Studying photographs of National Socialism and the Holocaust, we ask not just what these photos show, but also how the practice of photography shaped political behaviours. Taking photos, we suggest, prompted people to position themselves politically, to “perform” their role in the society created by National Socialism.
Photography could produce political conformity, encouraging an alignment with official propaganda and fascist ‘spectacle’. Photography could also be used as a tool of aggression, for example, in occupied territories, documenting one’s sense of cultural superiority. On the other side of the spectrum, photography could become a tool of resistance, deployed to record counter-narratives to the official gaze.
We first tested our approach in two pilot projects and publications: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History, special issue for Central European History, eds Maiken Umbach and Elizabeth Harvey, 48/3 (2015); and Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany, eds E Harvey, J Hürter, M Umbach, A Wirsching (Cambridge University Press, July 2019).
From the project itself, we recently published our first book, the study of the private photographic archive of one German-Jewish family dating from the Weimar years, Nazi Germany, their emigration in 1939, and their new life in the United States. Photography, Migration and Identity: A German-Jewish-American Story (Palgrave, 2018) exemplifies how we use private photography in this project more widely.
Future outputs will include:
German Private Photo Albums between Subjectivity and Ideology under National Socialism, a monograph by
Maiken Umbach, devoted to the personal photos of Germans included in the Nazi ‘Volksgemeinschaft’. Personal photo albums from this period survive in significant numbers.
Our project draws on over 500 albums of soldiers, which show life at and behind the front lines as well as ‘home leaves’, and a similar number of albums from the pre-war years and the home front: family albums; holiday albums; workplace albums; children’s albums of school trips, youth organisations and child evacuation programmes; albums of young adults in the various NS labour services.
German-Jewish Family Albums and the Narration of Identities from imperial Germany to the post-war years, a monograph by
Sylvia Necker, based on the collections of Jewish Museums in Berlin, Frankfurt/Main and Vienna, and other archives, the Wiener Library, and Yad Vashem.
The saturation of the public sphere with officially produced images posed particular challenges for people considered ‘undesirables’ by the regime, most notably Jews. Necker asks how they responded to this challenge: did they reject the medium of photography altogether, or did they mobilise older traditions of conspicuously private and domestic photography to create oppositional visual narratives?
Academic articles on in-between groups, such as the so-called 'ethnic Germans' by
Elizabeth Harvey.
Photos were mechanisms of including so-called ‘ethnic Germans’ in new definitions of national community, but they could also document a sense of unease with newly ascribed identities. Harvey will explore these through an analysis of several photo albums and illustrated ego-documents by ‘ethnic Germans’.
In addition, we will produce publications devoted to the pedagogic opportunities and challenges created by this research for museums and schools.
- S Necker and T Sakhnovich are working on an article about photos that survive in Jewish families who escaped from the Holocaust, which have never made it to public archives or museums. It draws on extensive fieldwork in Nottingham’s Jewish community.
- S Necker and C Reese will reflect on museum collections of photos from Holocaust survivors, and how we might best exhibit them.
- G Mills and E Harvey explore issues of pedagogy for the use of victim and perpetrator photography in Holocaust Education in Schools. Mills will develop methods using photos and testimony in curriculum planning for Holocaust Education.
- The role of new technologies in changing the way we perceive and interact with photographic evidence of the Holocaust will be the subject of an article by S Benford, P Tennent, and M Umbach.