View of Visual struggles for Identity and Heritage. The Photographic Archives of August Sander and Ernst Friedrich, and the Nazi Censorship

Visual struggles for Identity and Heritage

Marcos Fernandes

Abstract

This essay is a reflection about why the Nazi regime was against the photographic collections of one author, August Sander, and one anti-war activist, Ernst Friedrich. Using theories about Identity and Heritage, Culture and Memory, I return to the National Socialist thinking to find out why the Nazi regime was afraid of two photographic major collections.

Résumé

Le présent article se propose d’analyser pourquoi le régime nazi s’est opposé aux collections photographiques d’August Sander (photographe) d’une part et d’Ernst Friedrich (militant pacifiste) d’autre part. En m’appuyant sur les théories des rapports entre identité et patrimoine et entre culture et mémoire, je m’intéresse d’abord à la pensée national-socialiste afin de mieux comprendre la résistance nazie à ces collections d’images.

The photographic archives of August Sander and Ernst Friedrich, and the Nazi

censorship

Keywords

Photography, Identity, Heritage, Culture, Memory, Museum.

Introduction

In Germany’s Weimar Republic, between the end of the First World War and the arrival of the Nazism to power, two men built photographic archives that would harass the Hitlerian regime.

August Sander portrayed stereotypes of social and professional classes. He embarked on an epic journey to publish a giant portfolio, as an encyclopedia, that would be entitled People of the 20th

Century. The goal was never fully fulfilled because one life was not enough for Sander to feel the mission accomplished. The lack of completeness is also explained with the rise of the national-socialists, who clashed with Sander´s project and personal life. The Nazi prevented the broader distribution of Sander’s preview book, destroyed its printing plates, and detained Sander’s older son, a member of SAP, German Socialist Workers Party.

Ernst Friedrich was a conscientious objector who gathered photographs of German soldiers crippled by the First World War, published them in a book, and tried to exhibit them permanently in what he hoped to be an international museum against war, the Anti-Kriegs-Museum, in Berlin. That museum was destroyed by Hitler’s SS, and would be rebuilt later, after the Second World War, staying

open nowadays. Unlike Sander, Friedrich had precise ideological goals. He wanted to shock the German people with the horrors of the First World War to avoid a new-armed conflict.

The intents of the two humanists can be understood as attempts to raise “Realms of Memory”, using Pierre Nora’s concept, with “Mirrors with a Memory”, the elocution that the nineteenth poet Oliver Wendell Holmes used to describe photography1_{. August Sander wanted to capture the social fabric of}

Germany. His portraits – frontal, most of them with just one person in front of a neutral background or inside the workspace or an intimate place-, ended up doing the inventory of the parts that constitute German’s national identity, mainly represented by the clothing and the personal and professional objects of each one. Ernst Friedrich wanted to build, by force, a visual heritage museum for the consequences of war not to be forgotten in times of peace. He had the will to preserve representations of the suffering in the collective memory, so that future generations would not commit the error of launching another war.

This essay tries to understand why these two archivists were chased by the Nazi regime, explaining how photographic assets threatened the national identity that the new political power wanted. For that, I take the aid of Sociology and Anthropology’s theories about Identity and Heritage, Culture, and Memory. At the end, in a brief epilogue, I’ll reflect about the role of photography in the current context of museums, stressing one photographic exhibition, the Family of Man. It is part of the UNESCO’s Memory of the World, and it’s open to the public for more than 50 years. Curiously, it’s an exhibition put together in the aftermath of the Second World War, to enhance what’s common in every human, extolling peace.

Sander and Friedrich

August Sander was born in 1876 in the German city of Herdorf. He started to work in a commercial photography studio in Linz, Austria, when he was 25 years old. A few years after, he took over the place, alone. He covered portrait, landscape, architectural, industrial, and still life photography, always with artistical exigency. “The technical standard of his photographs is state-of-the-art”2_{, mentions Die}

Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, the institution that holds the photographer’s largest archive nowadays. In 1910 August Sander came to settle in Cologne, keeping photography as a profession.

