograph of the gatehouse of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the image database of the Federal Archives. The photo was taken by Polish photographer Stanisław Mucha soon after the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. The archive text accompanying the image provides no information about the nature of the source or its origin.

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In addition to image databases, which break down large photo collections into a large number of individual images, closed provenances are also available on the Internet. A few years ago, the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance in Vienna recorded around 3,900 photos of Nazi victims from the Gestapo card index of the Vienna City and Provincial Archives in a database. The identification photographs [erkennungsdienstliche Fotografien] from this card index can be accessed individually on the Internet, supplemented by key biographical data on the persons depicted and information on their persecution by the Gestapo.[40] After several years of preparation, the Staatsarchiv Freiburg [Germany] are now presenting the entire image collection of the professional photographer Willy Pragher (1908-1992) on the Internet and a selection of his pictures in a traveling exhibition with an accompanying publication.[41] The Vienna Gestapo photographs and Pragher’s photographs are reproduced as completely as possible on the Internet, whereby users are left to make their own selection from the extensive collection – which is not necessarily made easier by the pre-structuring of the data records. The Buchenwald Memorial dealt more intensively with the question of how users can make a meaningful selection from a large number of available photos. After receiving financial support for the preparatory work from the German Research Foundation, it recently made the largest photo collection on a concentration camp accessible as a digital image archive on the Internet.[42] The memorial provided an assessment of the relevance of the surviving photos with an exhibition entitled “Black on White”, which presents a selection of recontextualized photos from this microcosm of terror and has also been available as a “virtual exhibition” on the Internet since September 2008.[43] The texts accompanying the pictures explain the contexts in which they were created.

The general problem of image archives on the Internet is not primarily a technical one, but above all insufficient linguistic information about the material form and origin of the respective photographs. The digital copies of photographic sources available on the Internet do not usually contain any information about specific features of the material form of the surviving material, although these features would allow relevant conclusions to be drawn about the origin and original context of use of the photographs. The information about the photographs that is “cut away” during digitization includes, for example, the format and material of the image source as well as inscriptions and notes on the back of the image carrier. (Foremostly positive prints on paper have survived from the Nazi era; negatives and color slides – which were handled in writing by their makers elsewhere – are rarer). The digital representation of the photographs is usually limited to a reproduction of the front of a photographic paper print that has been torn out of its context of transmission. This encourages a primarily illustrative use, as important parts of the image source are completely hidden from the users of the digitized version.

In addition, when image collections are digitized, archival classification systems usually remain in effect, transforming the media-specific information content of photographs. The findings of cultural scientist Karen Becker, who has identified three typical ways of using photographs, each of which produces different insights, have a high explanatory value in this respect:[44]

– the use of the photo as a document, where it only serves as a substitute for something else that is important;

– the use of the photograph as an artifact, in which it is understood as a representational image medium [gegenständliches Bildmedium] that expresses and shapes certain cultural values;

– the use of the photograph as a key to the documentation procedures of the institution in question, in which the image, including its caption, is understood as a representative of the respective institutionalized values and procedures.

The digital presentation of photos from the period of the Nazi dictatorship can thus also be seen as a source for an analysis of the institutionally established norms and values to which the image sources were subjected. The respective classification system creates a framework that defines whether and how certain photographs should be viewed and used; it produces new meanings of the images and influences subsequent research by constructing fields of research with specific research objectives, but also leaves gaps that stand in the way of answering new questions.[45] Yet the fixation of archival classification systems on photographs as documents of something else is the greatest obstacle to gaining further insights: Portrait photographs are often only listed as images of specific people, but not as a photographic genre. Interrelated photo collections are fragmented into chronologically, topographically or thematically sorted individual images, which makes it difficult to reconstruct their contexts of origin and use. Questions about specific photographers or specific uses of photography (press illustration, police photographs, etc.) are not answered by classification systems that refer to photographs as documents of something else.[46] They usually also disregard the fact that photographs reflect the perspective of those who took them.[47] Thus, the overrepresentation of Nazi-conformist photographic material is partly due to archival classification systems that do not capture either the context of production or the social perspectivity of the photographs.

In the meantime, efforts are being made in Germany to regulate and improve the archival cataloging of photographs.[48] In contrast to official documents, state archives do not have a monopoly on accepting photographs. Nevertheless, they are increasingly opening up to the question of how to assess the archival value of photographs.[49] Axel Metz has attempted to identify the special features of the archival evaluation of photographs in comparison to official written sources. According to him, when assessing the archival value of photographs, the focus is on content-related criteria that depend on the collection mandate of the respective institution; archivists therefore usually focus their attention on the image content first.[50] Since the source value and the indexing of a photographic collection are closely related, a photographic collection that has not been indexed is worthless.[51] Ideally, therefore, information on the creation and origin of the photographs should first be collected and documented.[52] Such information has often not been secured to date.

Private snapshot from 1941 showing Soviet prisoners of war in the Crimea; from the estate of German soldier R.P.O. Schindler, who died on the Eastern Front. Schindler. Silver gelatine paper, 6.4 cm x 9.2 cm, front and back (privately owned). The fact that this is a privately produced photograph is confirmed by the shape of the source (including the inscription on the back indicating the location) and the history of its transmission. The photographer’s intention in taking the photograph cannot be reconstructed beyond doubt due to the lack of written contextual information about the image.

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The archival value of private photos from the time of the Nazi dictatorship is particularly controversial. From the 1930s at the latest, larger groups of people were taking photographs than before; in addition to the pictures taken by professional photographers, many pictures were taken by private “snapshooters”, which as a rule do not have the same average design quality as professional photographs. However, due to the particular historical significance of the Second World War and the Holocaust, as much meaningful visual material as possible should be preserved.[53] There are few or no professional photographs of many important events and “everyday life” during this period. For this reason, it is also necessary to preserve photographs that are not of optimal quality if they capture events, conditions or changes specific to the Nazi dictatorship. In addition, private photographs document certain perceptions of the Nazi era that do not appear at all or only marginally in official photography.

When assessing the archival value of photos, it is also important to avoid redundancy. Since professional photos of professional politicians are often highly redundant, it is usually sufficient to preserve a representative cross-section.[54] When digitizing the Heinrich Hoffmann photo archive, the Bavarian State Library was clearly not aiming to avoid redundancy: When digitizing the Heinrich Hoffmann photo archive, the Bavarian State Library was clearly not aiming to avoid redundancy: The digital image archive contains multiple copies of Hitler photos. There is no doubt that the National Socialists were among the early protagonists of an aestheticization and visual staging of the political, but multiple copies of the same “Führer images” do not gain any additional source value as a result. It is even more difficult to avoid a redundancy of photographic traditions in the relationship between different public institutions.[55] The limited exchange of information on this could be significantly improved by digital meta-information on the existing photo collections. The “Fotoerbe” [“Photo Heritage”] project is a first attempt to create an overview of photo collections in the Federal Republic of Germany.[56]

A variant of the visualization of the propagandistically constructed “deformed Soviet man” [“vertierten Sowjetmenschen”]: PK photographer Hähle, photograph distributed by Weltbild (Berlin), date of issue: 14.8.1941. Contemporary caption: “The Soviets used these types of criminals [‘Verbrechertypen’] to fight the German soldiers.” The fact that this is a professional German press photograph is confirmed by the shape of the source (including its inscription on the reverse) and its history of transmission.

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But what makes photographs so different from text documents? As an archivist, Axel Metz sees the decisive difference between official written sources and photographic collections in the fact that photographs are more heterogeneous in terms of content and more fragmented [kleinteiliger] than subject files.[57] In addition to one main aspect of content, they contain numerous secondary aspects that could be of interest for research. The central problem of their archival indexing lies in the indexing of such secondary aspects. Based on a processing time of around 15 minutes for one photo, the indexing of a photo stock measuring 33 shelf centimeters takes around seven full working days – the indexing of official documents of the same volume, on the other hand, takes only three and a half hours.[58] Metz also introduces the “evidence values” of a photographic record as a new criterion in the archival science discussion. He uses this term to describe the informative value of the photographic primary sources about their producers and their method of organization [Organisationsweise]. Photo albums or photographers’ estates can reveal, for example, how a photographer worked, what interests the clients or the people photographed pursued with the images, but also provide information on the question of how and why which photos were kept and by whom.[59] This refers to the photographic source as a material artifact with visible traces of its context of origin and use, as which it is not yet recorded by the archival classification systems.[60]

Axel Metz also emphasizes a very important but rather vague criterion for the archival evaluation of photographic holdings: their potential usefulness for research.[61] Since photos have long been used by historians hardly as objects of research, but primarily as illustrative tools, a prognosis of their future use cannot be based solely – as Metz suggests – on their previous use. With an expanded research practice and better access and publication conditions, use could also be more extensive. One of the biggest obstacles for students, doctoral candidates and researchers who are not civil servants is the fees charged by the archives for the use of images. Archives could increase the value of their photographic holdings for research simply by not charging academics researching photographic sources for the use of images.[62] The search for free access to image collections for teaching and research purposes, which is being actively pursued by art scholars, can serve as an inspiration here: The Cologne-based organization Prometheus e.V. operates a distributed digital image archive for research and teaching. In 2008, Prometheus concluded a cooperation agreement with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Image Archive, which provides for simplified image rights management for pupils, students and researchers. As a result of this agreement, all digital images from the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz can be used free of charge via the Prometheus Archive in schools, universities and scientific publications up to a circulation of 1,000 copies.[63]

The new opportunities for research offered by digital information and communication technologies should be utilized and further expanded. However, the value of photographic collections for research cannot be increased by increased digitization and easier accessibility alone; improved classification systems (online and offline) are just as necessary, which capture the material form and social perspective of the image sources more broadly than before. Digitization enables and requires a new reflection on the structure [Ordnung] of the image knowledge stored in photographic sources as well as the introduction of documentation that is improved in terms of content.

4. Which questions about the Nazi dictatorship can be answered by photos – and which cannot?

Photographs can expand the scientific description and analysis of the past to include previously unnoticed aspects. Their particular value lies in the greatest possible temporal proximity to past events and in the multitude of simultaneously conveyed, detailed visual impressions that are difficult to capture by other means. The cultural and social scientific information content of photographs as data sources has already been discussed in detail in American “visual anthropology” and “visual sociology”.[64] Accordingly, a media-specific limit to their informative value lies in the fact that they only represent the visible. Since not all phenomena of the past were visible, they cannot be examined solely on the basis of photographic sources. Accordingly, a media-specific limit to their informative value lies in the fact that they only represent the visible. Since not all phenomena of the past were visible, they cannot be examined solely on the basis of photographic sources. It is also necessary to ask to what extent the largely invisible production conditions of a photograph limited the visibility of certain phenomena or helped to determine the way in which they were made visible. The aesthetic judgment of taste about a person’s appearance was closely linked to the political value judgment about this person and their right to life. The photographic images of the enemy, which illustrated supposedly “racially” inferior opponents in contrast to models [“Leitbildern”] of the “German national body”[65], have hardly been researched to date.[66] However, it can be assumed that this program of images contributed to the escalation of violence against “foreign nationals” [“Fremdvölkische”] and “foreign races”. It was not primarily certain individual images that had a destructive effect, but rather mass-produced images, as “Leitbilder” of the “German” and images of the “foreign” that were disseminated in countless variations.[67]

The effectiveness of photographic images in the communication process cannot be derived from the images themselves, as the decisive prerequisite for their effectiveness is the human production and display of images – as well as the reception behaviour of the people who view these images. In this respect, the photographs disseminated and suppressed by the Nazi regime can be interpreted as a visual and at the same time material objectification of mass communication processes. An overview of the more recent German-language theories of human communication will reveal[68] that these – like the theories of signs [Zeichentheorien] – were mostly derived from linguistic theorems and offer no explanations for the particularities of visual communication. An important exception is the psychological communication theory of Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin and Don Jackson, which was developed on a broad empirical basis based on regular communication disruptions [Kommunikationsströrungen] among people.[69] With the help of this theory, photographs can be understood as messages that appeal to a different human communication modality than language – a modality that is referred to as ‘analogue’ in the terminology of this theory.[70] Accordingly, analogue communication represents that what is meant through sensually perceptible imitation. It usually takes place unconsciously, but is relevant to action as it defines the relationship between the communication partners. Analogue messages are ambiguous and cannot express negations, causal connections or alternative relationships. However, socially tabooed phenomena that are no longer or not yet articulated linguistically can be communicated analogously.[71] Of course, the complexity and multi-layered nature of visual messages increases if they are also part of an iconological tradition that goes back further in time and are also embedded in linguistic contexts (to be determined more precisely in each case).

Photographs can therefore communicate something that eludes language or transcends linguistic expression. The historian Sybil Milton had already referred to the gain in knowledge that photographic sources make possible in some cases for which there are no written sources. This possibility of an extended scientific description of the Nazi past is underpinned by recent discoveries of photographic images of anti-Jewish violence in villages and small towns.[72] The German press photographs shown here from the last years of the Second World War contain visually formulated definitions of interpersonal relationships in the sense of the Nazi regime in several respects, which visually concretise and reinforce what is known from written sources: The man leads and fights, the woman fulfils purely reproductive tasks, all ‘Nordic’ types are good and beautiful, while the non-‘racially pure’ types appear untidy and unclean. The images illustrate National Socialist norms and visually demonise any deviation from them. The focus of the National Socialist image programme was on ‘northern racial’ [“nordrassische”] body types, ‘hard’ fighting men, the rustic and folksy and as many blonde children as possible. With iconographic reference to the Nazi racial ideology, the ‘enemy’ was often visualised as a ‘racial mixture’ [“Rassenmischung”] – in deliberate contrast to the ‘racial unity’ [“Rassereinheit”] of the Germans sought by the Nazi regime.

Left: A variant of the visualisation of the national gender role model ‘German man’: PK photographer Fröhlich, photograph distributed via Atlantic (Berlin), date of issue 7.6.1944. Contemporary caption: ‘The combat helmsman [“der Gefechtsrudergänger”] – has a very important function to perform on the ship. He cannot and must not leave his position during an attack.

If he carries out the commander’s orders calmly, safely and quickly, the ship can escape many a bomb and torpedo.’ Archival print, silver gelatine paper, 18 cm x 13 cm, front (privately owned).

right: A variant of the visualisation of the national gender role model ‘German woman’: Unknown photographer on behalf of the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV) [Nationalsozialistischen Volkswohlfahrt], photo distributed by Weltbild (Berlin), date of issue 18.12.1943. Contemporary caption: [‘Mutterglück – Fränkische Bäuerin mit ihren Zwillingen.] Mother’s happiness – Franconian farmer’s wife with her twins. The face of the peasant woman – do we not know it immortalised in wooden portraits and paintings from past centuries and does it not seem to us to prove that this type of Franconian woman will be preserved for all time.’ Archival print, silver gelatine paper, 18 cm x 13 cm, front (privately owned).

—

In terms of social and contemporary history, it is significant here that the National Socialist visual programme generated an apparent visual evidence of the racial doctrine, which, in contrast to the linguistically tangible ideologems and the visual propaganda offences sanctioned by the courts after the end of Nazi rule (use of swastikas, etc.), was still passed on relatively uninterrupted in the visual mass media of the Federal Republic.[73] The peculiarity of mass-distributed visual messages and their iconological traditions lies in the fact that they seem to be effective primarily through their omnipresence – while texts primarily affect those who receive them more or less specifically.

American prisoners of war are visualised as a contrast to the National Socialist ideal of ‘racial unity’ [“Rassereinheit”]: PK photographer Seeger, photograph distributed via Weltbild (Berlin), date of issue 6 March 1944. contemporary caption: ‘As prisoners in Rome! Chicago and New York types [“Chikagoer und New Yorker Typen”] in Rome as prisoners of German paratroopers and grenadiers.’ Archival print, silver gelatine paper, 13 cm x 18 cm, front (privately owned).

