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Keri Mongelluzzo SA+AH Honors Thesis April 9, 2012

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Keri Mongelluzzo SA+AH Honors Thesis April 9, 2012 Keri Mongelluzzo SA+AH Honors Thesis April 9, 2012 Weimar Faces: August Sander’s Man of the Twentieth Century and the Nazi Ideal August Sander’s oeuvre, while extensive, serves predominantly as a compilation of works from a singular project: documenting everyday occupational and socio-economic “types” that pervaded German society in the early twentieth century. As Sander worked within the same period that the Neue Sachlichkeit, or the New Objectivity, gained popularity within avant-garde photography circles, his images of German society during the Weimar Republic embody various ideals set forth by the “new vision" movement.1 Throughout his career, Sander persisted with his ambitious project Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts, or Man of the Twentieth Century, until a slim volume of his photographs titled Antlitz der Zeit, or Face of Our Time,2 was banned under the authority of the new Nazi regime in 1934. Despite maintaining a nonpolitical stance in his photographs, Sander’s life-long artistic project was interrupted at the close of the Weimar Republic as he was sensed to be a danger to the rule of the Third Reich. Within the scope of this essay, I wish to examine the multitude of reasons as to why August Sander and his sociological artistic project were deemed threatening to the Nazi regime. More specifically, in what ways did Sander’s images conflict with the Third Reich’s definition of German society? With particular attention to the documentary nature of his photography, the existing parallels between Sander’s project and the New Objectivity will be explored to highlight Sander’s proliferation of landscape photographs after 1934 as well as his motivations for producing such images. In a holistic sense, focusing on the career of August Sander that spans both World Wars will provide insight into the effects of ever-changing political climates on the general production of art and the type of art produced. 1 Van Deren Coke, Avant-Garde Photography in Germany, 1919-1939 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 8. 2 Beaumont Newhall, preface to August Sander : Photographs of an Epoch, 1904-1959 : Man of the Twentieth Century, Rhineland Landscapes, Nature Studies, Architectural and Industrial Photographs, Images of Sardinia, by Robert Kramer, (Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1980), 8-9. 2 Born November 17, 1876, the son of a mining carpenter, August, and his wife, Justine, August Sander lived out his childhood in Herdorf, Germany.3 Raised with modest means, Sander left the Protestant public school in Herdorf in 1890 to assist his family financially by means of working in the iron ore mines. It was indirectly through laboring in the mines that Sander caught his first glimpse of a camera and became exposed to photography in 1892 upon meeting landscape photographer, Heinrich Schmeck.4 In the same year, Sander was able to purchase his first photographic equipment when aided monetarily by his uncle, David Jung.5 While serving as a reservist in the military, Sander apprenticed in various studios across Germany until he began his professional career in Linz, Austria at the Greif Photographic Institute of Art. As Sander grew financially stable, he married Anna Seitenmacher in 1902 and welcomed the birth of his first son, Erich, two years later. Sander and his wife had three more children, one of whom died from dysentery in 1911. At the turn of the century, Sander, like other prominent photographers, dabbled in pictorialist photography and produced his first color photographs through the gum bichromate process.6 Upon moving his family to Cologne, Sander sold the Greif Photographic Institute of Art and opened his own studio in 1910 in his city of residence. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Sander was called up to the “Landsturm,” and thus left his wife, Anna, to run his studio and support their three children. Able to return to Cologne in 1918, Sander resumed his photographic practice and began producing portraits of nearby residents in the town of Westerwald. It was while he began capturing portrait images of peasants and farmers in Westerwald that Sander developed his ambitious sociological project, Menschen des 20 3 Susanne Lange and Alfred Döblin, August Sander, 1876-1964 (Köln; New York: Taschen, 1999), 243. 4 J. Paul Getty Museum and August Sander, August Sander: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, California: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), 140. 5 Lange and Döblin, August Sander, 1876-1964, 243. 6 Getty Museum and Sander, Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum, 140. 