In the twenties, August Sander started to prepare a portrait collection which would illustrate professions and social groups in Germany. A preview of that work was published in book form in 1929, titled Face of Our Time. The whole project, however, was to achieve an iconographic encyclopedia of the German society, much broader than the 60 photographs published, a book which would be titled People of the 20th _{Century. In 1934, one of his sons, Erich, was sentenced to 10 years in jail, by the}

National Socialist regime, for political resistance. He would die behind bars. Besides that, in 1936, the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler ordered the destruction of the remaining copies of Face of Our Time and of his printing plates. Bombing, during the Second World War, destroyed the studio in Cologne but Sander managed to save a major part his archive, moving it to a new home in the Westerwald. Still, 1. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph”, in Trachtenberg, Alan, Classic Essays on Photography, New Haven, 1980, Leete’s Island Books, p. 74.

Bricklayer, 1928

August Sander

© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur - August Sander Archiv, Cologne; SPA, Lisboa, 2012

Pastry Cook, 1928

August Sander

© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur - August Sander Archiv, Cologne; SPA, Lisboa, 2012

Middle-class Children, 1928

August Sander

© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur - August Sander Archiv, Cologne; SPA, Lisboa, 2012

Gypsy, c. 1930

August Sander

© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur - August Sander Archiv, Cologne; SPA, Lisboa, 2012

he was caught by another mischance. A fire in the basement of his bombed Cologne studio, in 1946, destroyed negatives and archival material that had not yet been transferred. After the Second World War, he returned to his own projects, while continuing to work as a commercial photographer.

August Sander died in 1964, and until his last years he still worked on People of the 20th _Century.

He had the possibility to publish, again, selections of portraits but not his enormous project of over 600 photographs. It was his son Gunther who did a first broader publication in 1971, and, in 1980, edited a

book close to the original project, under the title Citizens of the 20th _{Century. Finally, in 2002, with the}

help of grandson Gerd Sander, La Martinière published one edition, with the original title of People of the 20th _{Century, that tried to follow the conception and cropping of works as August Sander wanted.}

Since then there have been new editions, with different photographs, following new researches and trying to get as near as possible to the conception the photographer, himself, aspired to.

Ernst Friedrich was born in 1894 in Breslau, Poland, at the time a city in Prussia. During the First World War he joined pacifist groups, ending up being arrested for the sabotage of a military enterprise. He was as anarchist, moved in a circle of left-wing intellectuals, and organized exhibitions and lectures about authors like Leo Tolstoi and Fyodor Dostojewski. In 1924, Friedrich published the book War against War!, a photographic album that worked as a “shock therapy”3_{, in the words of essayist Susan}

Sontag. Within military and clinical archives, and with the help of left-wing associations, Ernst Friedrich gathered more than 180 images of soldiers wounded, or killed, in the First World War. Many of those photographs had been censured. Friedrich states “the pictures in this book show records obtained by the inexorable, incorruptible photographic lens, of the trenches and the mass graves of ‘military lies’, of the ‘fields of honor’, and of other ‘idylls’ of the ‘Great Epoch’. (…) And no one comes and says: ‘O how frightful that such pictures should be shown!’. But he says, rather: ‘At last, at last the mask has been torn away from this ‘field of honor’, from this lie of a ‘heroic death’”4_{. The words are in the first section of}

the book, in an ironic text where the author connects war with the search of wealth and capital of a few powerful persons, who fool the people by educating children with war toys and by giving the idea that fighting in the name of the country is a patriotic thing. In four languages - German, French, English, and Dutch -, Ernst Friedrich calls to the resistance of war “to human beings in all lands”. The main section of the book starts with images of tin soldiers and ends with military graveyards. In between, there are images of destroyed churches and castles, gazed soldiers in agony, dead bodies in the battle fields – the so called fields of honor -, mass graves, gallows, and portraits of disfigured faces of soldiers. Susan Sontag says that “almost all the sequences in War Against War! are difficult to look at (…) but surely the most unbearable pages in this book, the whole of which was designed to horrify and demoralize, are in the section titled ‘The Face of War’, twenty-four close-ups of soldiers with huge facial wounds”5_.

In 1930, three years before Hitler got to power, the book had already sold out 10 editions in Germany6_.