—

The fact that the government-controlled press photographs under the Nazi regime only captured the events of the time very selectively is evident, for example, from comparisons with photographs taken independently. It therefore makes sense to use research concepts that look at a large number of photographs by different authors on the same topic or field of events in parallel – for example, photographs by authors of different nationalities.[74] The term ‘visual studies’ introduced at the beginning marks a detachment from the aesthetic value judgement that has long guided art history in the selection of its research objects and still does so to a large degree (see chapter 2 above). This detachment is a necessary prerequisite for the academic examination of German press photographs from the period of the Nazi dictatorship in order to gain distance from the aestheticisation of the National Socialist world view in the government-controlled image programme of the Nazi dictatorship. All photographs – not just the artistic ones – are a legitimate object of research. Not all photographic sources from the period of the Nazi dictatorship were controlled and directed by the propaganda apparatus. The statement by archivist Axel Metz that they depict phenomena that are not reflected in the official written sources certainly applies to all the surviving photographs.[75] Photographs show in detail the concrete socio-cultural living conditions of people; they record material manifestations of the social and cultural order in a particular space and also enable a generalised examination of a social order, as this is partially manifested visibly.[76] Photographs can be used to analyse the body language messages of individual people (kinetics) as well as the relationships between people and things within a space and the cultural significance of their spatial positioning (proxemics).[77] In this respect, photographs open up various possibilities for gaining social and cultural-historical knowledge. The examination of photographic sources from the period of the Nazi dictatorship also opens up the opportunity to triangulate the knowledge gained from the written tradition in a sociological sense, i.e. to specify the scope of these statements in comparison to knowledge from other data sources – including photographs.[78] While files describe a human population primarily from the perspective of its administration, photographs of different originator groups [Urhebergruppen] on the same subject allow multi-perspectival insights into socio-cultural microcosms under the Nazi regime. However, this diversity of perspectives on the field of events can only be opened up if the currently digitally underrepresented, non-professional and oppositional image production is included to a greater extent.

Since images – according to the view expressed here – appeal to a different communication modality than language, this should be taken into account theoretically and methodologically when researching them. It is also important to determine the similarities and differences between photographs and other visual sources more precisely. This field of research can only be tackled on an interdisciplinary basis, as the individual disciplines cannot provide viable answers to the many questions that arise with regard to photographs from the Nazi era. In the context of interdisciplinary visual studies, a new formulation of epistemological interests could be undertaken that would do greater justice to the changed conditions of visual communication of entire societies since industrialisation than the previous approaches of art history and art studies. When examining photographic sources from the Nazi era, it makes sense to understand the case studies on photographs and photographers that are now increasingly appearing in art history and history studies from a more comprehensive sociological conceptual perspective, the starting points of which could of course only be roughly outlined here. At the same time, the art-scientific standards of object description and iconographic-iconological interpretation methods are undeniably useful for other disciplines that do not have a tried and tested set of tools for reconstructing the contexts of origin and meaning of images. Finally, a closer connection between research-related and archival-practical competences would also be desirable, as more complex research is largely dependent on adequate forms of indexing in the archives.

Dr. Miriam Yegane Arani, http://propagandaundwiderstand.de

—

Footnotes

[1] The term “visual studies” is understood here as an analysis of images that are not considered artistic, based on art historical methods. Cf. most recently: Daniel Hornuff, Aus dem Blick verloren. Wie sich die aktuelle Bildwissenschaft von ihrem Gegenstand entfernt, in: Merkur 62 (2008), pp. 995-1003. On historical image research, see Gerhard Paul, Introduction, in: id. (ed.), Visual History. Ein Studienbuch, Göttingen 2006, pp. 7-36.

[2] Cf. generally Jens Jäger, Fotografiegeschichte(n). Stand und Tendenzen der historischen Forschung, in: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 48 (2008), pp. 511-537.

[3] Walter Benjamin, Lehrstück in materialistischer Dialektik, in: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung

7 (1938), on: Gisèle Freund, La photographie en France en XIX siécle, Paris 1936.

[4] See Jäger, Fotografiegeschichte(n) (note 2), p. 512, p. 515.

[5] Michael Kausch, Kulturindustrie und Populärkultur. Kritische Theorie der Massenmedien, Frankfurt a.M. 1988, pp. 19-28.

[6] Gisèle Freund, Fotografie und Gesellschaft, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989. This edition includes photographs by Heinrich Hoffmann showing Hitler practising his oratory poses (p. 141), a photomontage by John Heartfield (p. 170) and the best-known photograph of the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943 (p. 186f.).

[7] Ibid, p. 6.

[8] In current photo-historical research, in contrast, there are signs of a divergence between empirical research and theory development; see Jäger, Fotografiegeschichte(n) (note 2), p. 516ff., p. 535. Critical theory itself did not produce a convincing sociological media analysis; see Dieter Prokop, Medien-Macht und Massen-Wirkung. Ein geschichtlicher Überblick, Freiburg 1995, pp. 160-169, esp. p. 163.

[9] See, among others, Rolf Sachsse, Probleme der Annäherung. Thesen zu einem diffusen Thema: NS-Fotografie, in: Fotogeschichte 5 (1982), pp. 59-65; Diethart Kerbs, Historische Pressefotos im Dienst der nationalsozialistischen Propaganda, in: Fotogeschichte 10 (1983), pp. 25-39; id./Walter Uka/ Brigitte Walz-Richter (Hg.), Die Gleichschaltung der Bilder. Zur Geschichte der Pressefotografie 1930–1936, Berlin 1983; Ulrich Keller (Hg.), Fotografien aus dem Warschauer Ghetto, Berlin 1987; Detlef Hoffmann, Fotografierte Lager. Überlegungen zu einer Fotogeschichte deutscher Konzentrationslager, in: Fotogeschichte 54 (1994), S. 3-30; ders., „Auch in der Nazizeit war zwölfmal Spargelzeit“. Die Vielfalt der Bilder und der Primat der Rassenpolitik, in: Fotogeschichte 63 (1997), S. 57-68; Rolf Sachsse, Die Erziehung zum Wegsehen. Fotografie im NS-Staat, Dresden 2003; Ulrich Keller, Die umgedrehte Swastika. Propaganda und Widerspruch in Fotoreportagen der Machtergreifung, in: Fotogeschichte 107 (2008), S. 35-50. Even these brief references make it clear that the journal “Fotogeschichte”, founded in 1981, played a central role in such research.

[10] For example, Sybil Milton, Argument oder Illustration. Die Bedeutung von Fotodokumenten als Quelle, in: Fotogeschichte 28 (1988), pp. 61-90; id. Images of the Holocaust – Part I, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1 (1986), S. 27-61; id., Images of the Holocaust – Part II, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1 (1986), S. 193-216.

[11] Ulrich Herbert, Bilder vom Alltag im Dritten Reich. Lebten so die Deutschen?, in: Journal für Geschichte Nr. 1/1983, pp. 8-15.

[12] Milton, Argument (note 10).

[13] Cf. Jäger, Fotografiegeschichte(n) (note 2), p. 512, p. 517.

[14] See, for example, Janos Frecot (ed.), Erich Salomon. “Mit Frack und Linse durch Politik und Gesellschaft”. Photographien 1928-1938, Munich 2004; Gabriele Lohmann, Elisabeth Hase. Photographer for press and advertising. The 1930s to 50s, phil. Diss. Bochum 2002, online at URL: <http://www-brs.ub.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/netahtml/HSS/Diss/LohmannGabriele/>; Irme Schaber, Gerta Taro. Fotoreporterin im spanischen Bürgerkrieg. Eine Biografie, Marburg 1994. In several cases, the photographers’ statements about their own actions during the Nazi era were adopted without any comparison with relevant written and pictorial sources on the person in question. Cf. Daniel H. Magilow, The Interpreter’s Dilemma: Heinrich Jöst’s Warsaw Ghetto Photographs, in: David Bathrick/Brad Prager/Michael D. Richardson (eds.), Visualizing the Holocaust. Documents, Aesthetics, Memory, New York 2008, pp. 38-61; and in contrast to this Barbara Stambolis/Volker Jakob (eds.), Kriegskinder. Zwischen Hitlerjugend und Nachkriegsalltag. Fotografien von Walter Nies, Münster 2006.

[15] Cf. Jan Brüning, Dr. Paul Wolff. Ein Fotograf im Kraftfeld seiner Zeit, in: Fotogeschichte 61 (1996), pp. 31-46; Katja Protte, [“Bildberichterstatterin” im “Dritten Reich”], “Photojournalist” in the ”Third Reich”. Photographs from the years 1937-1944, in: DHM-Magazin 20 (1997), pp. 1-60.

[16] Gerhard Paul, Bilder des Krieges – Krieg der Bilder. Die Visualisierung des modernen Krieges, Paderborn 2004, pp. 223-284.

[17] Cf. on the photographic memory of the “Reichsgau Wartheland” after 1945: Miriam Y. Arani, Fotografische Selbst- und Fremdbilder von Deutschen und Polen im Reichsgau Wartheland 1939-1945. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Region Wielkopolska, Hamburg 2008, here Introduction and Chapter II.

[18] See Cornelia Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung. Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus national- sozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945, Berlin 1998; id., „Auschwitz in der Paulskirche“. Erinnerungspolitik in Fotoausstellungen der sechziger Jahre, Marburg 2000; Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild. Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur, Hamburg 2001.

[19] Hanno Loewy/Gerhard Schoenberner (ed.), “Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit”. Das Getto in Lodz 1940-1944, Vienna 1990; Hanno Loewy, “Nähmaschinen-Reparatur-Abteilung”. An album from the Lodz ghetto, in: Fotogeschichte 34 (1989), pp. 11-30; he, P.W.O.K. Arieh Ben Menachem’s Album, in: Fotogeschichte 39 (1991), pp. 31-43; ss, “… ohne Masken”. Juden im Visier der “Deutschen Fotografie” 1933-1945, in: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.), Deutsche Fotografie. Macht eines Mediums 1870-1970, Cologne 1997, pp. 135-149; Kersten Brandt/Hanno Loewy/Krystyna Oleksy (eds.), Vor der Auslöschung…. Fotografien gefunden in Auschwitz, 2nd ed. Munich 2001.

[20] Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust. Interpretations of the Evidence, London 2004.

[21] None of the photos shown in this exhibition were “forged” in the sense of a deliberately induced change in the image statement. In very few individual cases, the captions of the images were incorrect, although the error rate did not exceed the number of errors in captions equally found in other historical exhibitions. See also Miriam Y. Arani, „Und an den Fotos entzündete sich die Kritik“. Die „Wehrmachtsausstellung“, deren Kritiker und die Neukonzeption. Ein Beitrag aus fotohistorisch-quellenkritischer Sicht, in: Fotogeschichte 85/86 (2002), pp. 97-124, here pp. 105-112. For a rebuttal, see Ulrike Jureit, „Zeigen heißt verschweigen“. Die Ausstellungen über die Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, in: Mittelweg 36 13 (2004) H. 1, pp. 3-27, and my subsequent, more concrete description of the distinctiveness of the material forms of transmission of photographic sources contested by Jureit: Miriam Y. Arani, Fotografien als Objekte – die objektimmanenten Spuren ihrer Produktions- und Gebrauchszusammenhänge, in: Irene Ziehe/Ulrich Hägele (eds.), Fotos – “schön und nützlich zugleich”. Das Objekt Fotografie, Münster 2006, pp. 29-44. For more details on the methodological instruments I developed: Arani, Selbst- und Fremdbilder (Note 17), Chapter II.

[22] Wolf Buchmann, „Woher kommt das Photo?“ Zur Authentizität und Interpretation von historischen Photoaufnahmen in Archiven, in: Der Archivar 52 (1999), pp. 296-306.

[23] Cf. Sabine Hillebrecht, Bildquellen. Das Foto im Visier von Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaftlern, Historikern und Archivaren, in: Fotogeschichte 74 (1999), p. 68ff. The lecture by the representative of the Federal Archives was published in revised form (together with the resolution): Buchmann, “Woher kommt das Photo?” (note 22).

[24] Cf. Jäger, Fotografiegeschichte(n) (note 2), p. 528.

[25] For a general overview of the current state of research, see ibid. p. 531. For an overview of press photography under the Nazi regime, see Miriam Y. Arani, Deutsche Pressefotografie im Kontext der NS- Kriegspropaganda, in: Kurt Hochstuhl/Josef Wolf (ed.), Brechungen. Willy Pragher. Rumänische Bildräume 1924-1944, published by the Institut für donauschwäbische Geschichte und Landeskunde and the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Ostfildern 2007, pp. 93-102. On press photography under the Vichy regime: Francoise Denoyelle, La photographie d’actualité et de propagande sous le régime de Vichy, Paris 2003.

[26] On the view before the controversies, see Heinz Boberach, Art. “Quellen zum Nationalsozialismus”, in: Wolfgang Benz/Hermann Graml/Hermann Weiß (eds.), Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, 3rd ed. Munich 1998, pp. 330-342, here p. 340. In contrast to this: Ahlrich Meyer, Der Blick des Besatzers. Propagandaphotographie der Wehrmacht aus Marseille 1942-1945, Bremen 1999; Bernd Boll, Die Propagandakompanien der Wehrmacht 1938-1945, in: Christian Stadelmann/Regina Wonisch (eds.), Brutale Neugier. Walter Henisch. Kriegsfotograf und Bildreporter, Vienna 2003, pp. 37-46; id., Das Bild als Waffe. Quellenkritische Anmerkungen zum Foto- und Filmmaterial der deutschen Propagandatruppen 1938-1945, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 54 (2006), pp. 974-998; Oliver Sander, Deutsche Bildberichter in Polen, in: Danuta Jackiewicz/Eugeniusz Cezary Król (eds.), W obiektywie wroga. Fotoreporterzy niemieccy w okupo- wanej Warszawie 1939-1945/Im Objektiv des Feindes. Deutsche Bildberichterstatter in Warschau 1939-1945, Warsaw 2009, pp. 31-47; see also Claudia Zenker-Oertel, Die Verzeichnung von Fotobeständen am Beispiel des Bestandes M 660/319 im Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, Transferarbeit im Rahmen der Ausbildung für den Höheren Archivdienst, Marburg 2005, p. 11, p. 19f.

[27] Cf. generally Jäger, Fotografiegeschichte(n) (note 2), p. 526; Timm Starl, Knipser. Die Bildgeschichte der privaten Fotografie in Deutschland und Österreich von 1880 bis 1980, Munich 1995; Alexander B. Rossino, Eastern Europe through German Eyes. Soldiers’ Photographs 1939-1942, in: History of Photography 23 (1999), pp. 313-321; Peter Jahn/Ulrike Schmiegelt (eds.), Foto-Feldpost. Geknipste Kriegserlebnisse 1939-1945, Berlin 2000; Bernd Boll, Zur Überlieferung privater Fotografien aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, in: Anton Holzer (ed.), Mit der Kamera bewaffnet. Krieg und Fotografie, Marburg 2003, pp. 167-179; Petra Bopp, Fremde im Visier. Private Fotografien von Wehrmachtssoldaten, in: ibid., pp. 97-117; Sandra Starke, Privates Fotografieren 1933- 1939 am Beispiel von Familienalben, unveröff. geschichtswiss. Magisterarbeit [unpublished master’s thesis in history], Humboldt University of Berlin 2004.

[28] Bundesministerium für Inneres [Federal Ministry of the Interior] (ed.), Das sichtbare Unfassbare. Fotografien vom Konzentrationslager Mauthausen, Vienna 2005. Cf. also the exemplary catalog texts on individual exhibits in: Philippe Arbaizar/Hermann Arnhold (eds.), 1945 – im Blick der Fotografie. Kriegsende und Neuanfang, Münster 2005.

