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Ethnos and Mysticism in the Photographic Nexus Christopher Webster 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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