Before that, in the late twenties, the Anti-Kriegs-Museum opened the doors in a two-storey building in Berlin. There, Friedrich exhibited the photographs that were published in the book. At the same year Hitler won the election, the SS destroyed the museum. Ernst Friedrich migrated to Belgium, where he created a second pacifist museum, and then moved on to France, creating a new anti-war center in Paris. It was there where the conscientious objector died in 1967. 15 years later, in 1982, one of his grandsons reopened the Anti-Kriegs-Museum in Berlin, which remains open.

3. Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others, London, 2003, Penguin Books, p. 13. 4. Friedrich, Ernst, Krieg dem Kriege, Nördlingen, 1982, Zweitausendeins, p. 23. 5. Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 13.

Inside the Anti-Kriegs-Museum (Anti-War Museum) Photograph in newspaper Berliner Volkszeitung, 1925

(http://www.anti-kriegs-museum.de/english/history.html, accessed in April 22th ₂₀₁₃₎

Detail of the book War Against War! Ernst Friedrich (editor)

Struggles for Identity and Heritage versus the Hitler’s ‘struggle’

The book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), by Adolf Hitler, with the first volume being edited in 1925, marked the thinking materialized by the Nazi regime. After 10 chapters of historic background for the ideology, Hitler starts the 11th _{chapter, under the title Nation and Race, by saying that “there are}

numberless examples in history, showing with terrible plainness, how each time Aryan blood became mixed with that of inferior peoples the result has been the end of the culture-sustaining race“7 _{By culture,}

Hitler was not referring himself to the ways of living and the identity values of a community in a period of time, or the whole way of life and the forms of creative signification that emanate from that

everyday life through learning and arts, as explained by Raymond Williams8_{, novelist, academic, and}

Cultural Studies precursor. For Hitler, culture was what the common knowledge thinks of high culture, the erudite thinking, and not the set of banal and everyday practices. “All that we admire on this earth – science, art, technical skill and invention –, is the creative product of only a small number of nations, and originally, perhaps, of one single race. All this culture depends on them for its very existence. If they are ruined, they carry with them all the beauty of this earth into the grave”, adds Hitler9_{. In Mein Kampf, he}

divided humanity in three groups: the founders of culture, the maintainers of culture, and the destroyers of culture. “The Aryan stock alone can be considered as representing the first category”10_{. Although}

the meaning of culture expressed by Hitler was much simplified, it goes with the ethnographic concept of that time which, with intention or by innocence, separated the dominant group from others, seen as inferiors. Susan Wright, anthropologist, considers that the “old concept of culture” sees the people like a group of persons with static and identical values, therefore marking the difference between people. That old concept was used for xenophobia and ethnical cleansing11_{, she arguments.}

Hitler’s struggle (cultural, why not say it?) collided with the pacifist fight of Ernst Friedrich. Showing the violence and suffering of war victims in photographs in a museological space, he intended to form a collective pacifist consciousness, ideologically educating to the aversion to war. The museum, unlike the traditional sense, didn’t fit the nostalgia consumption or the longing stroll through the past. At best, he took advantage of the historical memory, perpetuated it in time, or disclosed it to anyone who has not been in battle scenarios. Any museum preserves a content that has been selected and, therefore, is incomplete and even, by chance, decontextualized. The Anti-Kriegs-Museum was no exception, but with the title of museum it sought to legitimize the pacifist value.

One cannot consider that Friedrich created the Anti-War Museum as a place of heritage, to preserve objects that marked the identity of a community that had fell into disuse. The museum was not dedicated to photography per se, and there isn’t plenty of traditional or historical to preserve in a series of portraits of victims of war, at least in the denotative sense that an image can have. But nowadays, the new Anti-Kriegs-Museum has acquired the true status of heritage preservation, because it displays war documents, weaponry, and, for example, an “air-raid shelter from Second World War. Equipped with many authentic objects, the shelter evokes the uneasy atmosphere of the bombing of Berlin during the Second World War”12_{, as it is described on their website. But the original Anti-Kriegs-Museum was,}

indirectly, an area of photographic heritage. His creator had gathered pictures, from archives, images that had been censored, and joined them for public display, around a specific theme. And thus, seen as a museological space attached to photography, it ultimately extended the meaning of “staged authenticity” that academic Dean MacCannell saw in museums13_{. In the argument of staging and stylization, Ernst}

8. Williams, Raymond, “Culture is ordinary” in Ben Highmore The Everyday Life Reader, London, 2001, Routledge, p. 91.

9. Hitler, Adolf, My Struggle, p. 121. 10. Hitler, Adolf, My Struggle, p. 121.

11. Wright, Susan, The Politicization of ‘culture’, in Anthropology Today, Vol. 14, Nº1, February 1998, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, pp. 8-9.