[29] Book accompanying the exhibition: Jean Baronnet, Les Parisiens sous l’occupation, Paris 2008. Zucca was employed by “Paris-Match” until 1940 and was the only foreigner to work for “Signal” (according to Rainer Rutz, Signal. Eine deutsche Auslandsillustrierte als Propagandainstrument im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Essen 2007, p. 152). Cf. the review of the exhibition by Daniela Kneißl: <http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/id=99&type=rezausstellungen>.

[30] Clément Chéroux (ed.), Mèmoires des camps. Photographies des camps de concentration et d’ex- termination nazis (1933-1999), Paris 2001; see also Ilsen About/Clément Chéroux, Fotografie und Geschichte. Lecture at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig 2004.

[31] Cf. Judith Lermer Crawley, Acts of Resistance (2005), online at URL: <http://www.sonderkommando-studien.de/artikel.php?c=fotografie/resistance>, and Miriam Y. Arani, Holocaust. Die Bilder des Sonderkommandos Auschwitz 1944, in: Gerhard Paul (ed.), Das Jahrhundert der Bilder. Bildatlas Vol. I: 1900 to 1949, Göttingen 2009, pp. 658-665.

[32] Georges Didi-Huberman, Bilder trotz allem, Munich 2007. On the positions of the two critics (Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux), see also Ralph Buchenhorst, Der Fotograf in der Gaskammer. Zu einer Debatte über die bildliche Darstellung der Shoah, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 53 (2008), pp. 261-283.

[33] Milton, Argument (note 10).

[34] In his dissertation on art history, Rudolf Herz comprehensively analyzed Heinrich Hoffmann’s mass production of Hitler photographs for the first time, narrowed down the iconography and contemporary uses of these photographs more precisely and made it clear that the name Heinrich Hoffmann concealed a rapidly expanding company: Rudolf Herz, Hoffmann & Hitler. Fotografie als Medium des Führer-Mythos, Munich 1994. Cf. Horst-Pierre Bothien (ed.), Adolf Hitler am “Deutschen Rhein”. NS-Prominenz aus der Sicht eines Hobbyfotografen, Essen 2003, and Hans Georg Hiller von Gaertringen (ed.), Das Auge des Dritten Reiches. Hitlers Kameramann und Fotograf Walter Frentz, Berlin n.d. [2006].

[35] Heinrich Hoffmann photo archive in the Bavarian State Library, online at URL: <http://www.bsb-muenchen.de/Bilder.591.0.html>. See also Sonja Meldau, Erschließung durch eine Bilddatenbank. Die Abteilung Karten und Bilder der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, in: Rundbrief Fotografie 13 (2006) H. 1, p. 15ff.

[36] Cf. Meldau, Erschließung (note 35), p. 17.

[37] Cf. Axel Metz, Nicht jedes Bild sagt mehr als tausend Worte – Ein Beitrag zur Bewertung von Fotobeständen, Transferarbeit im Rahmen der Ausbildung zum Höheren Archivdienst, Stuttgart 2007, p. 8.

[38] <http://www.bild.bundesarchiv.de>.

[39] See Christoph Hamann, Fluchtpunkt Birkenau. Stanisław Muchas Foto vom Torhaus Ausch- witz-Birkenau (1945), in: Paul, Visual History (note 1), pp. 283-302.

[40] <http://www.doew.at/php/gestapo>.

[41] Kurt Hochstuhl, Fotonachlässe im Staatsarchiv Freiburg i.Br. Überlegungen zu Erschließung und Vermarktung, in: Rundbrief Fotografie 12 (2005) H. 2, pp. 26-32; id./Wolf, Brechungen (note 25). The Internet presentation of the photo inventory of the Staatsarchiv Freiburg [Germany], Bestand W 134-137, Willy Pragher Collection, can be found at <https://www2.landesarchiv-bw.de/ofs21/ olb/struktur.php?stat=1&archiv=5&sprungId=20677&sprungStufe=B7&letztesLimit=suchen>.

[42] <http://www.buchenwald.de/fotoarchiv>. Cf. Silke Betscher, Das digitale Fotoarchiv der Gedenkstätte Buchenwald. Ein Beitrag zur Gedenkstättenarbeit im Internet, in: Rundbrief Fotografie 14 (2007) H. 3, pp. 14-17, who recommends using the sitemap to get an overview of the organization system of this photo archive; see <http://www.buchenwald.de/fotoarchiv/sitemap.php?q=1&page=1&link=k>.

[43] <http://www.buchenwald.de/fotoausstellung>. A book publication has also been announced: Volkhard Knigge/Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau (eds.), Schwarz auf Weiß. Fotografien aus dem Konzentrationslager Buchenwald 1937–1945, Göttingen (forthcoming).

[44] Karen Becker, Das Bildarchiv und die Konstruktion von Kultur, in: Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 93 (1997), S. 235-253.

[45] Ibid, p. 249f.

[46] See Diethart Kerbs, Ehrenkodex für den Umgang mit Fotografen-Nachlässen und historischen Bildbeständen, in: Fotogeschichte 22 (1985), p. 2; Arani, Selbst- und Fremdbilder (Note 17), Chapter II.4.a.

[47] Becker, Das Bildarchiv (note 44), p. 241.

[48] Cf. the synopsis of guidelines for photo cataloging published in Germany to date in Zenker-Oertel, Verzeichnung (note 26), pp. 20-25.

[49] Metz, Nicht jedes Bild (note 37), p. 22, p. 2, p. 12, p. 33.

[50] Ibid., p. 12ff.

[51] Ibid., p. 3; Zenker-Oertel, Verzeichnung (note 26), p. 20.

[52] Metz, Nicht jedes Bild (Note 37), p. 25. If the photographs are closely related to certain written sources, the information they contain about them should also be recorded (ibid., p. 16).

[53] One of the criteria mentioned by Axel Metz for the archival value of photographs is their origin from time periods for which, according to today’s assessment, as much as possible should be preserved (ibid., p. 19ff.).

[54] Cf. ibid., pp. 12f., p. 19, pp. 25-32.

[55] Cf. ibid., p. 30, p. 33.

[56] <http://www.fotoerbe.de>. Cf. Stefan Rohde-Enslin, Was ist wo und wer hat was? www.fotoerbe.de: Auf dem Weg zu einer deutschlandweiten Beständeübersicht, in: Rundbrief Fotografie 15 (2008) H. 1, pp. 18-21.

[57] Metz, Nicht jedes Bild (note 37), p. 21, p. 33.

[58] Ibid., p. 3, pp. 5-8; Zenker-Oertel, Verzeichnung (note 26), p. 13.

[59] Metz, Not every picture (note 37), p. 23f.

[60] Cf. Arani, Fotografien als Objekte (note 21).

[61] Cf. Metz, Nicht jedes Bild (note 37), p. 12, p. 22.

[62] Cf. Hanns-Peter Frentz, Leere Kassen – volle Archive. Erlöschancen kommerzieller Verwertung von Sammlungsbeständen öffentlich-rechtlicher Archive und Museen, in: Rundbrief Fotografie 12 (2005) H. 3, p. 20ff.; Holger Simon, Internetpublikationen – Zum Umgang mit Kulturgütern aus öffentlichen Sammlungen, in: Rundbrief Fotografie 13 (2006) H. 2, p. 23ff., Hanns-Peter Frentz, Wunschtraum und Wirklichkeit. Eine Replik auf den Beitrag von Holger Simon [a reply to the article by Holger Simon], in: Rundbrief Fotografie 13 (2006) H. 3, pp. 30-33.

[63] See Prometheus Newsletter 2008/01, online at URL: <http://www.prometheus-bildarchiv.de/index.php?id=384>, as well as the terms of use at <http://www.prometheus-bildarchiv.de/uploads/media/Nutzungsbedingungen_de_01.pdf>.

[64] Jon Wagner (ed.), Images of Information. Still Photography in the Social Sciences, Beverly Hills 1979; cf. also Arani, Selbst- und Fremdbilder (note 17), chapter II.2.

[65] Berliner Blätter. Ethnographische und ethnologische Beiträge 36 (2005): Menschenbild und Volksgesicht. Positionen zur Porträtfotografie im Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Falk Blask and Thomas Friedrich; Ulrich Hägele, Die Visualisierung des “Volkskörpers“. Fotografie und Volkskunde in der NS-Zeit, in: Fotogeschichte 82 (2001), pp. 5-20; id./Gudrun M. König (eds.), Völkische Posen, volkskundliche Dokumente. Hans Retzlaffs Fotografien 1930 bis 1945, Marburg 1999; Ulrich Domröse (ed.), Leitbilder für Volk und Welt. Nationalsozialismus und Photographie, Berlin 1995.

[66] Cf. Paul, Bilder des Krieges (Note 16), p. 236f.; Henrick Stahr, Fotojournalismus zwischen Exotismus und Rassismus. Darstellungen von Schwarzen und Indianern in Foto-Text-Artikeln deutscher Wochenillustrierter 1919-1939, Hamburg 2004. Zur völkisch-rassischen Ikonographie im Nationalsozialismus: Arani, Selbst- und Fremdbilder (note 17), chapter III.3.

[67] For an edition of mass images, see Juliane Peters (ed.), Spott und Hetze. Antisemitische Postkarten 1893–1945, DVD, Berlin 2008.

[68] Cf. for example Carsten Winter/Andreas Hepp/Friedrich Krotz (eds.), Theorien der Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft. Grundlegende Diskussionen, Forschungsfelder und Theorieentwicklungen, Wiesbaden 2008. In the case of German-language research on visual communication, it is particularly important to ask to what extent it is internationally compatible, as photographic images, unlike national languages, do not require knowledge of the language in question for their reception. The oldest and most influential anti-democratic essay on the significance of images in mass communication is Gustave Le Bon’s ‘Psychology of the Masses’, written at the end of the 19th century; the NSDAP built its image propaganda on this intellectual foundation. Another point of reference could be, for example, the theory of culture and symbols developed by Ernst Cassirer at the beginning of the 20th century.

[69] Paul Watzlawick/Janet Beavin/Don Jackson, Menschliche Kommunikation. Formen, Störungen, Paradoxien, Bern 1982.

[70] Since the fundamental work of Gregory Bateson, Don Jackson and Paul Watzlawick in the 1960s, the term ‘analogue’ has been used in communication and media theory as the opposite of ‘digital’. While the verbal language referred to as ‘digital’ is based on an arbitrary connection of the meaning with abstract signs, the non-verbal communication modality referred to as ‘analogue’ is based on a relationship of similarity between the messages to that what is meant. For the history of the term, see Alexander Roesler/Bernd Stiegler (eds.), Grundbegriffe der Medientheorie, Paderborn 2005, pp. 9-16.

[71] Watzlawick/Beavin/Jackson, Menschliche Kommunikation (note 69), p. 61ff., p. 98ff., p. 101f.

[72] Cf. Klaus Hesse/Philipp Springer, Vor aller Augen. Fotodokumente des nationalsozialistischen Terrors in der Provinz, Essen 2002; Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung. Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919 bis 1939, Hamburg 2007.

[73] It must of course be taken into account that this took place in a democratic state, which allows a far greater pluralism of world views disseminated in word and image than the Nazi dictatorship.

[74] Margot Blank (ed.), Beutestücke. Kriegsgefangene in der deutschen und sowjetischen Fotografie 1941-1945, Berlin 2003; Andrzej Rybicki (ed.), Przełamywać bariery – budować mosty. Wojna na fotografiach polskiego i niemieckiego żołnierza [Breaking barriers – building bridges. The war in photographs of Polish and German soldiers], Krakow 2004; Arbaizar/Arnhold, 1945 – im Blick der Fotografie (note 28).

[75] Metz, Nicht jedes Bild (note 37), p. 21.

[76] The visible expressions of a social order include, for example, the furnishings and condition of individual people’s clothing and living space, meeting places, public leisure facilities, trading centres, workshops and industrial plants.

[77] Cf. Wagner, Images of Information (note 64); Ernö Kunt, Fotografie und Kulturforschung, in: Fotogeschichte 21 (1986), pp. 13-31.

[78] Cf. Wagner, Images of Information (note 64), p. 150; Arani, Selbst- und Fremdbilder (note 17), pp. 106f.

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About the author
Miriam Yegane Arani did her doctorate at the UDK in Berlin under the supervision of the photo historian Prof. Diethart Kerbs. Her work focuses on the survey and analysis of photo-historical materials from the NS period. Her dissertation dealt with the Reichsgau Wartheland, where the Nazis implemented “exemplary” oppressive measures against the native Polish population. Similar methods were soon to be used in the old Reich territories in an increased dimension against the antagonized parts of the German, especially the German Jewish population. In the “Reichsgau Wartheland”, a German administrative unit newly formed from previously Polish territories after the military occupation, the Nazi regime realized its population and settlement policy plans for Eastern Europe in an exemplary manner.

Tierautonomie
Publisher: www.simorgh.de – ‘Society, conflict and the anthropogenic dilemma’. Revised 12/2024. This reader is published in context with the memorial fund dedicated to Miriam’s work by the Edition Farangis.

Citation
Y. Arani, Miriam (2024): Photo-historical research on the National Socialist dictatorship as an interdisciplinary visual science. TIERAUTONOMIE, 9 (2), http://simorgh.de/tierautonomie/JG8_2024_7.pdf.

TIERAUTONOMIE (ISSN 2363-6513)

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Jahrgang 7, Nr. 2, Art. 1, ISSN 2363-6513, Dezember 2020

NS racism as a visual ideology

This text as a PDF

A presentation by Miriam Yegane Arani

Background: This presentation by Miriam Yegane Arani of an introductory iconographic analysis of National Socialist racism, provides a good entry point to Yegane’s basic research on sociological and photo-historical methodology of analyzing visual materials, in particular photographic sources, from the Nazi era. It is striking that the images published under the Nazi regime followed a certain program that polarized between idealized body norms and deviations from them. The Ministry of Propaganda presumably controlled the photo-publication to ensure that only photographs that conformed to the racial ideology were published. It can be assumed that under the Nazi regime there was an increasingly rigid polarization between the guiding and enemy images within the government-controlled image program. During the pre-war period, the focus seems to have been on propagating the “Nordic” model, whose visual counterpart is expressed in the “racially” pejorative enemy images of the war years. Particularly noticeable is the practice of distinguishing between people according to their outward appearance in pairs of pictures typical of the period, which were intended to illustrate “racial” antagonisms.

Tags: NS racism, National Socialism, propaganda, sociology of images

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TIERAUTONOMIE, Jg. 7 (2020), Heft 2.

NS racism as a visual ideology

Contextual infos

The pagenumbers in the brackets all relate to: Miriam Y. Arani: Fotografische Selbst- und Fremdbilder von Deutschen und Polen im Reichsgau Wartheland 1939–45 (2008).

After 1945

Race-ideology did not disappear after 1945, partly because of personal continuities that were possible to remain in German society after the Second World War and partly because of the long-term effects this thinking-model had in the everyday conceptions of the vast majority. (426)

From a strictly scientific point of view, race theory had already longer been considered untenable. (426)

Soon after the Second World War, the physical anthropologist Juan Comas clarified on behalf of the newly founded UNO in a paper entitled “Race as a Myth”, that the National Socialist racial teachings were factually incorrect. Human heredity has nothing to do with the blood. (426) Furthermore, the findings of physical anthropology in no way lead to the conclusion that “racial purity” causes cultural development while “race mixture” would cause cultural decay. (427) The results of international anthropological, social and historical research allow much more to conclude that not it’s not different body shapes, skin colors, etc. that are causes of conflicts, but rather conflicts of interest between different social groups, through which visible variedness (body, clothing, religious customs etc.) first become significant as signs of difference. (427)

In particular in biology, the classification of human races is scientifically obsolete, since it’s not a suitable concept for describing the variability of Homo Sapiens. Human populations can’t be adequately classified with the category “race”. A correct biological classification as a “breed” [in German the term race and breed are the same: ‘Rasse’] is not even applicable to natural populations of animals, since an exclusive allocation to a single “race/breed” would be necessary, which is not possible in the case of humans. The only area in biology where “races/breeds” are spoken of now, is in the breeding procedures that affect domesticated nonhuman animals. Only in context with nonhuman animals domesticated by humans the ‘biologically correct’ zoological forms of “breeds” exists. (427)

Racism as a visual ideology

It is noticeable that the pictures published under the NS-regime are subject to a certain program that polarizes between idealized body norms and deviations from them.

