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Photography in the Third Reich C Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda HRISTOPHER EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER WEBSTER This lucid and comprehensive collec� on of essays by an interna� onal group of scholars cons� tutes a photo-historical survey of select photographers who W embraced Na� onal Socialism during the Third Reich. These photographers EBSTER developed and implemented physiognomic and ethnographic photography, and, through a Selbstgleichschaltung (a self-co-ordina� on with the regime), con� nued ( to prac� ce as photographers throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich. ED .) The volume explores, through photographic reproduc� ons and accompanying analysis, diverse aspects of photography during the Third Reich, ranging from the infl uence of Modernism, the qualita� ve eff ect of propaganda photography, and the u� lisa� on of technology such as colour fi lm, to the photograph as ideological metaphor. With an emphasis on the idealised representa� on of the German body and the role of physiognomy within this representa� on, the book examines how select photographers created and developed a visual myth of the ‘master race’ and its an� theses under the auspices of the Na� onalist Socialist state. P HOTOGRAPHY Photography in the Third Reich approaches its historical source photographs as material culture, examining their produc� on, construc� on and prolifera� on. This detailed and informa� ve text will be a valuable resource not only to historians studying the Third Reich, but to scholars and students of fi lm, history of art, poli� cs, media studies, cultural studies and holocaust studies.As with all Open IN Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the publisher’s THE website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com T HIRD Cover image: Erich Retzlaff , Joseph Goebbels, 1933. Courtesy of the Estate of R Erich Retzlaff , all rights reserved. EICH Cover design by Anna Ga� Photography in book the Third Reich eebook and OA edi� ons also available Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda OPEN ACCESS OBP EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER WEBSTER https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2021 Christopher Webster. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapter’s author. OPEN ACCESS This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Christopher Webster, Photography in the Third Reich: Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0202 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0202#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0202#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-914-0 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-915-7 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-916-4 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-917-1 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-918-8 ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-919-5 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0202 Cover image: Erich Retzlaff, Joseph Goebbels, 1933, reproduced in Wilhelm Freiherr von Müffling, ed., Wegbereiter und Vorkämpfer für das neue Deutschland (Pioneers and Champions of the New Germany) (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1933), p. 11. Cover design by Anna Gatti. 5. ‘Transmissions from an Extrasensory World’1: Ethnos and Mysticism in the Photographic Nexus Christopher Webster How far, since then, the ocean streams Have swept us from that land of dreams, That land of fiction and of truth, The lost Atlantis of our youth!2 Introduction In contrast to the increasingly lurid scholarly research on the broader subject of the ‘Nazi Occult’ that has appeared since the end of the Second World War, the relationship to mythic occult currents and esoteric themes in the photography of Ethnos3 in National Socialist Germany has not been examined in any great depth. However, recent scholarship has confirmed that there were indeed powerful esoteric (as well as exoteric) occult currents that undoubtedly influenced the cultural mythos of National Socialist Germany. This influence 1 Erste Gesamtausstellung der Werke von Fidus zu seinem 60. Geburtstage (First complete exhibition of the works of Fidus for his 60th birthday) (Woltersdorf bei Erkner: Fidus-Verlag, 1928), p. 9. 2 From the frontispiece dedication to George Washington Green, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ultima Thule (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880). 3 As noted in the introduction to this volume, I use ‘Ethnos’ as a summary term for this ethnically driven approach to (in particular) the autochthonous peasant and other ‘people of the soil’. © Christopher Webster, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0202.05 174 Photography in the Third Reich included the photographic portfolios of Ethnos that were developed for propaganda and ideological purposes. Eric Kurlander’s definitive work Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (2017) explores this influence in Austria and Germany, arising as it did from a late- nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century paranormal milieu, as well as how this influence continued to play a part in what Kurlander terms the ‘Supernatural Imaginary’ throughout the era of the Third Reich itself. As Kurlander explained: From cosmopolitan Berlin to Catholic Munich, from Saxony to Schleswig- Holstein thousands of Germans flooded to seances, astrologers, tarot readers, parapsychological experiments, occult bookstores and even esoteric schools and university courses… the sheer size and diversity of the occult marketplace in Germany and Austria suggests that it tapped into a mass consumer culture that was unique in depth and breadth when compared to other countries. Berlin and Munich alone were home to thousands of spiritualists, mediums and astrologers who appealed to tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of consumers.4 Kurlander’s intelligent work builds upon a slim but significant corpus of scholarly works that have dealt with this topic and its influence (or otherwise) on the origins and direction of National Socialism itself.5 Kurlander, who has written the preface to this volume, described how this influence in National Socialist Germany, this ‘Supernatural Imaginary’, was ‘…a space in which a range of popular esoteric, pseudo- scientific, folklorist, and mythological tropes might be exploited in the 4 Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters, A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 14. 