12. http://www.anti-kriegs-museum.de/english/start1.html, accessed in April 22th _2013.

Friedrich narrowed the context of war to a number of violent images, and thus imposed a kind of symbolic violence.

The militarist and imperialist intention of Hitler was also reflected in the book he wrote. In My Struggle, the last chapter is, moreover, devoted to ‘Emergency Defense as a right’. As the military dictatorship was installed in 1933, and with the control of all media in an attempt to have exclusive influence over public opinion, it is not surprising that Nazi Germany was against a museum that advocated pacifism, especially because the country had been defeated in the First World War, a subject that dominated the sore of Hitler at the beginning of My Struggle book. Moreover, the bruises and slashes that Ernst Friedrich exhibited in the portraits would maintain open the psychological wounds that marked the German identity after the conflict between 1914 and 1918, caused by the international monitoring, that jeopardize the sense of the Germany as an independent nation.

August Sander’s case is singular. The photographer embarked on an epic effort to portray the People of the 20th _{Century with images of social types. To represent Germany through stereotypes of}

class and social spaces, each photograph’s subtitle has the year, sometimes the location, in a few cases the name of the person, and always the element of identity that Sander felt more striking. “The Physician, 1929”, “Catholic Priest, 1927”, “Jerusalem Pilgrim, 1930”, “Wife of a Writer and High School Teacher, 1924”, “Society Lady, 1923”, “Middle-class Family, 1924”, “Young Mother, Middle Class, 1926”, “Aristocrat, 1928”, “Attorney, 1931”, and “Soldier, c. 1940” are examples of some captions. What was the interest in making an inventory of such an order? Would it be for a group of contemporaries to see other fields of the social network? I think the title People of the 20th _{Century gives us a clue to the}

intentions of the photographer. Sander searched for stereotypes of German society, an idea conceived in the twenties, complemented along the way in accordance with social and political changes14_{. As so,}

August Sander also photographed different Nazi ranks, from soldiers to captains, all in military vesture and with National Socialist insignias. For the most part, the photographer presents us with the obvious subtitle “National Socialist”, but there are also cases when he gives more information, such as “National Socialist, Head of Department of Culture, c. 1938”, or “Member of Hitler’s SS Bodyguard, c. 1940”. In a letter, written in the last day of 1946, to the left-wing Paul Frölich and Rosi Wolfstein, August Sander explained People of the 20th _{Century as a “work which is more depiction than criticism, will provide}

some insight into our age and its people, and the more time passes, the more valuable will become”15_.

“The People he portrayed appear as types representative of their time or station in life”, says Susanne Lange, former director of Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, in Cologne16_{. The original}

14. August Sander mentioned the growth of the project, for example, in letters written to friends after the Second World War. In one of them, with the date of January 1947, Sander told the writer Dettmar Heinrich Sarnetzki that “I am hard at work. Last week I was engaged on ‘People of the 20th _{Century’ again. We set out the Jewish portfolio.}

It is concerned with people who either emigrated or breathed their last in the gas chambers; all outstanding head portraits of non-political people. Another portfolio with political prisoners and a third with foreign workers”. The images of political prisoners were taken by Sander’s son Erich when he was, himself, incarcerated, and delivered the task of photographically documenting his fellow colleagues behind bars. Sander, August, People of the 20th

Century, Paris, 2002, Éditions de La Martinière vol. VI, p. 19. 15. Sander, August, People of the 20th _{Century, vol. VII, p. 53.}

idea was to divide the oeuvre in seven groups: “the farmer”, “the skilled tradesman”, “the woman”, “classes and professions”, “the artists”, “the city”, and “the last people”. Each group is subdivided in subgroups, as, for example, “the young farmer”, “the farmer’s child and mother”, and “farming types”, or “the elegant woman” and “the woman in intellectual and practical occupation”. The plan was to have 45 subgroups portfolios, each one with 12 photographs, making the total number of images of 540.