The Ministry of Propaganda most likely controlled photojournalism to that effect, that only photographs were published that corresponded to the racial ideology. (430)

I suspect that under the NS regime there was an increasingly rigid polarization between the guiding- and enemy images of the government-controlled image program. During the pre-war period, the propagation of the “Nordic” model seems to be in the foreground, whose visual counterpart becomes expressed as the “racially” pejorative enemy images in the years of war.

Especially striking is the practice of differentiating between people according to their external appearance in pairs of pictures typical of the time, which sought to demonstrate a racial antagonism. To narrow down the high relevance of these “contrast images” more precisely it is helpful to remember that Adolf Hitler, in his time in Vienna became acquainted to the Ostara booklets of Adolf Lanz that contained a Christian religious racial doctrine which described a “racial conflict” between blond-blue-eyed “Ario-Heroicists” and dark “Sodom monkey-likes”. (408)

The NS-ideologist Alfred Rosenberg claimed that the creative power of Europe was to be traced back alone to the Germanic tribes and that their greatest threat were the “mudflows of Mongrel from Asia, Africa, the entire Mediterranean basin and its foothills”. (408)

The precursors of the NS race ideology

The racial ideology was not a new creation of the NSDAP, which merely brought together the already existing racisms in the human sciences and then put it with an incredible radicalism into practical politics. (381, 382)

Since the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, the people of the world have been classified by European anthropologists predominantly on the basis of external, visible characteristics such as skin color, body type, shape of skull, hair color and texture, eye shape, nose shape, etc. On the basis of visible characteristics scholars formed “race-types” and interpreted their outward appearances as signs of moral, emotional and intellectual qualities. (381f., 394)

In the 19th and early 20th century, scientific anthropology was for large parts racial anthropology. (395) At the end of the 19th century racial theory achieved the rank of a scientifically legitimized dogma, that tried to justify political domination with “scientific” arguments. European Scholars mainly used visible characteristics, which usually only change over a long-term (behavior patterns, clothing, traces of specific living conditions), as indicators for the construction of different “races”. (382) The characteristics ascribed to other races usually corresponded to the social prejudices of the involved researchers towards the foreign peoples. (382) The European anthropologists routinely ignored empirical facts in favor of the norms of their own socio-cultural milieu, and the characteristics attributed to the other “races” legitimized above all the claim to leadership of their own “white race”. (395)

Until the end of the 19th century, the racial anthropological model of order was based on a selection of externally visible characteristics (skin color, physique, shape of skull, etc.). With the beginnings of modern genetics at the turn of the 20th century the biological theories about humans detached themselves from the visible exterior. The visible appearance was now called “phenotype” and was attributed to the interaction of hereditary factors and environmental influences. The hereditary factors that are not directly perceptible were called “genotype”. This also meant that human-biological race theory became largely detached from the concrete appearance in favor of abstract considerations, that could no longer be traced by the general public. (395)

Since the middle of the 18th century, European scholars have classified and hierarchized humans as “races” within an anthropology that was understood in terms of natural history, and they interpreted the physical appearance of a person as an exterior indicator of certain mental and spiritual characteristics, which were considered to be hereditary and unchangeable. (391) “Race” became a political term of struggle in the context with the aristocratic counter-revolution at the end of the 18th century in the conflict of the “two races”, in which the “purity” of “race” was first used to serve as a basis of legitimacy for the aristocracy’s claim to power. (391)

Race theory had become an elite ideology already in the German Empire. (390) Around the beginning of the 20th century, race theory developed into the elite ideology of the German academic middle classes. Among their most important supporters were biologists, anthropologists and physicians. In the period between the wars, the number of the followers of ideas of “racial hygiene” (eugenics) increased. ( ) Race theory was a thinking model represented by renowned German scientists during the Nazi dictatorship, from which by no means all of them moved away after 1945. This is also related to the fact that this thinking model was also established in other Western societies. (426)

In the Nazi state, eugenic ideology was propagated as “hereditary and racial hygiene”. (430) In addition, the argumentation of racial ideology was connected with the theorems of the eugenic movement, bringing forth a fearsome horror scenario of the imminent extinction of the “nordic race”. (430)

Content of the NS race ideology

According to the NS racial ideology, based on their outward appearance people could be divided into “races”, which would bequeath not only physical characteristics to their descendants but also a “racial soul”. (380)

Within the Nazi racial ideology, it was assumed that there was a direct relationship between certain physical and psychological characteristics and that a person’s physical appearance could be used to draw conclusions about the individual’s soul and behavior. (381)

The racial theory referred not only to the visible body, but also to the visible behavior. (430)

The Nazi race ideology amounts to a complete biologization of the socially and culturally acquired characteristics of a human. Characteristic is the representation of social conflicts of interest as a violation of a “naturally given” social order. The biologistic view of humans negates the historical, cultural and social influences on human existence. (380)

Racial theory reduced the diversity of humans to a few, statically conceived “racial types”, so that very large numbers of people could be thought of as summarizable and international political conflicts could be rationally explained with supposed biological tendencies of the “races” involved. (382) “Races”, as an absolutized supra-individual structure, became the presumed subject of history (382).

The “Nordic race”

The Nazi dictatorship elevated the “Nordic race” to the physical and mental ideal for the entire German people. The characteristics ascribed to the “Nordic race” were propagated as exemplary: a slender and strong body, a long narrow skull, blond hair and blue eyes. The rosy-white skin was considered the lightest of all the “races” and therefore only it should be called “white”. (405)

According to Nazi race theory, the “German people” consisted of 6 races, whereby the “Nordic” portion was to be increased to 50% by “racial care”. For this purpose, the most valuable “racial” components were to be collected from the population and brought into dominant positions. (380)

Already at the beginning of the 20th century, parts of German society perceived Northern Europe as an untouched counter-world to the modernizing society in their own country. Northern Europe became a projection screen for a racial-biological utopia: the peoples of Northern Europe were declared “Germanic blood relatives” and “noble people”. (405)

The glorification of the “northern race” did not only refer to the physique type of a human being, but also to its allegedly directly connected “racial soul”. (406) The racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther described the following mental “leader-qualities” of the “northern race”: the “ability to judge, truthfulness and energy (‘Tatkraft’)” were outstanding. The “Nordic” human controls him/herself and shows “an objective, prudent attitude that often makes him appear cool and stiff”, his “sense of reality” in combination with his “energy” drives him to great undertakings. He unfolds “objective passion, while passionality (…) is far from him”. In social interaction he/she showed “little inclination to empathize with the nature of other people”. (406) Günther thus described a contemporary bourgeois German habitus and placed it in direct relation to a certain type of physique, which was judged to be exemplary. (407)

The equation of “Nordic” and “Aryan”

The Nazi ideology combined the visual idea of the “Nordic race” with the race-theoretical view of history in the tradition of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which interpreted both the culture of Greek antiquity, which was regarded as exemplary by the German elites, as well as the “Aryans”, which had been suspected even longer ago, as “Nordic”.

Although the origins of the Aryan language are undoubtedly to be found in the Middle East, the term “Aryan” had already been a synonym for “Christian-German” since the imperial period and was explicitly limited to Nordic-Germanic racial types in the encyclopedias of the Nazi era. (407)

During the Nazi dictatorship, a distinction was made between superior and inferior human races and it was claimed that only “Nordic” people had intellectual and creative cultural potential. The other “human races” were more or less clearly denied a cultural capability. (380)

Hitler attributed the majority of progress in art and science to the “Aryans” as the only culturally creative race; he considered all other races to be uncultured and culturally destructive. Like the race-theoretical ‘pioneers’, he claimed that the culture-creating potency of the “Aryans” was threatened by “racial crossbreeding” and “blood mixing”, because this lead to degeneration and cultural disintegration. (407)

The NSDAP ideology explained more precisely that ancient Greece as a “Nordic” high culture had disintegrated due to the “racial mixture” between Greeks and Turks. (408)

Hitler believed that German “blood” must be kept “pure” because “blood mixing” would lead to a “lowering of the racial niveau”. (407)

Race mixture

In the middle of the 19th century, the French Count Arthur de Gobineau, in his essay “On the Inequality of the Races of Man”, took the view that people in the world were divisible into three main races and the “white Aryan race” was the crowning glory of creation. “Race mixture” would lead to cultural decay, because a “mixed race” was not capable of higher cultural achievements. He thought the “Germanic peoples” were the last “purely preserved branch” of the “Aryans” and threatened by “mixing” with foreign peoples. (391f.) The German Gobineau Society, founded by Richard Wagner, supplemented these assertions with the idea of being able to counter the supposed decline of the “Aryan race” by “breeding”. (392)

Following on from Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain claimed in “The Foundations of the 19th Century” (1899) that the “Aryans” were “pure-bred” cultural carriers and had been in a “racial struggle” with the “Jews” as a “mixed race” since antiquity. His racial-theoretical historical misrepresentation became widely effective in the German Empire, and Kaiser Wilhelm II made Chamberlain’s publication mandatory reading in the training of German senior teachers. (392) At this time, racial ideology was also a constitutive element of the German Emperor’s worldview. (392)

Finally, under the Nazi dictatorship, schoolchildren were taught that the culture of a people depended on its “race” and that German culture was in the tradition of the Germanic peoples, to whom the “Jews” were completely foreign in nature. (358)

The German-Germanic “People’s Face”

In the public visual world of the Nazi dictatorship – as in the associated politics – the focus of attention was not the individual, but rather the supposedly typical physical and psychological characteristics of large groups. (430)

Erna Lendvai-Dircksen’s books on the “German People’s Face” connected with the agrarian-romantic and anti-metropolis ideas, that became known under the slogan “blood and soil”, that were supported by the “völkischen” [Editor’s Note: a homogenous concept of “people” and “state” as an organic unity] groups of the Weimar Republic and the agricultural political apparatus of the NSDAP. Behind this was the idea of a social and biological unity of the Germans an based on a “piece of agrarian homeland” that was threatened by ”deracination”. (358)

Already in the last third of the 19th century, the “völkische” understanding of the German nation became the dominant ideology in the Prussian-dominated German Empire. (359)

The “völkischen” groups in the Weimar Republic also clung to the idea of a “racial hierarchy” associated with the “Volksgemeinschaft”-ideology [Editor’s Note:: unity of the ethnically homogenous ‘own’ people]. (379)

The “völkische” understanding of the German nation contradicts the democratic republican concept of nation, according to which “nation” is a political and “people” an ethnic category, so that from a democratic republican perspective a nation can also be composed of several peoples. (359)

The “average image” as a precursor of the “people’s face” (“Volksgesicht”)

The iconological roots of the German “people’s face” propagated in the Nazi era are to be found in the imperial era and the at that time still elitist racial anthropological-eugenic world of ideas. (430) Lendvai-Dircksen’s “people’s face” was preceded by the “average pictures”. (386)

The Prussian government established a non-democratic state in 1871 in the form of an empire. Now the elites involved in the rule “from above” made a supposed “essence” of the German people the nexus of national identity formation, and sought this in Christian, Aryan-Germanic and biological terms. (396)

Since the end of the 19th century, “illustrations” of a new way of thinking of the Western elites have been found in the form of “average pictures” or “composite photographs”. They were discussed within a transnational network of scholars around 1890-1920. What has come down to us is, among other things, an average image of Saxon soldiers, which belongs to the legacy of the first professor of photography at the TH Dresden (Robert Luther) at the beginning of the 20th century. He had received the picture from the art historian Georg Treu, who tried to prove that Classical Greek art had the purest ideal of beauty that was valid regardless of time and place. (385) For his research he also used average pictures, which he had become aware of through publications by Henry Pickering Bowditch of the Harvard Medical School. In the 1890s, Bowditch had been given with Saxon soldiers as photo objects by General von Funcke in Dresden. From numerous photographs of different individual heads, an average photo of the soldiers was finally produced by multiple exposures of these photographs on one and the same surface. (386) The average photograph of Saxon soldiers was to be compared with an “average face” of Slavic soldiers produced in the same way. Treu and Bowditch claimed that the “Germanic” head was rounder and the “Slavic” head was more angular. (386)

In the second half of the 19th century it became more common in Prussia to assume that the Germans were superior to the Poles. At the end of the 19th century, especially the Poles in Poznan became objects of an increasingly colonial self-image of the German Empire. (396) The continuing migration from divided Poland westwards into the German Empire and beyond became a political issue, which racial-theory-arguing-Germans portrayed as a “flooding” of the Germans by “the Slavs”. (398) The German Empire strived for an imperial world status and pursued a colonial policy both internally and externally. (399) The polarization between “Germans” and “Slavs” that began in anti-Polish journalism during the imperial era was a mental abstraction and imagination that did not do justice to the political realities on the ground. The “average photographs” of Saxon and Wendish soldiers were not only a synthesis of “scientific” images of humans with aesthetic values. They also represent an abstracting pictorial conception of the imperial elites of their “people” in a racial-ideological-eugenic context. (402)

The inventor of the average picture method was Sir Francis Galton, who also came up with the hypothesis, adopted by the previously mentioned two, that average pictures would lead to conclusions about the nationality, the “race” and the intelligence of the group in question. (386)

Galton is considered the founder of “eugenics”. He wanted to use quantitative methods to create the basis for the social selection of people in order to improve the quality of the “British race”. With his publications on the heredity of intelligence and talent, he laid the scientific foundations for a concept for the “ennoblement” of society, which he called eugenics from 1883 onwards: the allegedly too high birth rates of the weak, sick and poor were to be reduced and the allegedly too low birth rates of the intelligent, healthy and rich were to be increased. (386f.) Eugenics gained in importance above all because of the new, “biological” perspective on human beings. (387) It completed the arsenal of arguments put forward by the Social Darwinists who sought to apply Darwin’s theory of evolution to social life and who held the view that human beings were biologically determined to occupy certain positions in society. (387) Towards the end of the 19th century the eugenic movement also established itself among the economic and political elites of the German Empire and was institutionalized at German universities under the term of “racial hygiene”. (390)

The defining power of a minority of scientists became an instrument of power to control a majority. (388)

Visual enemy images

Physiognomics provided in particular explanations for the internal structure of the Germans, who were outwardly quite different. (361) Race theory, on the other hand, served primarily to scientifically rationalize the exclusion and devaluation of “Jews” and “foreigners” („Fremdvölkischen”). (361)

Enemy images of “the degenerated”

Since Darwin’s theory of evolution, the line between “human” and “nonhuman animal” seemed to become more fluid. European racial anthropologists took up this idea, arguing that the non-European “races” had not yet completed the process of becoming human and that Europeans too could “degenerate” and sink back to “animal” life forms. The “mentally ill” were now settled at a level of development between ‘humans’ and ‘animals’. (387f.)

