Abstract
“The propaganda of the Rassenpolitisches Amt and the popularizing racial textbooks of people … demonstrate just how important the photograph became in Nazi culture as an instrument for training a disciplinary gaze, for developing a form of technologized seeing whose purpose was to strip away the visible veneer of human beings and expose or interpolate an otherwise “invisible” racial foundation that purportedly undergirded it.”[1]
The marriage of technology and the occult in the modern era has perhaps never been more evident than during the 12 years of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich – nor more controversial. Indeed, the debate about whether we can really talk about a ‘Nazi occult’ is still ongoing. However, with key plenipotentiaries of National Socialism such as Himmler, Hess, Rosenberg and Darré interested in (and indeed often obsessed with) the occult, Reich policies and actions often included a strange mixture of cutting-edge knowledge, hard-edged pragmatism, ‘völkisch’ (folkish) mysticism and fringe, if not outright bizarre, science.
‘Heimat’ photographers sympathetic to National Socialism used the medium to emphasise an anti-rational, anti-enlightenment and Romantic model especially in portraits, landscapes and pictures of people at work on the land. With straight, sharp, close cropped images, they were also pioneers in using state-of-the-art photographic technologies like the 35mm camera and new film advances such as Agfa colour films introduced in 1936. Some of the more prominent of these National Socialist ‘avant-garde’ such as Erich Retzlaff (1899-1993) were also deeply involved in applying physiognomy to their practice. Esoteric paradigms such as physiognomy, affected and often merged into somatic science and contributed to the manner in which a medium like photography was understood to reveal ‘truth’. This field had grown out of nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropometrical photography, Social Darwinism and also metaphysical responses such as Lanz von Liebenfels Theozoology an d his Aryan ‘Gottmenschen’ (god-men). The physiognomic photographers looked for evidence of the Aryan race through the close scrutiny of the faces and bodies of the ‘Volk’. The National Socialists employed what Eric Kurlander has called the ‘supernatural imaginary’, where the many publications in which the work of these photographers appeared, provided, “… a space in which a range of popular esoteric, pseudo-scientific, folklorist, and mythological tropes might be exploited in the building of ideological consensus across a diverse Nazi Party and all the more eclectic German population.”[2]
Drawing on a range of primary sources (photographs and contemporaneous publications) and with reference to the conclusions of modern scholarly research on the ‘Nazi occult’ (for example, Bernard Mees, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and Hans Hakl) this text would explore the use of modern photography to underscore the mystical racial foundation of the National Socialist state.
[1] Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 368.
[2] Eric Kurlander, “The orientalist roots of National Socialism?” in Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India, ed. Eric Kurlander et al (New York: Routledge, 2014), 164-165.
The marriage of technology and the occult in the modern era has perhaps never been more evident than during the 12 years of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich – nor more controversial. Indeed, the debate about whether we can really talk about a ‘Nazi occult’ is still ongoing. However, with key plenipotentiaries of National Socialism such as Himmler, Hess, Rosenberg and Darré interested in (and indeed often obsessed with) the occult, Reich policies and actions often included a strange mixture of cutting-edge knowledge, hard-edged pragmatism, ‘völkisch’ (folkish) mysticism and fringe, if not outright bizarre, science.
‘Heimat’ photographers sympathetic to National Socialism used the medium to emphasise an anti-rational, anti-enlightenment and Romantic model especially in portraits, landscapes and pictures of people at work on the land. With straight, sharp, close cropped images, they were also pioneers in using state-of-the-art photographic technologies like the 35mm camera and new film advances such as Agfa colour films introduced in 1936. Some of the more prominent of these National Socialist ‘avant-garde’ such as Erich Retzlaff (1899-1993) were also deeply involved in applying physiognomy to their practice. Esoteric paradigms such as physiognomy, affected and often merged into somatic science and contributed to the manner in which a medium like photography was understood to reveal ‘truth’. This field had grown out of nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropometrical photography, Social Darwinism and also metaphysical responses such as Lanz von Liebenfels Theozoology an d his Aryan ‘Gottmenschen’ (god-men). The physiognomic photographers looked for evidence of the Aryan race through the close scrutiny of the faces and bodies of the ‘Volk’. The National Socialists employed what Eric Kurlander has called the ‘supernatural imaginary’, where the many publications in which the work of these photographers appeared, provided, “… a space in which a range of popular esoteric, pseudo-scientific, folklorist, and mythological tropes might be exploited in the building of ideological consensus across a diverse Nazi Party and all the more eclectic German population.”[2]
Drawing on a range of primary sources (photographs and contemporaneous publications) and with reference to the conclusions of modern scholarly research on the ‘Nazi occult’ (for example, Bernard Mees, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and Hans Hakl) this text would explore the use of modern photography to underscore the mystical racial foundation of the National Socialist state.
[1] Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 368.
[2] Eric Kurlander, “The orientalist roots of National Socialism?” in Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India, ed. Eric Kurlander et al (New York: Routledge, 2014), 164-165.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Fenris Wolf |
| Volume | 10 |
| Publication status | Published - 01 Oct 2020 |