3 Jahrhunderts, or Man of the Twentieth Century. It wasn’t until 1929 that Sander released his first volume of photographs from the Man of the Twentieth Century project titled Antlitz der Zeit, or Face of Our Time. Five years after the publication of his first book, August’s leftist son, Erich, was denounced and sentenced to ten years in prison under the authority of the Nazi regime. Coinciding with his son’s imprisonment in 1934, Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit was seized by the National Socialists and many of his photographic glass plate negatives were destroyed.7 It was this point in Sander’s career that witnessed a shift in subject matter from predominantly portraits of societal types to landscape and architectural images. For fear of further destruction of any additional plates, Sander attempted to store negatives in the cellar of his Cologne home, within housing quarters in Westerwald, and in Kuchhausen; unfortunately, over 30,000 negatives were destroyed in a fire that decimated his old Cologne residence leaving only 10,000 of Sander’s most precious negatives in his possession.8 Although Sander continued to run his photography studio with the help of his younger son after the conclusion of World War II, most of the works produced during this time period were prints of old plates. Upon Sander’s return to Cologne following World War I, he crossed paths with the Group of Progressive Artists, joined the local photographers’ guild, and became acquainted with Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, a painter “who felt that art should reflect society’s structure.”9 It was through his association with Wilhelm Seiwert and other artists that Sander began to alter his photographic process. Driven towards offering a representation of man whose physiognomy could speak of the attributes of a specific “type” in society, Sander eschewed his previous 7 Lange and Döblin, August Sander, 1876-1964, 246. 8 Ibid., 247. 9 Coke, Avant-Garde Photography, 36. 4 pictorialist tendencies during the 1990s of retouching the negative and producing atmospheric images in soft focus.10,11 Sander described his work in Man of the Twentieth Century as “straight photography;” a documentary form of photography that falls under the umbrella of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Coined initially by G.F. Hartlaub for an exhibition in 1923 of post-expressionistic painting12 that was preoccupied with objective artistic representation, the term in its original German “was not based so much on nonsubjective vision as on a concern with reality, with ‘thingness’ (‘Sache’ means ‘thing’).”13 Neue Sachlichkeit painting featured images of satirical social realism in response to the current state of Germany and the German people following World War I.14 Works by some proponents of Neue Sachlichkeit took this concept of realism to the extreme point of brutality and the grotesque which can be seen in Otto Dix’s painting, Three Women, from 1926 (Figure 1). Although Sander’s photographs addressed his contemporary view of society and of man, they are void of any satirical critique and remain rather nonpolitical throughout his career. Permeated throughout German culture and art making in the Weimar Republic was a pervasive interest in the factual and the real. While the notion of a photograph as an unmediated image or document is inherent within the nature of the medium, the “use of the term ‘documentary’ to describe photographs taken specifically to convey information of a sociological nature began in the 1920s.”15 Reminiscent of Sigfried Kracauer’s call for an analysis of surface- level expressions as they “provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of 10 George Baker, "Photography between Narrativity and Stasis," October 29 (spring, 1996): 81-82. 11 Robert Kramer, August Sander: Photographs of an Epoch, 1904-1959: Man of the Twentieth Century, Rhineland Landscapes, Nature Studies, Architectural and Industrial Photographs, Images of Sardinia, (Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1980), 13. 12 Fritz Schmalenbach, "The Term Neue Sachlichkeit," The Art Bulletin 22, (September, 1940): 161. 13 Newhall, preface to Photographs of an Epoch, 1904-1959, 8. 14 Ursula Zeller, "Neue Sachlichkeit," In Grove Art Online, accessed December 1, 2011. 15 Newhall, preface to Photographs of an Epoch, 1904-1959, 8. 5 things,”16 Sander wished to communicate information about the lives of members of German society and the realities of their environments through the universal language of photography. Heavily interested in Physiognomy upon his return from service in World War I, Sander began the ambitious project, Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts, of documenting sociological types with the purpose of exposing the spirit of contemporaneous society in a universally understandable manner.17 Unlike spoken language, Sander argues that photographic literacy is not contingent upon sound or geographic origins; it is universal and can be comprehended by all.18 It was through the medium of photography that Sander believed he could represent a sociological truth about contemporary German society to a global audience.19 Serving as a continuation and expansion of a portrait series of farmers from Westerwald, Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts relies on physiognomic characteristics of individual portraits to speak of the realities of collective societal types. Sander organized his images into groups based on occupations, ages, and socio-economic standings as a means to draw parallels between the physiognomies of one peasant, student, or physician to another.
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