The National Socialist “hereditary and racial hygiene” amounted to a breeding concept affecting German society. Initially, “hereditary patients” (“erbkrank”), “asocial” and “Jews” were to be excluded. The corresponding laws to legalize state exclusion measures were passed in the mid-1930s (Law against Habitual Criminals 1934, Inheritance Health Law 1935, Blood Protection Law/Nuremberg Laws 1935). (428)

During the Nazi dictatorship, the process of visual exclusion even became part of the state health care system. In the context of state-“hereditary and racial care”, the “foreign” and “sick” were excluded by aesthetic taste judgements in the guise of medical expertise. “Aryanised” German doctors judged the people entrusted to them in relation to a model of the “inherited healthy” (“erbgesunden”), supra-individual German “people’s body” (“Volkskörper”) with a “Nordic race ideal”. In the medical field, the aesthetic taste judgement about the body of a person became a medical judgement about the “racial” inheritance-value (“Erbwert”) of a person for the “people’s body” (“Volkskörper”) and a right to life based solely on this. (409) These processes are also reflected in visual communication: under the Nazi regime, visual representations of “abnormal” or “degenerated” human bodies were repeatedly used to evoke fear, disgust and contempt in viewers. The “abnormal” body was considered a sign of a “sick” mind. (409)

The iconography of the “abnormal” human being, popularized under the Nazi regime, was in line with the view held by the Italian doctor Cesare Lombroso as early as 1876 that there were “born criminals” who differed from other people in their physical build. His student Hans Kurella declared in 1893 that people “born to crime” had typical physical characteristics: a skull that was too small or too large, thick and dark hair, an asymmetrical face, deformed ears, large and wide or long and thin noses. (409)

Under the Nazi regime, aesthetic taste judgement, “racial hygiene” and criminal anthropology merged seamlessly. (409) Accordingly, the prisoners of Dachau concentration camp were presented in the NSDAP party magazine “Illustrierter Beobachter” as “deformities” (“Missgestalten”) with deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks, crooked mouths, protruding ears, scars etc. (410).

Enemy images of “foreign peoples” and “foreign races”

Of significance for the intended iconography of the “völkische” portrait photography is the exclusion of “un-German” physiognomies, which was also intended by the manufacturer. (364) In 1933 Erna Lendvai-Dircksen expressly advocated the exclusion of aesthetic figures of “foreign style” from the German pictorial world, because this would “not allow a national community”.

Images of the enemy / Jews

The government-controlled visual self-image of the Germans under the Nazi regime is primarily revealed in relation to the visually expressed image of the enemy “Jew”. During the Second World War, Nazi press propaganda used Jews as a central enemy image, with which other enemy images were associated. For example, anti-Polish Nazi propaganda was repeatedly closely linked with anti-Semitic propaganda. (384)

Enemy images / Polish

In order to understand the visual representation of the Poles in the National Socialist imagery of the Second World War, it is useful to be aware that at the beginning of the Second World War the mental border between Europe and Asia was moved by the Nazi regime to the western border of the Soviet Union – and thus ran through the previously Polish territory. (420)

“Racial science” (“Rassenkunde”)

In the Nazi state, racial research scientifically underpinned the ideology and policies of the NSDAP. The Polish civilian population also became the subject of German-language race research. (420)

In the Reichsgau Wartheland in particular, a professionalising and radicalising centre of racial selection of people was established. Experts of the SS on race and folklore tried to put their “folklore” political (“volkstumspolitischen”) measures on a scientific basis, in cooperation with the German civil administration and the Reichs-University of Poznan. (422f.) With the introduction of the DVL-procedure (Deutsche Volksliste) in all “incorporated eastern territories” in 1941, a “racial patterning” of the inhabitants in accordance with the SS’s RuSHA (SS Race and Settlement Main Office) was enforced in the Warthegau, which was also applied in other German-occupied territories in Eastern Europe and came to a provisional conclusion in the Warthegau in 1943. (426) The anthropologists Egon von Eickstedt and Ilse Schwidetzky used “racial formulae” to calculate allegedly exact percentages of “racial proportions” of individuals in the incorporated eastern territories. (420f.)

At the “Reichs-University of Poznan”, application-oriented race research was conducted for the Nazi dictatorship. Here, for example, the “Völkerpsychologe” Rudolf Hippius and the biologist Konrad Lorenz carried out race-relevant studies on the civilian population in cooperation with SS functionaries. This included, in particular, “Mischlingsforschung” (“mixed-race-research”) as a special branch of research which would have had no right to exist without the race ideology. In 1942, Rudolf Hippius carried out a psychological study of German-Polish “half-breeds” in order to prove that the degree of “racial mixing” had an effect on the psychological structure of a person. He assumed that Germans and Poles had fundamentally different personality structures and that German rule over Poland was legitimate because they were only prepared to “use their forces regularly and in an orderly manner” under duress. He came to the easily predictable conclusion that “racial mixing” between Germans and Poles would lead to “character disharmonisation”. (421, 422)

Heinrich Himmler believed that “Nordic” children were more creative than “racial mongrels” and that the Poles had only joined Europe through “Nordic” Germans. He fantasized that “inferior foreign host peoples” such as the Poles would want to drain “Nordic blood” from the Germans, because all cultural and state-forming achievements would go back to the “Nordic race”. (421)

National Socialist racism as a visual ideology; picture panels

Table of nations, middle 18th century.

The term “racism” describes a specific relation of social oppression and violence in which the ruling groups differentiate a very large number of people according to physical and cultural characteristics. Allegedly typical character and behavioral traits are attributed to them, which imply an alleged “natural” hierarchy of people. The “racial” attributions of characteristics serve to justify unequal treatment of people in economic and political life.

From: Eugen Fischer, Grundlagen der Humangenetik und Rassenhygiene (1921/1923).

With regard to National Socialist racism in particular, there are certain communication problems due to the different perspectives on the facts. For most Germans under Nazi rule, racial ideology seemed to be insignificant, as people were not consciously aware of the resulting unequal treatment. From their perspective, the theory and practice of Nazi racial ideology seemed to diverge widely. Accordingly, a German whisper joke of the time said: “What does the ideal German look like? Blond like Hitler, tall like Goebbels, slim like Göring (…)”. The racial ideology in the Nazi state before the Second World War affected mainly minorities and marginal groups in German society. With the beginning of the war, however, racial ideology became more relevant for numerous people in German-occupied foreign countries, who were now declared “racially” inferior by the Nazi state. In occupied Poland in particular, it became apparent that it was directed not only against the Jewish minority but also against the Christian majority of the population. The racial ideology was of central importance for the moral legitimization of the NS crimes of murder against millions of people and formed the ideological core of the National Socialist policy of extermination.

Hitler Youth learning the definitions of “full Jew”, “half Jew” and “quarter Jew” (Nuremberg Laws), 1938.

Racial studies for school assistants, 1943.

[Plates 3, 4; Heredity and Racial Studies].

The concept of “race” is one of the core elements of Nazi ideology and was propagated linguistically, primarily in the guise of a scientific theory of heredity. In addition, the race ideology was also visually popularized to a considerable extent during the Nazi dictatorship. During this period, masses of widespread pictorial representations of so-called Nordic people and their supposed enemies, scientific racial anthropology and the “völkisch” utopia of a “racially pure” German nation merged into one another. The historian George Mosse described racism as a “visual ideology” and saw visuality in particular as one of its greatest strengths. However, the specifics of this visual ideology have not yet been sufficiently researched in relation to National Socialism.

Cover of the magazine “Neues Volk” with “Nordic” ideal types, 1938.

Poster of the exhibition “The Eternal Jew”, which was shown in several German cities in 1937/38.

[Plates 5, 6; “New People” and “The Eternal Jew”]

The Germans under the Nazi regime were educated in educational institutions and through the mass media controlled by the Ministry of Propaganda to a folkish-racial vision standard. They were to view their own nation in a “racial” way. They were continuously given a conventionalized visual idea of what Germans should look like by the government and the feeling that they should stay away from “foreign”, supposedly inferior “blood”.

Touring exhibition “Degenerate Art” (“Entartete Kunst”) – defamation of modern art with racist slogans.

Cover of the publication “Entartete Musik” 1938 on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition against “the penetration of brutal jazz rhythms into the German world of music”.

[Plates 7, 8; “degeneration” through “niggering” (“Verniggerung”)]

By means of Nazi pictorial propaganda and racial education, in which the use of pictorial material was common, an emotionally guided distinction between “Germans” and “foreigners” (“Fremdvölkischen”) was practiced, which further spread and consolidated the Nazi racial ideology.

From: Illustrierter Beobachter, July 1933, showing the scientists of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute Otmar von Verschuer (above) and Wolfgang Abel (below). [The title says: “The racial image in the family tree”.]

From: Märkischer Adler, 7 June 1936, comparison of antique and contemporary heads. At the top: Equating Augustus with the “Nordic race”. [The title says: “Race, unchanged throughout centuries”]

[Plates 9, 10; “Racial studies in the press”]

Looking at other people was broadly coupled with a process of distinguishing between “own” and “foreign” physiognomies, between norm and deviation, good and bad. The processes of exclusion initiated at the visual level related to easily recognizable external characteristics such as physical appearance, clothing and behaviour. On the basis of published photographs, aesthetic taste judgements about people of different cultural backgrounds were practiced, which were transferred to the social interaction with real people.

I would like to try to illustrate the self-image of the Germans propagated under National Socialism by means of Erna Lendvai-Dircksen’s “völkischen” portrait photographs. The photographer achieved a relatively high level of recognition under the Nazi regime through her photo albums on the “German” or also the “Germanic folk face” (“germanischen Volksgesicht”).

Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, photographs from the years 1933-1945.

[Plates 11, 12, 13; Lendvai-Dircksen]

Her “völkischen” portrait photographs have also been published since the 1930s in large mass magazines and racial-political journals in hundreds of thousands of copies. Lendvai-Dircksen’s portrait photographs usually follow a consistent concept: they show close-ups of faces, with all socio-cultural contextual information about the person in question being blanked out. Her photographic models were usually German farmers, initially older ones with faces marked by wind and weather, later younger ones with smoother faces. The photographer depicted the faces of the individual people like light, rigid masks against a dark background. Often they are photographed from a slight view from below, so that they appear slightly raised to the viewer. With her subject matter and stylistic features of the picture design, which were intended to remind of old German and folkloric-realistic paintings, the photographer underpinned the idea of a centuries-long “German” community of descent. Lendvai-Dircksen’s illustrated books, in which she summarized these portraits, served to illustrate a biologically and socio-culturally homogenous German or Germanic “Volkskörper”. The faces she presented met widespread ideas of the appearance of the Germans. At the same time, they were consistent with the National Socialist ideas of the “Nordic race”.

Winner of the competition for the best Nordic breed head of the magazine “Volk und Rasse” (1926).

[Plates 14, 15, 16, 17; winner of the competition for “Nordic heads”]

Lendvai-Dircksen’s portraits of German farmers and Nordic people [plates 11, 12, 13] corresponded to the preferences of the “völkischen” groups and the romantic agricultural and anti-government “blood and soil” ideology of the Weimar Republic. Under the Nazi dictatorship, the term “völkisch” denoted a “racially” understood national feeling, according to which Germans were a “blood and ‘species’ community” (“Bluts- und Artengemeinschaft”).

Lendvai-Dircksen’s photographs and illustrated books [plates 11, 12, 13] gave the public an aesthetic model of what a “German” physiognomy looks like and a visual sense of the so-called “German way”. According to the Physiognomy of the Zurich vicar Lavater, the head and face were the external expression of a person’s soul and morality. This idea from the 18th century was increasingly combined with the search for anthropological types in the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, therefore, pictorial representations of individual people often did not have the purpose of showing a particular individual, but were intended to represent an anthropological type. This led to the endeavor to identify a specifically “German” type of person. Erna Lendvai-Dircksen stylised a non-representative selection of German faces in the “völkisch” sense into a superordinate, de-individualised “folk face” (“Volksgesicht”). She illustrated physiognomies in the sense of a community that extended beyond Germany into northern Europe.

Legend of the race map (1925): pink “Nordic or white race”, brown “Westic or Mediterranean race”, orange: “Eastern Baltic race”, olive green “Ostic race”, yellow “Mongolian race”, light blue “Dinaric race”, violet “Armenian race”, dark blue “Arab or Oriental race”, at the bottom “Negro or Black race”.

[Picture plate 18; “race map” (“Rassenkarte”)]

The Nazi state saw itself as a “völkischer” state, whose basis was to be a “social unit” founded “in blood”. Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf” that the “völkische Weltanschauung”, the “völkische” worldview, denied the equality of people and assumed the existence of higher and inferior human “races”. He interpreted world history as a “racial struggle”.

At that time, people with the same physical and psychological characteristics were considered a “race”. In the tradition of European racial anthropology and against the background of Gobineau’s and Chamberlain’s racial theories, the outward appearance of a “race” was directly inferred from a supposedly “racially” conditioned mental and spiritual state and a certain cultural status. The National Socialists elevated the so-called “Nordic race” to the physical and mental ideal for the entire German people. In the tradition of the racial theoreticians, the so-called “northern race”, the “Germanic” and the “Aryans” were equated, because the Germans, and before them the Germanic people, were said to have preserved the “blood” of the “Aryans” in the purest possible way.

Adolf Hitler: “The ‘völkische Staat’ must place race at the center of general life” …

Information- and Worksheets for ‘Reichskunde’, Magdeburg 1941.

[Plates 19, 20; worksheets on “racial studies”, Hitler quote: ethnic national state – race]

Information- and Worksheets for ‘Reichskunde’, Magdeburg 1941.

[Plates 19, 20; worksheets on “racial studies”, Hitler quote: ethnic national state – race]

German children in the Nazi state were taught “racial studies” (“Rassenkunde”) from adolescence onwards, and the use of visual material was common practice. I show two pages here from the “Merk- und Arbeitsblätter für Reichskunde” (Information- and Worksheets for Reichs-Studies) from 1941, which were aimed at young vocational school pupils. Why lessons in racial studies were given is clear from the Hitler quotation in the first line: “The entire educational work of the ‘völkische’ state must find its crowning glory in the fact that it burns the sense of race and racial feeling instinctively and rationally into the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it.”

The text of the worksheet stated that all European peoples would be made up of six races, with the proportions of “races” varying in each case. Peoples would be always made up of several “races”, with one or two “races” leading the way. In the case of the German people, the “Nordic” and “Faelic” (fälische”) races would be dominant and decisive. The proportion of “Nordic” people would be higher among the Germans than among other peoples: 10% of Germans were “pure Nordic” and the majority of Germans had “Nordic blood”.

A table on the worksheet is to represent the six European “races”. Each one of the so-called “races” is assigned a portrait. In the following rows of the table you find information on the physical appearance of the “races”. Remarkably, only the skin of the “Nordic” and the “Faelic race” is described as light and rosy and the eye colors as “blue to grey”. All other “races” are described as more colorless or darker. The worksheet contains no information about the alleged “mental characteristics” of these alleged “races”. However, they can be found, for example, in Hans F.K. Günther and a devaluation of all non-“Nordic” and “non-Faelic breeds”. The text for the pupils is limited to the statement that in Germany “pure-bred” representatives of other European breeds were rare.

The authors emphasize that people of the “Nordic race” have excellent qualities and are therefore particularly promoted by the Nazi state. They were “gifted with imagination”, had a “sharp mind”, had a “sense of responsibility” and were “born to be leaders”. They had a “matter-of-fact and sober view”, a “good organizational talent”, “drive to action” and “creative urge”. In conclusion, the authors emphasize that it is not only physical appearance that is decisive for the assessment of a person, but also the “attitude” and “sort of display of oneself”, which would indicate the “racial soul”. Thus, even a person who looks “Ostic” (“ostisch”) could be “Nordic” in thought and action.

This restriction was necessary in order to be able to relativize the appearance of the Nazi top officials by referring to their “racial soul”. At the same time, however, the relativization of the visible appearance of a “race” also meant the opening of infinite discretionary scope for the so-called race experts of the Nazi regime. For the assessment of the relevance of the visible exterior of a human being was ultimately withheld from these racial experts in individual cases, which the “völkisch” state produced. For in the case of people discriminated against and persecuted by the Nazi regime, the racial argumentation modules were used specifically against those affected. For example, Poles could look “Nordic”, but in cases of doubt, the “racial soul” attributed to them was always considered “foreign”.