August Sander wanted to make a cut in time passing, preserve it in pictures, and deliberately build a photographic heritage that would be, in the future, also a mark of a social heritage, expressed in the clothes used once, and personal objects that connoted a determined kind of person, all elements visible in the photographs. With hundreds of images, the notorious goal of August Sander goes well with the anthropologist Agustín Santana definition of cultural heritage as a “symbolic synthesis of identity values and the link between society and its environment”17_{. So, it would be a photographic heritage with}

a double value: aesthetic, at the time, between the two world wars, and ethnographic, with the passage of time and as the objects and references showed in the photographs fall into disuse. Sander’s images, even if not deliberately, exhibit a strong component of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defined as habitus, a “system of schemes of production of practices and a system of perception and appreciation of practices. And, in both of these dimensions, its operations express the social position in which it was elaborated”18_.

That is translated, for example, in the clothing that is typically associated with a particular social group, such as cooks, gypsies, or bourgeois children, for example. Today, in the 21st _{Century, the pictures bring}

back the memory, for example, of how glasses were decades ago, or how perfect the men’s coiffure had to be. And more: August Sander attempted to separate the portions of the German society from the end of 19th _{Century to the decade of 50, in the 20}th _{Century, to offer, in the hypothetical end of his lifetime work,}

those views to an audience “of the future”, what Raymond Williams, cultural studies pioneer, defined as structure of feeling: the experience of quality of life in a certain space and time, a set of values shared by a generation. In other words, a “culture of a period”19_{. Although incomplete – could it ever be possible to}

be finalized? -, the photographic odyssey of August Sander works as a materialization of German identity of the middle of last century, and a conscious attempt for transmission and cultural prepatrimonialization, so that decades later, the so called “man of the future” would have the remembrance of ancient habits and uses. And I say uses because the construction worker appears on a Sander’s photograph with a set of bricks in his back, the maestro has the baton, the nun wears the proper clothing and seems to hold the bible, the bourgeois children have the little dress, tight shirt, shoe laces tied, and bows around the neck and holding the hair.

The photographs work as a scission in a culture that molds itself slowly into a temporal continuum, when observed many years later. The historian François Hartog, referring himself to the concept of heritage, said that it “becomes visible, expresses a certain order of time, where fits the size of the past. But it’s a past in which the present cannot, or doesn’t want to, move away completely”20_{. Hartog added}

17. Santana, Agustín, “Os olhos também comem: imagens do património para o turismo” in Peralta, Elsa and Anico, Marta, Patrimónios e Identidades – Ficções Contemporâneas, Oeiras, 2006, Celta, p. 173.

18. Bourdieu, Pièrre, Social Space and Symbolic Power - Sociological Theory vo.l 7, 1989, p. 19. 19. Williams, Raymond, The Long Revolution, Toronto, Broadview Encore Editions, 2001, p. 64. 20. Hartog, François, Régimes d’historicité, Paris, 2003, Éditions du Seuil, p. 166.

“the heritage was never born of continuity, but rather from cuts of the order of time, with all the games of absence and presence, of the visible and the invisible” 21_{. It is the feeling one gets nowadays when}

looking at today’s photographs exhibited in the museums. And, at this point, we may add an interesting vision that Stuart Hall, cultural studies figure, has of identity and representation. He says that “perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a production, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation”22_.

The identity nature of Germany in August Sander’s photographs was precisely what led the Nazi regime to destroy the printing plates of Face of Our Time in 1936. The art historian Susanne Lange says “August Sander’s sober view of reality, which in 1929, through the publication of Face of Our Time, was enthusiastically received both at home and abroad, was to come into conflict just a few years later with an image of man now propagated by dictum that was totally subordinated to the idealizing and transfiguration view of the National Socialist ideology”23_{. The complete set of photographs did not show}

the Aryan stereotype, anthropomorphically and culturally perfect, that Hitler cheered in the book My Struggle. Face of Our Time has a slovenly “Jobless, 1928”, a portrait of two bohemians, and a collective portrait of stiff “Workers‘ Council from the Ruhr Region, 1929”, not to mention a “Communist Leader, 1929 [Paul Froelich]” and “Revolutionaries, 1929 [Alois Lindner, Erich Muehsam, Guido Kopp]”. In the text of the first edition book, there’s also a fear of being misunderstood by political parties, and a criticism of the eugenics theories that would be adopted by the National Socialists. After mentioning that Face of Our Time only represents a small selection of two decades of Sander’s work, it announces the intention of publishing, in the future, a more complete body of work, with 540 photographs. In the same text it is written: “the author has not approached (in 1929) this immense self-imposed task – the like of which has never been attempted before in this scale -, from an academic standpoint, nor with scientific aids, and has received advice neither from racial theorists nor from social researchers”24_{. The}

text ends by saying that August Sander “has brought the task to completion with the fanaticism of a seeker after truth and without prejudice either for or against any one party, tendency, class, or society”25_.