5 See Joscelyn Godwin’s Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival (London: Thames and Hudson,1993), Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), Thomas Hakl’s Unknown Sources: National Socialism and the Occult (Sequim: Holmes Publishing Group, 2005) and the classic work of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935 (New York: New York University Press, 1992). In addition, there have been, over the last two decades, a growth of scholarly studies focussed on esoterica in toto in academia, as well as academically grounded research societies such as the European Society for Studies in Western Esotericism, the American Association for the Study of Esotericism, and the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Esotericism, amongst others. Added to these are the growing number of postgraduate study courses and academic chairs related to Western and Eastern esotericism (for example at the University of Amsterdam, the École pratique des hautes études, Rice University Houston, the University of Groningen and, until 2014, the Essex Centre for the Study of Western Esotericism, led by the late Goodrick-Clarke). 5. Ethnos and Mysticism in the Photographic Nexus 175 building of ideological consensus across a diverse Nazi Party and all the more eclectic German population’.6 This chapter explores how the influence of nineteenth-centuryvölkisch and occult currents on National Socialism percolated the mass-reproduced photographic images of Ethnos, with its framing of the German as ‘other’, and how the National Socialist syncretisation of myth, the occult, science, and art found a nexus in these photographic images. Additionally, as will be seen, the work of influential (if controversial) scholars such as Herman Wirth, and the powerful influence of political institutions such as Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, also played a direct role in forming this visual manifestation of a race apart, with a divine origin in a mythical Urheimat in the ‘ultimate north’. The allusion to an occult myth of divine forebears in these photographically staged portrayals of the ‘Aryan’ added to and extended the celebration of a racial type in line with ‘race science’. Photographers of Ethnos, such as Erich Retzlaff or Hans Saebens, often incorporated typological approaches that included a metaphysical and esoteric basis. They used the machine-generated optical and chemical processes of photography to make work that was breaking the bounds of its empirical realm, in a kind of nationalist ‘staged’ photography, just as cinema did in the interwar period. Occult Currents In his 1961 essay ‘The Mystical Origins of National Socialism’, George L. Mosse explored a ‘revolt against positivism’ that had formed part of the cultural and semi-religious prelude to the advent of the Third Reich.
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    FUNDBERICHTE AUS HESSEN BEIHEFT 7 • 2011 GLAUBERG-FORSCHUNGEN BAND 1 Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Hessen hessenARCHÄOLOGIE Keltenwelt am Glauberg Wiesbaden 2011 Selbstverlag des Landesamtes für Denkmalplege Hessen in Kommission bei Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH, Bonn ARCHÄOLOGIE UND POLITIK Archäologische Ausgrabungen der 30er und 40er Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts im zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext Internationale Tagung anlässlich „75 Jahre Ausgrabungen am Glauberg“ vom 16. bis 17. Oktober 2008 in Nidda-Bad Salzhausen Herausgegeben von Egon Schallmayer, in Zusammenarbeit mit Katharina von Kurzynski Archäologie und Politik Fundberichte aus Hessen Seite Archäologische Ausgrabungen der 30er und 40er Beiheft 7 = 75 – 120 Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts im zeitgeschichtlichen Glauberg-Forschungen 1 Kontext (Wiesbaden 2011) Von der Steinzeitsiedlung zum Fürstengrabhügel – Herausragende archäologische Forschungen der 1920er und 1930er Jahre am Federsee und an der Heuneburg in Südwestdeutschland1 Von Gunter Schöbel Im Schloss Hohentübingen befinden sich heute nicht nur mehrere bedeutende kulturwissenschaft- liche Institute, sondern auch die historischen Sammlungen der Universität Tübingen einschließlich der Antiken Abgusssammlung und – in den beiden „Fürstenzimmern“ – als Traditionseinrichtung die Professorengalerie seit 1578. Im Schlossmuseum sind die kennzeichnenden Funde Schwabens vom Paläolithikum der Höhlen der Schwäbischen Alb über die einzigartigen Funde der Steinzeit- siedlungen aus den Mooren und Seen Oberschwabens bis hin zu den Ergebnissen der Forschungen
  • The Past As Propaganda: Totalitarian Archaeology in Nazi Germany

    The Past As Propaganda: Totalitarian Archaeology in Nazi Germany

    The past as propaganda: totalitarian archaeology in Nazi Germany BETTINA ARNOLD* An important element to the future of archaeology in the ex-Communist countries of central Europe will be the freeing of archaeological ideas from the constraints of a particular set of social theories built into the fabric of the state, CIS Milisauskas noted in the last Ax’rJQLvTY (64: 283-5). This is a timely moment to look at the interference of a different set of social theories in the same region some decades ago. After almost six decades, there is no term Vorgeschichte (prehistory)was rejected as comprehensive account by a German-speaking a survival of anthropological thinking; Urge- prehistorian of the effects on prehistoric scho- schichte (early history) was preferred as better larship of the National Socialist regime, or the emphasizing the continuity of prehistory with Isle played by archaeology in legitimating it. documentary history (Sklenar 1983: 132). The This paper addresses the following questions: writings of the 19th-century French racial What were the foundations of German prehis- philosopher Gobineau provided a doctrine of toric research under the National Socialists the inequality of different races (Daniel & Ken- (NS)? What role did prehistory play in the frew 1988: 104-6). Journals and publications process of political legitimation from 1933 to dealing with the subject of race and genetic 1945? What did the NS system offer to prehis- engineering increasingly appeared in Germany torians in exchange for their part in this legiti- in the early 20th century, among them Volk und mation process? What was the official Party Hasse, which was founded in 1926, and policy regarding prehistoric archaeology? What Fortschritte der Erbpathologie und HC~SS~JI- was the response of the discipline to this hygiene, founded in 1929.