Another worksheet presents “The three race circles” and is introduced with the Hitler quote: “The völkische state must place race at the center of general life.” The text that follows explains that the people of the earth could be divided into three “race circles” “purely outwardly”: “whites, yellows and blacks”. The subgroups of these “racial circles” would be called “races”. A “race” would be a group whose members display a large number of the same physical and mental characteristics that were equally present in their descendants.

The three “race circles” are presented in tabular form for comparison. They are distinguished according to the criteria: “important representatives of the race circle”, “physical characteristics” and “mental characteristics”. In the line “important representatives” the faces of a “White”, a “Yellow” and a “Black” are shown. The “White” is represented by a young man in a white shirt, tie and suit jacket; he looks – photographed from a slightly lower perspective – beyond the viewer into the distance. The “Yellow”, on the other hand, is depicted as a male child in nature-loving and poor-looking clothes, looking past the viewer at the side of the picture. The “Black” is presented as an adult man without clothing. His head is photographed from above, so that it appears that the man is looking up at the viewer. In the next lines the “race” subordinated to the “race circles” and their “residential areas” are listed: The “white race circle” is assigned the supposed six European “races”, the “yellow race circle” is assigned the Chinese and Japanese, Lapps, Eskimos and Indians, as well as Turks, Arabs and Iranians. The “black race circle” includes Africans and Afro-Americans, Australian natives and South Sea Islanders.

In the line on “physical characteristics”, there is surprisingly little information on the “white race circle”, which is only described as “fair-skinned”, and relatively much information on the other “race circles”. However, these only mention characteristics of individual sub-groups, which are then transferred to the entire “race circle”. Accordingly, “the Yellow” have a yellow to reddish skin color, a flat, broad face, “slit eyes”, a stocky figure and “short limbs”. According to this, “Blacks” have a “broad, flat nose”, “bulging lips”, curly hair, a “slender figure” and “long limbs”. The implied hierarchy of the “racial circles” among themselves is mainly based on the “mental characteristics” attributed to them. The “Whites” would be “spiritually” leading, “cultural creators” and “state-forming”; the “Yellows” were “empathetic”, “stuck on old cultural levels” but receptive, and the “Blacks” were “little capable of development” and had “low intellectual abilities”.

After confrontation with this table, students should apply what they have learned in an exercise and draw the distribution areas of the three “race circles” on a small map of the world. Those who do this will inevitably get the impression that the “yellow ones” pose a threat to the “white ones” because of their spatial extension and developmental capacity.

Anti-Semitic graphics in “Stürmer” style.

Jews in Poland, before 1939.

[Plates 21, 22, 23, 24; NS graphics “Jews” and photos of Polish Jews before 1939].

The doctrine of race offered a pattern of interpretation of apparently great explanatory power, as it provided a key of interpretation for the different manifestations of people in the world. Interestingly, the two sheets just presented do not contain any statements about Jews, who during the Nazi dictatorship were often classified “racially” as “Middle Eastern” types, although they had lived in Europe since Roman times at the latest. One reason for this is that the National Socialists propagated the principle of “racial purity” (“Rassereinheit”) and stylized Jews into a counter-principle of “racial mixing” (“Rassenmischung”). This figure of thought was not new, but already pre-formulated by Houston Stewart Chamberlain. On the visual level, the Nazi state produced various enemy images of Jews, some of which propagated the supposedly “Middle Eastern” (“vorderasiatisch-orientalische”) appearance, others the danger of “racial mixing” and others anti-Semitic fantasies. In addition to the very striking images of the enemy, relatively subtle photopublicistic depictions were also created, whose contemporary anti-Semitic significance is difficult to recognize for today’s viewers without knowledge of Nazi racial theory.

Photofreund-Yearbook 1939: “Work Break” (“Werkpause”).

Photofreund-Yearbook 1939: “Philosophers of doing nothing” (“Philosophen des Nichtstuns”).

[Plates 25, 26; picture pair “Photofreund” 1939]

An example of this are pairs of pictures consisting of an “Aryan” and a “Semitic” page, which appeared repeatedly in the yearbooks of the magazine “Photofreund” at that time.

As a generalization of the racial ideological Nazi image propaganda, it can be said that it linked an aesthetic judgement of taste about the appearance and visible behaviour of people very closely to political meanings.

Photofreund-Jahrbuch 1942: “Study” (“Studie”).

Photofreund-Yearbook 1942: “The Thoughtful One” (“Der Nachdenkliche”).

[Plates 27, 28; picture pair “Photofreund” 1942]

The conformity of a person’s appearance and behaviour with the “Nordic” racial ideal was considered “beautiful”, whereas the deviation from this ideal was considered “ugly”. All physique types and mental impulses considered “foreign” were to be intuitively and emotionally excluded by the German “Volksgenossen”. Under the Nazi dictatorship, the so-called “instinctive” recognition of the “foreign folk” (“des Fremdvölkischen”) was regarded as proof of the so-called “healthy folk soul” (“gesunde Volksseele”). The process of social exclusion under the Nazi regime, which was initiated on the basis of aesthetic taste judgements about the visual appearance of a person, can also be partially proven existent in the scientific-medical field. The biologist Konrad Lorenz, for example, wrote in 1940 that the so-called “species-specific (‘arteigene’) perception of beauty and ugliness” allows a correct distinction between valuable forms of life and so-called “degenerative mutations”. The term “degeneration” leads into the field of eugenics, which unfortunately cannot be dealt with further here for reasons of time. Eugenics, like racial ideology, attributed all violations of the normative concepts of the ruling elites to supposed biological deficiencies of the ruled, which were regarded as hereditary and unchangeable. Also in the context of National Socialist “hereditary and racial hygiene”, “the sick” and “the foreign” were excluded by aesthetic taste judgments in the guise of medical expertise. The overlap between the eugenic and racist dimensions of National Socialism is also reflected in the pictorial world.

Press photo of the propaganda companies of the German Wehrmacht, 14.8.1941. Caption: “The Soviets used such criminal types to fight German soldiers.”

“Scum of humanity” (“Abschaum der Menschheit”). Page from the report by Jürgen Stroop on the suppression of the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

[Plates 29, 30; Soviet war prisoner of war / Hähle, and “degenerated” Jewish bodies / Stroop].

Under the Nazi regime, visual representations of “abnormal”” or “degenerated” human bodies were repeatedly used to evoke fear, disgust and contempt in the viewers.

The propagandistic success of the dissemination of the Nazi racial ideology is partly due to the fact that it was an elite ideology that was already widespread among many German and “Western” academics before 1933. The widespread effect of the racial ideology is – apart from the aforementioned school indoctrination of German youths – very probably due to the aggressive image propaganda of the Nazi regime. In the 1930s, the number of photographs published in newspapers, magazines and books increased in Germany.

Press photo of the SS propaganda company (“SS-Propagandakompanie”) of the German Wehrmacht, no date, caption: “On the Soviet front. The gaze of this Kradmelder, a young Dane who fights as a volunteer in the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front, is clear and certain.”

Press photo of the propaganda companies of the German Wehrmacht, 7.6.1944, caption: “The battle rudder man has a very important function to fulfil on the ship. He cannot and must not leave his place during an attack. (…).“

[Plates 31, 32; press photos of “Nordic” soldiers]

While the Germans and their supposed “Artverwandten” were stylized in the visual mass media of the Nazi state towards the so-called “North-Racial” (“nordrassischen”) ideal, Jews and Soviet Russians in particular were presented as unhuman-like enemies who seemed to be standing on a lower level of cultural development. The Germans, on the other hand, were portrayed in the photojournalism of the Nazi state as “sympathetic” as possible in the sense of the racial ideology.

Two German press photos of the propaganda companies of the German Wehrmacht, ca. 1941/42, caption:

„Figures from the ‘Sowjet-Paradise’. In the prison camps, the types of criminals we remember from the worst times of the ‘commune’ are now multiplying. Among the Jews in uniform of the Soviet Army there are also types who are seen to be capable of all kinds of murder, but who nevertheless fail as soldiers at the given moment. – On the right, a pockmarked Mongolian who fits worthily into the ranks of the Bolsheviks.”

[Plates 33, 34; press photos “Asians”]

German press photographs of Russians from 1941 onwards show them in a way that the German public was supposed to find “unsympathetic”. Very interesting and so far unexplored are the iconographic parallels between the anti-Soviet and anti-American Nazi image propaganda of the last years of the war. The Nazi regime accused both states of being a “mixture of races” (“Rassengemisch”).

Press photograph of the propaganda companies of the German Wehrmacht, 6.3.1944, caption: “As prisoners in Rome! Chicago and New York types in Rome as prisoners of German paratroopers and grenadiers.”

Press photograph of the propaganda companies of the German Wehrmacht, 5.7.1944, caption: “After a short fight in German captivity. The American soldiers in a collection camp are glad to have escaped from the ‘hell of the Atlantic Battle’ at least with their lives. (…)“

[Plates 35, 36; press photos “Americans”]

This accusation can only be understood if the Nazi ideal of “racial purity” is included in the analysis.

In the course of research for my dissertation I was able to prove in regard to Poles in the Reichsgau Wartheland, that German Nazi photojournalism did not produce a tangible visual image of the “Pole” in this area, which would have visualized deviating human physique types. If possible, the Poles in this area were not depicted at all. In this way, Nazi propaganda informed the Poles in the Gau non-verbally: you do not exist. What is interesting in this case is above all the political tactical use of National Socialist race research. For during the non-aggression pact with the Nazi state, the Poles were characterized by German race researchers as rather “Nordic”, whereas after the beginning of the war, German race research tended to judge the Poles as “instinctive” and “uncultured” and brought so-called “Ostic” and “Mongolian” race shares of the Poles to the foreground. During the war and occupation years, the tenor of German racial researchers was that no predominant “racial types” could be identified among the Poles, but only a high degree of “mixture” of many “races”, whereby the negative influence of “Asian races” was particularly emphasized.

Wolfgang Abel, picture panel on research into “mixed-race”/”hybrids” (allegedly physically and psychologically “degenerated” Moroccan-German and Vietnamese-German people), 1937.

Alphonse Bertillon (Paris Police Prefect), survey of physiognomic features, around 1895.

[Plates 37, 38; photos Mischlingsforschung / “mixed-race studies“]

The Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler believed that “Nordic” children were more creative than “racial hybrids”. In order to give this belief greater prominence, the Nazi regime produced numerous German contributions to “research into hybrids” (“Mischlingsforschung”), which would have had no right to exist without the racial ideology. Such research was carried out on various people from bi-national couples. In 1942, German-Polish “Mischlinge” amongst others, were psychologically researched in the Gauhauptstadt of the Wartheland Posen, to prove that “racial mixing” led to psychological instability. Empirical data were interpreted in such a way that the political cause of the discomfort of those people who were now classified as “half-breeds” was completely ignored. And this was due to the fact that the National Socialist occupying power subjected the multi-ethnic population of Poland to a radical segregation according to “völkisch-rassischen” criteria, thus constructing a supposed “mixed race” problem.

A large amount of research has shown that in the case of “racially” motivated discrimination, it is not the actual characteristics of the person discriminated against that are decisive, but rather those characteristics that are ascribed to him or her by the discriminator – depending on his or her self-image. From a scientific – and especially biological – perspective, racial theory is obsolete. It would be very desirable if the historiography of National Socialism would emphasize more strongly that racial theory does not say anything reliable about the people defamed by it, but primarily something about the political strategies and methods of legitimation of such elites who systematically mistreated and murdered other people.

About the author

Miriam Yegane Arani did her doctorate at the UDK in Berlin under the supervision of the photo historian Prof. Diethart Kerbs. Her work focuses on the survey and analysis of photo-historical materials from the NS period. Her dissertation dealt with the Reichsgau Wartheland, where the Nazis implemented “exemplary” oppressive measures against the native Polish population, which were soon to be used in the old Reich territories in further increased brutality against the antagonized parts of the German, especially the German Jewish population.

Tierautonomie

Publisher: www.simorgh.de – ‘Open Access in animal-, human- and the earth liberation’. Revised 12/2020. Published with the kind permission of the author and the Edition Farangis.

Citation

Yegane Arani, Miriam (2020). Presentation: NS racism as a visual ideology. TIERAUTONOMIE, 7(2), http://simorgh.de/tierautonomie/JG7_2020_2.pdf.

(Rev. 07.12.2020)

TIERAUTONOMIE (ISSN 2363-6513)

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Jahrgang 7, Nr. 1, Art. 1, ISSN 2363-6513, Mai 2020

Der NS-Rassismus als visuelle Ideologie

Eine Präsentation von Miriam Yegane Arani

Dieser Text als PDF

Hintergrund: Diese Präsentation von Miriam Yegane Arani einer einleitenden ikonographischen Analyse des nationalsozialistischen Rassismus bildet einen guten Einstieg in Yeganes Grundlagenforschung zu einer sozialwissenschaftlichen und fotogeschichtlichen Methodik der Analyse von Bildmaterialien, und dabei insbesondere fotografischer Quellen, aus der NS-Zeit. Es ist auffällig, dass die unter dem NS-Regime publizierten Bilder einem gewissen Programm folgten, das zwischen idealisierten Körpernormen und Abweichungen davon polarisiert. Das Propagandaministerium kontrollierte die Fotopublizistik wahrscheinlich darauf hin, dass nur Fotografien veröffentlicht wurden, die der Rassenideologie entsprachen. Zu vermuten ist, dass es unter dem NS-Regime zu einer immer rigideren Polarisierung zwischen den Leit- und Feindbildern des von der Regierung gesteuerten Bildprogramms kam. Während der Vorkriegszeit scheint die Propagierung des „nordischen“ Leitbilds im Vordergrund gestanden zu haben, dessen visuelles Pendant in den „rassisch“ pejorativen Feindbildern der Kriegsjahre zum Ausdruck kommt. Besonders auffällig ist dabei die Einübung einer Unterscheidung von Menschen nach ihrem äußeren Erscheinungsbild in zeittypischen Bildpaaren, die einen rassischen Antagonismus veranschaulichen sollten.

Schlagworte: NS-Rassismus, Nationalsozialismus, Propaganda, Bildsoziologie

—

TIERAUTONOMIE, Jg. 7 (2020), Heft 1.

Miriam Yegane Arani: Der NS-Rassismus als visuelle Ideologie (für die komplette Fassung bitte diesem Link zur PDF Version folgen)

Kontextinfos

Die in den Klammern angegebenen Seitenzahlen beziehen sich sämtlich auf: Miriam Y. Arani: Fotografische Selbst- und Fremdbilder von Deutschen und Polen im Reichsgau Wartheland 1939–45 (2008).