In fact, when the Nazi climbed to power in 1933, the portfolio of August Sander also had, for example, pictures of vagrants made in 1929 and 1930, “Vagabonds, 1929/1930”, lots of portraits of male and female beggars and jobless dated between 1926 and 1930, a “Unemployed sailor, 1929”, a considerable number of gypsies’ photographs made in 1930 and 1931, a crippled “Disabled Miner 1927/1928”, some mentally ill people in asylums photographed between 1926 and 1930, a “Blind Miner and Blind Soldier, c. 1930”, midgets portraits made in the first 15 years of the century, “Criminal Type, 1926-1030”, and “Invalide de Guerre, c.1928”26_{. Walter Benjamin had a cold outlook on this when he wrote that Sander}

“takes the viewer through all levels and professions, up on one hand to the highest representatives of

21. Hartog, François, Régimes d’historicité, p. 204.

22. Hall, Stuart, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, in Rutherford, Jonathan, Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, London, 1990, Lawrence & Wishart, p. 222.

23. Heiting, Manfred, August Sander, Cologne, 1999, Taschen, p. 111. 24. Sander, August, Face of Our Time, Munich, 2003, Schirmer/Mosel, p. 1. 25. Sander, August, Face of Our Time, p. 1.

civilization and down on the other to idiots”27_{. Susan Sontag says “Sander aimed to shed light on the}

social order by atomizing it, into an indefinite number of social types. It doesn’t seem surprising that in 1934, five years after its publication, the Nazis impounded the unsold copies of Sander’s book Antilitz der Zeit (Face of our Time) and destroyed the printing blocks, thus bringing his national-portrait project to an abrupt end”28_{. But looking at Mein Kampf, we can go deeper in the explanations. The Nazi wanted}

to remake the German identity, alleging racial and cultural supremacy, to the point of liquidating ethnic minorities, and even crippled Germans. To eliminate what they considered as inferior people or, at best, normalize German society, the portraits of August Sander would have to disappear from collective memory. They were photographic portraits that proved the existence of an identity that Hitler wanted to disappear. Enzo Traverso, historian who studies the Holocaust for decades, explained that “the violence of Nazism it’s the violence of a war for the conquest of vital space”29_{, a conflict to kill people deemed}

inferior, in a spirit that Hitler considered a civilizing mission, a way to end lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy to be lived”. In The Origins of Nazi Violence, Traverso considers that Nazism came after 19th

Century’s colonial theories of Social Darwinism, racial supremacy, and eugenics. Writing about the intention to colonize Russia, Enzo Traverso says that Hitler’s Germany wanted to establish a “living space” (lebensraum) in the east30_{. If the Nazi’s had such pretentions to neighboring areas, wouldn’t they}

want the same in their own living space? Traverso confirms it explaining that if war was an instrument of racial selection abroad, inside the Germany the “racial hygiene” started before the Second World War, under the Weimar Republic, saying that by 1936 the regime had already enforced several tens of thousands of sterilizations of the mentally ill, criminals, and “moral retarded” individuals31_{, people like}

some of the ones portrait by August Sander. In fact, eugenics was studied at the time even in the United States, but wasn’t openly contaminated by a racist ideology, such as the Nazi, Enzo Traverso says. If today, with digital photography, we erase a photograph that we consider bad, it won’t be difficult to realize that the Nazis wished to destroy the images of social groups who also hardly embodied the ideal of Aryan identity.