Nach 1945

Nach 1945 verschwand die Rassenideologie nicht, einerseits wegen der personellen Kontinuitäten, die in den Nachkriegsgesellschaften möglich waren, und andererseits wegen dem längerfristigen Niederschlag dieses Denkmodells im Alltagswissen der breiten Bevölkerung. (426) Aus streng naturwissenschaftlicher Sicht gilt die Rassentheorie schon länger als nicht haltbar. (426)

Schon bald nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg stellte der physische Anthropologe Juan Comas im Auftrag der neu gegründeten UNO in einer Schrift mit dem Titel „Rasse als Mythos“ klar, dass die nationalsozialistische Rassenlehre sachlich falsch ist. Menschliche Vererbung hat nichts mit dem Blut zu tun. (426) Außerdem lassen die Erkenntnisse der physischen Anthropologie in keiner Weise den Schluss zu, dass „Rassereinheit“ zu Kulturentwicklung und „Rassenmischung“ zu Kulturverfall führe. (427) Die Ergebnisse der internationalen anthropologischen, sozial- und geschichtswissenschaftlichen Forschung lassen sehr viel mehr darauf schließen, dass nicht die verschiedenen Körperformen, Hautfarben usw. die Ursache von Konflikten sind, sondern vielmehr Interessenskonflikte verschiedener sozialer Gruppen, durch die sichtbare Unterschiede (Körper, Kleidung, religiöse Sitten usw.) erst als Zeichen von Differenz bedeutsam werden. (427)

Insbesondere innerhalb der Biologie ist die Klassifizierung von menschlichen Rassen wissenschaftlich obsolet, weil es sich um kein geeignetes Konzept zur Erfassung der Variabilität des Homo Sapiens handelt. Menschliche Populationen können mit der Kategorie „Rasse“ nicht angemessen erfasst werden. Eine korrekte biologische Klassifikation als „Rasse“ ist noch nicht einmal auf natürliche Populationen von Tieren anwendbar, weil eine exklusive Zuordnung zu einer einzigen „Rasse“ erforderlich wäre, die bei Menschen nicht möglich ist. Der einzige Bereich in der Biologie, in dem von „Rassen“ gesprochen werden kann, ist die Haus- und Nutztierzucht. Nur unter den von Menschen domestizierten Tieren gibt es ‚biologisch korrekt‘ als „Rassen“ bezeichenbare zoologische Formen. (427)

Rassismus als visuelle Ideologie

Es ist auffällig, dass die unter dem NS-Regime publizierten Bilder einem gewissen Programm folgen, das zwischen idealisierten Körpernormen und Abweichungen davon polarisiert. Das Propagandaministerium kontrollierte die Fotopublizistik sehr wahrscheinlich darauf hin, dass nur Fotografien veröffentlicht wurden, die der Rassenideologie entsprachen. (430) Ich vermute, dass es unter dem NS-Regime zu einer immer rigideren Polarisierung zwischen den Leit- und Feindbildern des von der Regierung gesteuerten Bildprogramms kam. Während der Vorkriegszeit scheint die Propagierung des „nordischen“ Leitbilds im Vordergrund gestanden zu haben, dessen visuelles Pendant in den „rassisch“ pejorativen Feindbildern der Kriegsjahre zum Ausdruck kommt.

Besonders auffällig ist die Einübung einer Unterscheidung von Menschen nach ihrem äußeren Erscheinungsbild in zeittypischen Bildpaaren, die einen rassischen Antagonismus veranschaulichen sollten. Um die hohe Relevanz dieser „Kontrastbilder“ genauer einzugrenzen, ist es hilfreich sich zu vergegenwärtigen, dass Adolf Hitler in seiner Wiener Zeit durch die Ostara-Hefte von Adolf Land eine christlich-religiöse Rassenlehre kennengelernt hatte, die als ein „Rassenkampf“ zwischen blond-blauäugigen „Ario-Heroikern“ und dunklen „Sodoms-Äfflingen“ dargestellt wurde. (408)

Der NS-Ideologe Alfred Rosenberg behauptete, die schöpferische Kraft Europas gehe allein auf die Germanen zurück und deren größte Bedrohung seien die „Schlammfluten der Mischlinge Asiens, Afrikas, des gesamten Mittelmeerbeckens und seiner Ausläufer“. (408)

Die Vorläufer der NS-Rassenideologie

Die Rassenideologie war keine Neuschöpfung der NSDAP, die lediglich bereits existierende Rassismen in den Humanwissenschaften zusammenfasste und sie dann mit unglaublicher Radikalität in praktische Politik umsetzte. (381, 382)

Seit dem 18. Jahrhundert und das 19. Jahrhundert über wurden die Menschen der Welt von europäischen Anthropologen vorwiegend anhand äußerer, sichtbarer Merkmale wie Hautfarbe, Körperbau, Schädelform, Haarfarbe und –beschaffenheit, Augenform, Nasenform usw. klassifiziert. Anhand der sichtbaren Merkmale bildeten die Gelehrten „Rassetypen“ und deuteten deren Äußerlichkeiten als Anzeichen für ihre moralischen, seelischen und intellektuellen Eigenschaften. (381f., 394)

Im 19. und im frühen 20. Jahrhundert war die wissenschaftliche Anthropologie in weiten Teilen Rassenanthropologie. (395) Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts erlangte die Rassenlehre den Rang eines wissenschaftlich legitimieren Dogmas, das politische Herrschaft mit „naturwissenschaftlichen“ Argumenten zu rechtfertigen suchte. Den europäischen Gelehrten dienten dabei hauptsächlich sichtbare Merkmale, die meist nur längerfristig veränderlich sind (Verhaltensmuster, Kleidung, Spuren spezifischer Lebensumstände), als Anhaltspunkte bei der Konstruktion unterschiedlicher „Rassen“. (382) Die anderen Rassen zugeschriebenen Eigenschaften entsprachen üblicherweise den sozialen Vorurteilen der involvierten Forscher über die fremden Völker. (382) Die europäischen Anthropologen setzten sich zugunsten der Normen ihres soziokulturellen Milieus wiederholt über empirische Fakten hinweg und die den anderen „Rassen“ zugeschriebenen Eigenschaften legitimierten vor allem den Führungsanspruch der eigenen, „weißen Rasse“. (395)

Das rassenanthropologische Ordnungsmodell hat bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts auf einer Auswahl äußerlich sichtbarer Merkmale aufgebaut (Hautfarbe, Körperbau, Schädelform usw.). Mit den Anfängen der modernen Genetik lösten sich die biologischen Theorien vom Menschen in der Wende zum 20. Jahrhundert vom sichtbaren Äußeren des Menschen. Die sichtbare Erscheinung wurde nun „Phänotypus“ genannt und auf das Zusammenwirken von Erbanlagen und Umwelteinflüssen zurückgeführt. Die nicht direkt wahrnehmbaren Erbanlagen dagegen wurden als „Genotypus“ bezeichnet. Damit löste sich auch die humanbiologische Rassentheorie großteils von der konkreten Erscheinung zugunsten abstrakter Überlegungen, die von der Öffentlichkeit nicht mehr nachvollzogen werden konnten. (395)

Seit Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts klassifizierten und hierarchisierten europäische Gelehrte innerhalb einer naturgeschichtlich verstandenen Anthropologie Menschen als „Rassen“ und interpretierten das körperliche Erscheinungsbild eines Menschen als Veräußerungsform von bestimmten geistig-seelischen Eigenschaften, die für erblich und unveränderlich gehalten wurden. (391) Zum politischen Kampfbegriff wurde die „Rasse“ im Kontext der aristokratischen Gegenrevolution Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts im „Streit der zwei Rassen“, in dem die „Reinheit“ der „Rasse“ erstmals als Legitimationsgrundlage für den Herrschaftsanspruch der Aristokratie dienen soll. (391)

Die Rassentheorie war bereits im deutschen Kaiserreich zu einer Eliten-Ideologie geworden. (390) Etwa seit Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts entwickelte sich die Rassentheorie zur Eliten-Ideologie der deutschen akademischen Mittelschichten. Zu ihren wichtigsten Trägern zählten Biologen, Anthropologen und Ärzte. In der Zwischenkriegszeit nahm insbesondere die Zahl der Anhänger „rassenhygienischer“ Ideen (Eugenik) zu. (    ) Die Rassentheorie war während der NS-Diktatur ein von renommierten deutschen Wissenschaftlern vertretenes Denkmodell, von dem keineswegs alle nach 1945 abrückten. Dies hängt auch damit zusammen, dass dieses Denkmodell auch in anderen westlichen Gesellschaften etabliert war. (426)

Im NS-Staat wurde die eugenische Ideologie als „Erb- und Rassenhygiene“ propagiert. (430) Darüber hinaus wurde die Rassenideologie argumentativ mit Theoremen der eugenischen Bewegung verbunden, woraus sich ein angsterregendes Schreckensszenario vom drohenden Aussterben der „nordischen Rasse“ ergab. (430)

Inhalt der NS-Rassenideologie

Der NS-Rassenideologie zufolge konnten Menschen aufgrund ihres äußeren Erscheinungsbildes in „Rassen“ aufgeteilt werden, die ihren Nachkommen nicht nur körperliche Eigenschaften, sondern auch eine „Rassenseele“ vererben würden. (380)

Innerhalb der NS-Rassenideologie wurde vorausgesetzt, dass eine direkte Beziehung zwischen bestimmten physischen und psychischen Eigenschaften besteht und dass vom körperlichen Erscheinungsbild eines Menschen auf seine Seele und sein Verhalten schließen könne. (381) Die Rassenlehre bezog sich nicht nur auf den sichtbaren Körper, sondern auch auf das sichtbare Verhalten. (430)

Die NS-Rassenideologie läuft auf eine vollständige Biologisierung sozial und kulturell erworbener Merkmale eines Menschen hinaus. Charakteristisch ist die Darstellung von sozialen Interessenkonflikten als Verstoß gegen eine „naturgegebene“ Gesellschaftsordnung. Das biologistische Menschenbild negiert historische, kulturelle und gesellschaftliche Einflüsse auf das menschliche Dasein. (380)

Die Vielfalt der Menschen wurde durch die Rassenlehre auf wenige, statisch gedachte „Rassetypen“ reduziert, so dass sehr große Zahlen von Menschen gedanklich zusammengefasst und internationale politische Konflikte mit vermeintlich biologischen Anlagen der betreffenden „Rassen“ rational erklärt werden konnten. (382) „Rassen“ wurden als verabsolutierte überindividuelle Struktur zum vermeintlichen Subjekt von Geschichte (382).

„Nordische Rasse“

Die NS-Diktatur erhob die „nordische Rasse“ zum körperlich-seelischen Ideal für das gesamte deutsche Volk. Die der „Nordrasse“ zugeschriebenen Eigenschaften wurden als vorbildlich propagiert: ein schlanker und kräftiger Körper, ein langer, schmaler Schädel, blonde Haare und blaue Augen. Die rosig-weiße Haut galt als hellste aller „Rassen“ und deshalb sollte nur sie als „weiß“ bezeichnet werden. (405)

Der NS-Rassenlehre nach setzte sich das „deutsche Volk“ aus 6 Rassen zusammen, wobei der „nordische“ Anteil durch „Rassenpflege“ auf 50% gesteigert werden sollte. Zu diesem Zweck sollten die wertvollsten „rassischen“ Bestandteile in der Bevölkerung gesammelt und in beherrschende Stellungen gebracht werden. (380)

Schon zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts nahmen Teile der deutschen Gesellschaft den Norden Europas als unberührte Gegenwelt zu der sich modernisierenden Gesellschaft im eigenen Land wahr. Nordeuropa wurde zur Projektionsfläche für eine rassenbiologistische Utopie: die nordeuropäischen Völker wurden zu „germanischen Blutsverwandten“ erklärt und zu „Edelmenschen“. (405)

Die Verherrlichung der „Nordrasse“ bezog sich nicht allein auf den Körperbautypus eines Menschen, sondern auch auf seine vermeintlich direkt damit verbundene „Rassenseele“. (406) Der Rassekundler Hans F. K. Günther führte folgende seelische „Führereigenschaften“ der „nordischen Rasse“ an: herausragend seien die „Urteilsfähigkeit, Wahrhaftigkeit und Tatkraft“. Der „nordische“ Mensch beherrsche sich und zeige „eine sachliche, abwägende Haltung, die ihn oft als kühl und steif erscheinen lässt“, sein „Wirklichkeitssinn“ treibe ihn in Verbindung mit seiner „Tatkraft“ zu großen Unternehmungen an. Er entfalte „sachliche Leidenschaft, während ihm Leidenschaftlichkeit (…) fern liegt“. Im sozialen Umgang zeige er „wenig Neigung zur Einfühlung in das Wesen anderer Menschen“. (406) Günther beschrieb damit einen zeitgenössischen bürgerlichen deutschen Habitus und setzte diesen in direkte Beziehung zu einem bestimmten Körperbautyp, der als vorbildlich beurteilt wurde. (407)

Gleichsetzung von „Nordisch“ und „Arisch“

Die NS-Ideologie verband die visuelle Vorstellung von der „nordischen Rasse“ mit dem rassentheoretischen Geschichtsbild in Tradition von Houston Stewart Chamberlain, dass sowohl die von den deutschen Eliten als vorbildhafte Kultur der griechischen Antike als auch die vor noch längerer Zeit vermuteten „Arier“ als „nordisch“ interpretierte.

Obwohl die Ursprünge des Arischen zweifellos im Mittleren Osten zu suchen sind, fungierte der Begriff „Arier“ bereits seit der Kaiserzeit als ein Synonym für „christlich-deutsch“ und wurde in den Lexika der NS-Zeit ausdrücklich nur auf nordisch-germanische Rassetypen beschränkt. (407)

In der NS-Diktatur wurde zwischen höher- und minderwertigen Menschenrassen unterschieden und behauptet, nur „nordische“ Menschen würden über ein geistiges und schöpferisches Kulturpotential verfügen. Den anderen Menschenrassen wurde eine Kulturfähigkeit mehr oder weniger deutlich abgesprochen. (380)

Hitler führte die Mehrzahl der Fortschritte in Kunst und Wissenschaft auf die „Arier“ als einzig kulturschöpferische Rasse zurück, alle anderen Rassen hielt er für kulturlos und kulturzerstörerisch. Er behauptete wie die rassentheoretischen Vordenker, die kulturschöpfende Potenz der „Arier“ sei durch „Rassenkreuzung“ und „Blutsvermischung“ bedroht, denn dies führe zu Degeneration und Kulturzerfall. (407)

Der NSDAP-Ideologe erklärte genauer, das antike Griechenland als „nordische“ Hochkultur sei durch die „Rassenmischung“ zwischen Griechen und Türken zerfallen. (408) Hitler meinte, das deutsche „Blut“ müsse „rein“ gehalten werden, weil „Blutsvermischung“ zur „Senkung des Rasseniveaus“ führen würde. (407)

Rassenmischung

Der französische Graf Arthur de Gobinau vertrat Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts in seinem Essai „Über die Ungleichheit der Menschenrassen“ die Auffassung, die Menschen auf der Welt seien in drei Hauptrassen aufteilbar und die „weiße arische Rasse“ sei die Krönung der Schöpfung. „Rassenmischung“ führe zum Kulturverfall, weil eine „Mischrasse“ zu keinen höheren Kulturleistungen fähig sei. Er meinte, die „Germanen“ seien der letzte „rein erhaltene Zweig“ der „Arier“ und durch „Vermischung“ mit fremden Völkern bedroht. (391f.) Die von Richard Wagner ins Leben gerufene deutsche Gobineau-Gesellschaft ergänzte diese Behauptungen um die Idee, den vermeintlichen Verfall der „arischen Rasse“ durch „Züchtung“ entgegen treten zu können. (392)

An Gobineau anknüpfend behauptete Houston Stewart Chamberlain in „Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts“ (1899), die „Arier“ seien „reinrassige“ Kulturträger und stünden seit der Antike in einem „Rassenkampf“ mit den „Juden“ als „Mischlingsrasse“. Seine rassentheoretische Geschichtsklitterung wurde im Deutschen Reich breitenwirksam, das Kaiser Wilhelm II. Chamberlains Veröffentlichung zur Pflichtlektüre in der Ausbildung deutscher Oberlehrer machte. (392) In dieser Zeit war die Rassenideologie auch ein konstitutives Element der Weltanschauung des deutschen Kaisers. (392)

In der NS-Diktatur schließlich wurde schon den Schulkindern beigebracht, die Kultur eines Volkes sei abhängig von seiner „Rasse“ und die deutsche Kultur stehe in der Tradition der Germanen, denen die „Juden“ völlig wesensfremd seien. (358)

Das deutsch-germanische „Volksgesicht“

In der öffentlichen Bildwelt der NS-Diktatur stand – wie in der dazugehörigen Politik – nicht das Individuum im Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit, sondern das vermeintlich körperlich und seelisch Typische großer Gruppen. (430)

Erna Lendvai-Dircksen schloss mit ihren Büchern zum „deutschen Volksgesicht“ an die agrarromantische und großstadtfeindliche Ideenwelt an, die unter der Parole „Blut und Boden“ bekannt wurde und von den „völkischen“ Gruppierungen der Weimarer Republik und dem agrarpolitischen Apparat der NSDAP getragen wurde. Dahinter stand die Vorstellung von einer auf eine „heimatliche Scholle“ bezogenen sozialen und biologischen Einheit der Deutschen, die durch „Entwurzelung“ bedroht werde. (358)