Memory of Nazi Germany

The images of August Sander and Ernst Friedrich survived the memory cleansing done by the Nazis. Despite the destruction of Sander’s book, the author managed to keep the negatives and photographic prints on paper, and continued to work on his project People of the 20th _{Century. In the case of Ernst}

Friedrich, photographs also survived, and the book War Against War! continues to be reissued with some regularity.Hitler failed to force a new German identity, and nowadays photographic prints are evidence of how society was during the Weimar Republic and what the atrocities of war were like. In Berlin, the Anti-War Museum reopened to the public and displays the archive of Ernst Friedrich. In Cologne, Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur has the world’s largest collection of Sander’s work, 27. Benjamin, Walter, “A Short History of Photography”, in Trachtenberg, Alan, Classic Essays on Photography, New Haven, 1980, Leete’s Island Books, pp. 210-211.

28. Sontag, Susan, On Photography, London, 1977, Penguin Books, p. 60. 29. Traverso, Enzo, Memoria y conflicto – Les violencias del siglo XX, p. 7.

30. Traverso, Enzo, The Origins of Nazi Violence, New York, 2003, The New Press, pp. 68-70. 31. Traverso, Enzo, The Origins of Nazi Violence, pp. 126-127.

which is regularly exhibited and published in books.

Unlike Nazi Germany, today’s country doesn’t seem to want to forget the Hitlerian past, but, at the same time, appears to live a troubled relationship with the preservation of that memory. It’s, at least, the opinion of some anthropologists and historians. Sharon MacDonald believes that the German people

live the dilemma of refusing that a part of their historical culture, Nazism, be seen as Identity and also has Heritage, while, at the same time, not intending to ostracize that historical moment. She notices the example of the buildings constructed in Nuremberg, when the city was designed to be a kind of headquarters of the Third Reich. MacDonald reveals that, recently, the government was unsure whether to keep the huge buildings, and thus offer them a status display, or to abandon them, and thus granting the symbolism of imperial ruin, something that could be seen as past glorification. None of the purposes was intended32_{. Enzo Traverso also said, in 1992, that the three generations born after the Second World}

War were confronted with contradictions of the dual inability to remember the horrors of war and to forget them at the same time. “Auschwitz is no longer a non-event. It simply didn’t become a site of memory (lieu de mémoire, using Pierre Nora’s concept, or realm of memory). This eventually led to a representation that absolves the past and creates new forms of collective amnesia”, says Traverso33_{. But}

the historian does not understand that lack of full memory as an act of redemption. He explains that the today’s Germany fulfilled the expected plan of preserving the identity of the people selectively retaining historical or mythical elements that nurture the tradition, while abandoning or losing the rest of history. Enzo Traverso explains that this was evident with the reunification of Germany in 1990. He ends up holding that “the Germans of today, men and women mostly born after the war, are linked to the German past not by identifying themselves with previous generations but by shared heritage, which imposes a duty to preserve the memory. There isn’t a collective guilt inherited from the past that weighs above the Germans, but rather the grace of a late birth”34_{. Enzo Traverso noticed that even in academic sectors}

there is a difficulty in dealing with the memory of Nazism. He says there are a squabble of historians, among them the ones who depict the Holocaust and those who relativize “as a task needed to restart giving the Germans a positive national identity, emitted from the spectrum of a past that no longer wants to go” 35_.

Epilogue, or how photography preserves memory and heritage

Currently, photographs are a regular feature in museums, sites of excellence to display heritage of a people. In many cases, they serve to show the use that was given to a particular object and, in other cases, replace the reference to the object itself, which may have been destroyed by the passage of time. The images of other periods also serve to turn present, not the intangible cultural heritage, but references to it. Being impossible to fix the ephemeral, it is difficult but feasible to use photography and video for that, 32. Macdonald, Sharon, Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond, Abingdon, 2009, Routledge.

33. Traverso, Enzo, Les juifs et l’Allemagne: de la “symbiose judéo-allemande“ à la mémoire d’Auschwitz, Paris, La Découverte, 1992, p. 196.

34. Traverso, Enzo, Les juifs et l’Allemagne, p. 204. 35. Traverso, Enzo, Les juifs et l’Allemagne, p. 186.

despite the supposed contradiction of presentation.

Every modern country has municipal museums with photos in which you can see the industrial or farming past of the region. Sometimes, near the photographs there’s the original objects showed in the images, or a replica. The photograph almost works as a caption of an old, probably extinct, act. Observing it invites us to a virtual tour, a touristic walk through past identity, as anthropologists would refer. The photographs, the objects, and the entire scenario, invite us to travel in a time and a site of memory, a “testimony of the life signed up in national history“, as Natalie Heinich says, quoting Pierre Nora36_{. The anthropologist Faye Ginsburg explains, alluding to the possibility of groups of indigenous}

people exhibit old identity through pictures, that “capabilities of visual media to transcend boundaries of time, space, and even language can be used effectively to mediate historically produced social ruptures that link past and present”37_.

But photographs do not arise only in ethnographic museums as a vestige of the past. Often, the images are, by themselves, for personal use and value, the real and only heritage. The biggest example of this is Family of Man, a photographic exhibition that was included in the Memory of the World Register, UNESCO, in 2003, the same year that was created the international convention for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. The exhibition had opened for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in New York, in 1955, at the peak of the humanist era that followed the Second World War. With 503 photographs, taken by 273 professional and amateur photographers from 68 countries, Family of Man intended to show the elements that are common to all men. It represented the birth, growth, aging, nutrition, work, leisure, and the war, in various parts of the globe, showing the oneness of the human race. After New York, the exhibition traveled to 47 countries. Today, it is permanently in Château de Clervaux, Luxembourg. UNESCO says “although the Family of Man has become a legend in the history of photography, it went far beyond the traditional view of what an exhibition should be. It may be regarded as the memory of an entire era, that of the Cold War and McCarthyism, in which the hopes and aspirations of millions of men and women throughout the world were focused on peace”38_.

References

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Bourdieu, Pierre, Social Space and Symbolic Power - Sociological Theory vol 7, Nº1, 1989, http://www. soc.ucsb.edu/ct/pages/JWM/Syllabi/Bourdieu/SocSpaceSPowr.pdf, accessed in February 5th

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Friedrich, Ernst, Krieg dem Kriege, Nördlingen, 1982, Zweitausendeins

Ginsburg, Faye, “Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media, Ethnographic Film, and The Production of 36. Heinich, Nathalie, La fabrique du patrimoine, p. 19.

37. Ginsburg, Faye, “Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media, Ethnographic Film, and The Production of Identity” in Devereaux, Leslie and Hillman, Roger, Fields of Vision – Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995, University of California Press, p. 260.

38.

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/flagship-project-activities/memory-of-the-world/register/full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-3/family-of-man/, accessed in April 22th

Identity” in Devereaux, Leslie and Hillman, Roger, Fields of Vision – Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995, University of California Press

Hall, Stuart, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, in Rutherford, Jonathan, Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, London, 1990, Lawrence & Wishart

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Heiting, Manfred, August Sander, Cologne, 1999, Taschen Hitler, Adolf, My Struggle, London, 1938, Hurst & Blackett

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph”, in Trachtenberg, Alan, Classic Essays on Photography, New Haven, 1980, Leete’s Island Books

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Sander, August, People of the 20th _{Century, Paris, 2002, Éditions de La Martinière}

Santana, Agustín, “Os olhos também comem: imagens do património para o turismo” in Peralta, Elsa and Anico, Marta, Patrimónios e Identidades – Ficções Contemporâneas, Oeiras, 2006, Celta Sontag, Susan, On Photography, London, 1977, Penguin Books

Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others, London, 2003, Penguin Books

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Traverso, Enzo, The Origins of Nazi Violence, New York, 2003, The New Press

Williams, Raymond, “Culture is ordinary” in Ben Highmore The Everyday Life Reader, London, 2001, Routledge

Williams, Raymond, The Long Revolution, Toronto, Broadview Encore Editions, 2001

Wright, Susan, “The Politicization of ‘culture’”, in Anthropology Today, Vol. 14, Nº1, February 1998, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

Online references http://www.anti-kriegs-museum.de http://www.blossfeldt.info/wEnglish/August_Sander/AS_bio.php http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/flagship-project-activities/memory- of-the-world/register/full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-3/family-of-man/

Marcos Fernandes is a Portuguese journalist, freelance photographer, and image researcher. He is the deputy editor in Media Capital Radios newsroom, a Portuguese media company that owns several radio stations. He also writes regularly about photography and books in the Portuguese press. The author has a degree in Media, a post-graduation in Photographic Studies, and a master’s degree in Visual Anthropology