Das „völkische“ Verständnis von der deutschen Nation wurde schon im letzten Drittel des 19. Jahrhunderts zur vorherrschenden Ideologie im preußisch dominierten deutschen Kaiserreich. (359)

Die „völkischen“ Gruppen in der Weimarer Republik hingen auch der Vorstellung von einer „rassischen Hierarchie“ an, die mit der „Volksgemeinschafts“-Ideologie verbunden war. (379)

Das völkische Verständnis von der deutschen Nation widerspricht dem demokratisch-republikanischen Nationsbegriff, demzufolge „Nation“ eine politische und „Volk“ eine ethnische Kategorie ist, so dass sich eine Nation aus demokratisch-republikanischer Perspektive auch aus mehreren Völkern zusammensetzen kann. (359)

Das „Durchschnittsbild“ als Vorläufer des „Volksgesichts“

Die ikonologischen Wurzeln des im NS propagierten deutschen „Volksgesichts“ liegen in der Kaiserzeit und der zu diesem Zeitpunkt noch elitären rassenanthropologisch-eugenischen Ideenwelt. (430) Lendvai-Dircksens „Volksgesicht“ gingen die „Durchschnittsbilder“ voraus. (386)

Die preußische Regierung errichtete 1871 einen nicht-demokratischen Staat in Gestalt eines Kaiserreichs. Nun machten die an der Herrschaft beteiligten Eliten „von oben“ ein vermeintliches „Wesen“ des deutschen Volkes zum Knotenpunkt der nationalen Identitätsbildung und suchten dies im Christlichen, im Arisch-Germanischen und im Biologischen. (396)

Seit Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts finden sich „Veranschaulichungen“ eines neuen Denkstils der westlichen Eliten in Gestalt von „Durchschnittsbildern“ oder „composite photographs“. Sie wurden innerhalb eines länderübergreifenden Netzwerks von Gelehrten etwa 1890-1920 diskutiert. Überliefert ist u.a. ein Durchschnittsbild sächsischer Soldaten, das aus den Hinterlassenschaften des ersten Professors für Fotografie an der TH Dresden (Robert Luther) zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts zählt. Er hatte das Bild von dem Kunstwissenschaftler Georg Treu erhalten, der nachzuweisen versuchte, dass die klassische griechische Kunst das reinste Schönheitsideal aufweise, das zeit- und ortsunabhängig gültig sei. (385) Für seine Forschungen nutze er auch Durchschnittsbilder, auf die er durch Veröffentlichungen von Henry Pickering Bowditch von der Harvard Medical School aufmerksam geworden war. Bowditch hatte in den 1890er Jahren von General von Funcke in Dresden sächsische Soldaten als Foto-Objekte zur Verfügung gestellt bekommen. Aus zahlreichen Aufnahmen von unterschiedlichen einzelnen Köpfen wurde schließlich durch Mehrfachbelichtung dieser Aufnahmen auf ein- und dieselbe Fläche ein Durchschnittsfoto der Soldaten hergestellt. (386) Die Durchschnittsfotografie sächsischer Soldaten sollte mit einem auf gleiche Weise hergestellten „Durchschnittsgesicht“ slawischer Soldaten verglichen werden. Treu und Bowditch behaupteten, der „germanische“ Kopf sei runder und der „slawische“ eckiger. (386)

In der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts wurde es in Preußen üblicher, von einer Überlegenheit der Deutschen den Polen gegenüber auszugehen. Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts wurden insbesondere die Polen in Posen zu Objekten eines zunehmend kolonialen Selbstverständnisses des deutschen Kaiserreichs. (396) Die anhaltende Migration aus dem geteilten Polen nach Westen in das Deutsche Reich hinein und darüber hinaus wurde zu einem Politikum, das rassentheoretisch argumentierende Deutschnationale als „Überschwemmung“ der Deutschen durch „die Slawen“ darstellten. (398) Das deutsche Kaiserreich strebte imperiale Weltgeltung an und betrieb nach innen und außen Kolonialpolitik. (399) Die in der antipolnischen Publizistik der Kaiserzeit einsetzende Polarisierung zwischen „Germanen“ und „Slawen“ war eine gedankliche Abstraktion und Imagination, die den politischen Wirklichkeiten vor Ort nicht gerecht wurde. Die „Durchschnitsfotografien“ sächsischer und wendischer Soldaten waren nicht nur eine Synthese „naturwissenschaftlicher“ Menschenbilder mit ästhetischen Wertvorstellungen. Sie repräsentieren auch eine abstrahierende bildliche Vorstellung der kaiserzeitlichen Eliten von ihrem „Volk“ in einem rassenideologisch-eugenischen Kontext. (402)

Der Erfinder der Durchschnittsbild-Methode war Sir Francis Galton, von ihm stammte auch die von den beiden zuvor genannten übernommene Hypothese, die Durchschnittsbilder würden Schlussfolgerungen über die Nationalität, Rasse und Intelligenz der betreffenden Gruppe gezogen werden. (386)

Galton gilt als Begründer der „Eugenik“ (engl. Eugenics). Er wollte mit quantitativen Methoden die Grundlage für die soziale Selektion von Menschen schaffen, um die Qualität der „britischen Rasse“ zu verbessern. Mit seinen Publikationen zur Erblichkeit von Intelligenz und Begabung legte er die wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen für ein Konzept zur „Veredelung“ der Gesellschaft, das er seit 1883 als Eugenik bezeichnete: die vermeintlich zu hohen Geburtenzahlen von Schwachen, Kranken und Armen sollten reduziert und die angeblich zu niedrigen Geburtenzahlen von Intelligenten, Gesunden und Reichen sollten gesteigert werden. (386f.) Die Eugenik gewann vor allem durch die neue, „biologische“ Perspektive auf den Menschen an Bedeutung. (387) Sie komplettierte das Arsenal der Argumentationsfiguren der Sozialdarwinisten, die Darwins Evolutionstheorie auf das gesellschaftliche Leben zu übertragen trachteten und die Auffassung vertraten, Menschen seien biologisch zu bestimmten Positionen in der Gesellschaft determiniert. (387) Die eugenische Bewegung etablierte sich gegen Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts auch in den wirtschaftlichen und politischen Eliten des deutschen Kaiserreichs und wurde an den deutschen Universitäten unter dem Begriff „Rassenhygiene“ institutionalisiert. (390)

Die Definitionsmacht einer Minderheit von Wissenschaftlern wurde zu einem Machtinstrument zur Beherrschung einer Mehrheit. (388)

Visuelle Feindbilder

Die Physiognomik lieferte v. a. Erklärungen zur Binnenstrukturierung der äußerlich durchaus verschiedenen Deutschen. (361) Die Rassenlehre diente dagegen primär zur wissenschaftlich rationalisierten Ausgrenzung und Abwertung von „Juden“ und „Fremdvölkischen“. (361)

Feindbilder „Degenerierte“

Seit Darwins Evolutionstheorie erschien die Grenze zwischen „Mensch“ und „nichtmenschlichem Tier“ fließender zu werden. Europäische Rassenanthropologen knüpften daran an und meinten, die außereuropäischen „Rassen“ hätten den Prozess der Menschwerdung noch nicht abgeschlossen und auch die Europäer könnten „degenerieren“ und auf „tierische“ Lebensformen zurücksinken. „Geisteskranke“ wurden nun auf einer Entwicklungsstufe zwischen Mensch und Tier angesiedelt. (387f.)

Die nationalsozialistische „Erb- und Rassenhygiene“ lief auf einen die deutsche Gesellschaft betreffenden Zuchtgedanken hinaus. Ausgegrenzt werden sollten zunächst „Erbkranke“, „Asoziale“ und „Juden“. Die entsprechenden Gesetze zur Legalisierung entsprechender staatlicher Ausgrenzungsmaßnahmen werden Mitte der 1930er Jahre verabschiedet (Gesetz gegen Gewohnheitsverbrecher 1934, Erbgesundheitsgesetz 1935, Blutschutzgesetz/Nürnberger Gesetze 1935). (428)

Der visuelle Ausgrenzungsprozess wurde in der NS-Diktatur sogar zu einem Bestandteil des staatlichen Gesundheitswesens. Im Kontext der staatlichen „Erb- und Rassenpflege“ wurde das „Fremde“ und „Kranke“ durch ästhetische Geschmacksurteile im Gewand der medizinischen Expertise ausgeschlossen. „Arisierte“ deutsche Ärzte beurteilten die ihnen anvertrauten Menschen bezogen auf ein Leitbild vom „erbgesunden“, überindividuellen deutschen „Volkskörper“ mit „nordischem Rasseideal“. Das ästhetische Geschmacksurteil über den Körper eines Menschen wurde im medizinischen Bereich zu einem ärztlichen Urteil über den „rassischen“ Erbwert eines Menschen für den „Volkskörper“ und einem nur darauf aufbauenden Lebensrecht. (409) Diese Vorgänge schlagen sich auch in der visuellen Kommunikation nieder: Unter dem NS-Regime wurden wiederholt visuelle Darstellungen „abnormer“ oder „degenerierter“ menschlicher Körper dazu eingesetzt, um bei den Betrachtern Ängste, Ekel und Verachtung hervorzurufen. Der „abnorme“ Körper galt als ein Anzeichen für einen „kranken“ Geist. (409)

Die unter dem NS-Regime popularisierte Ikonografie des „abnormen“ Menschen schloß an die schon 1876 von dem italienischen Arzt Cesare Lombroso Auffassung an, es gebe „geborene Verbrecher“, die sich in ihrem Körperbau von anderen Menschen unterscheiden. Sein Schüler Hans Kurella erklärte 1893, „zum Verbrechen geborene“ Menschen würden typische körperliche Merkmale aufweisen: einen zu kleinen oder zu großen Schädel, dichtes und dunkles Haar, ein asymmetrisches Gesicht, deformierte Ohren, große und breite oder lange und dünne Nasen. (409)

Unter dem NS-Regime gingen das ästhetische Geschmacksurteil, die „Rassenhygiene“ und die Kriminalanthropologie fließend ineinander über. (409) Dementsprechend wurden die Häftlinge des KZ Dachau in der NSDAP-Parteizeitschrift „Illustrierter Beobachter“ präsentiert als „Missgestalten“ mit tiefliegenden Augen, hohlen Wangen, schiefen Mündern, abstehenden Ohren, Narben usw. (410).

Feindbilder „Fremdvölkische“ und „Fremdrassige“

Von Bedeutung für die beabsichtigte Ikonografie der „völkischen“ Porträtfotografie ist die von der Herstellerin mitbeabsichtigte Ausgrenzung „undeutscher“ Physiognomien. (364) Erna Lendvai-Dircksen sprach sich 1933 ganz ausdrücklich für eine Ausgrenzung von ästhetischen Gestalten „fremden Stils“ aus der deutschen Bildwelt aus, weil damit „keine Volksgemeinschaft möglich“ sei.

Feindbilder / Juden

Das regierungsamtlich gesteuerte visuelle Selbstbild der Deutschen unter dem NS-Regime erschließt sich primär in Bezug auf das auch visuell zum Ausdruck gebrachte Feindbild „Jude“. Die NS-Pressepropaganda benutzte während des Zweiten Weltkriegs Juden als zentrales Feindbild, mit dem weitere Feindbilder assoziiert wurden. Beispielsweise wurde auch die antipolnische NS-Propaganda wiederholt eng mit antisemitischer Propaganda verknüpft. (384)

Feindbilder / Polen

Um die visuelle Darstellung der Polen in der nationalsozialistischen Bildwelt des Zweiten Weltkriegs zu verstehen, ist es sinnvoll, sich bewusst zu machen, dass die gedankliche Grenze zwischen Europa und Asien zu Beginn des Zweiten Weltkriegs vom NS-Regime an die Westgrenze der Sowjetunion verlegt wurde – und damit durch das zuvor polnische Staatsgebiet verlief. (420)

Rassekundliche Forschung

Im NS-Staat untermauerte die rassenkundliche Forschung die Ideologie und Politik der NSDAP wissenschaftlich. Auch die polnische Zivilbevölkerung wurde zum Gegenstand der deutschsprachigen Rasseforschung. (420)

Insbesondere im Reichsgau Wartheland entstand ein sich professionalisierendes und radikalisierendes Zentrum rassekundlicher Selektion von Menschen. Rasse- und Volkstumsexperten der SS versuchten hier in Zusammenarbeit mit der deutschen Zivilverwaltung und der Reichsuniversität Posen ihre „volkstumspolitischen“ Maßnahmen auf eine wissenschaftliche Grundlage zu stellen. (422f.) Mit der Einführung des DVL-Verfahrens in allen „eingegliederten Ostgebieten“ 1941 wurde im Warthegau eine „rassische Musterung“ der Einwohner nach Maßgabe des RuSHA der SS durchgesetzt, die auch in anderen deutsch besetzten Gebieten Osteuropas angewandt wurde und im Warthegau 1943 zu einem vorläufigen Abschluss kam. (426) Die Anthropologen Egon von Eickstedt und Ilse Schwidetzky rechneten mit „Rasseformeln“ vermeintlich prozentgenaue „Rasseanteile“ einzelner Menschen in den eingegliederten Ostgebieten aus. (420f.)

An der „Reichsuniversität Posen“ wurde anwendungsorientierte Rasseforschung für die NS-Diktatur betrieben. Hier führten beispielsweise der „Völkerpsychologe“ Rudolf Hippius und der Biologe Konrad Lorenz in Kooperation mit SS-Funktionären rasse-relevante Untersuchungen an der Zivilbevölkerung durch. Hierzu zählte insbesondere auch die „Mischlingsforschung“ als ein spezieller Forschungszweig, der ohne die Rassenideologie keinerlei Existenzberechtigung gehabt hätte. Rudolf Hippius untersuchte 1942 deutsch-polnische „Mischlinge“ psychologisch, um nachzuweisen, dass die der Grad der „Rassenmischung“ auf die psychische Struktur eines Menschen auswirke. Er setzte voraus, das Deutsche und Polen grundsätzlich verschiedene Persönlichkeitsstrukturen aufweisen und dass eine deutsche Herrschaft über Polen legitim sei, weil diese nur unter Zwang zu „einem regelmäßigen und geordneten Kräfteeinsatz bereit“ seien. Er gelangte zu dem leicht voraussehbaren Ergebnis, dass „Rassenmischung“ zwischen Deutschen und Polen zu „charakterlicher Entharmonisierung“ führe. (421, 422)

Heinrich Himmler glaubte, „nordische“ Kinder seien schöpferischer als „Rassemischlinge“ und die Polen hätten nur durch „nordische“ Deutsche Anschluss an Europa gefunden. Er fantasierte, „minderwertige fremde Wirtsvölker“ wie die Polen würden den Deutschen „nordisches Blut“ abringen wollen, weil alle kulturellen und staatenbildenden Leistungen auf die „nordische Rasse“ zurückgehen würden. (421)

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• Der nationalsozialistische Rassismus als visuelle Ideologie – Präsentation

Mit dem Begriff „Rassismus“ wird ein bestimmtes gesellschaftliches Macht- und Gewaltverhältnis bezeichnet, in dem die herrschenden Gruppen eine sehr große Zahl von Menschen nach körperlichen und kulturellen Merkmalen unterscheiden. Ihnen werden vermeintlich typische Charakter- und Verhaltensmerkmale zugeschrieben, die eine angeblich „natürliche“ Hierarchie der Menschen implizieren. Die „rassischen“ Eigenschaftszuschreibungen dienen dabei dazu, eine Ungleichbehandlung der Menschen im wirtschaftlichen und politischen Leben zu rechtfertigen … weiterlesen als PDF