Suchergebnisse

The sense of time : configuring history and memory in the city -- The sense of place : representing the local in the modern city -- Nature and culture : greening the city -- The designed object : commercial culture and the global market -- Liberal governmentality and the spatial politics of "Burgerlichkeit" -- Conclusion and epilogue : Bourgeois modernism and national socialism.

AbstractThis article explores the significance of photography and photo-album making as practices that many Germans used to record their lives during the Third Reich. Millions of photos not only offer insights into everyday life under National Socialism: mass photography itself had a transformative effect, turning seemingly mundane actions into performances for the camera and into conscious acts of self-representation. The article also considers the relationship between amateur snapshots, on the one hand, and propagandistic and commercial photographs, on the other. Identifying connections between the genres, it argues that these are best understood as two-way processes of borrowing and (re-)appropriation, in which private subjectivity and public ideology constantly commingled. Particularly important in linking the two were photos of emotional or affective states, such as relaxation, exploration, introspection, and even melancholy, which were often defined or underscored by the ways in which both civilians and soldiers positioned themselves in relation to particular landscapes. The photographic archival record is highly varied, but such variation notwithstanding, photos helped cement immersive "experience" as the basis for individual and collective identity; this was central to the ideology of the National Socialist regime, even if it never wholly controlled its meanings.

History conjures up an image of the past and transports it into our present. Photographs both facilitate and, at times, markedly determine this historical process, especially for the twentieth century. For better or worse, they have irrevocably shaped the way we imagine the characters and sites of modern history. From infamous dictators to mass political rallies, from radical protests to everyday leisure pursuits: photographs form powerful frames through which we historians represent the past to ourselves and to our audiences.

In the introduction to this special issue on photography and German history, we outline current research on using both professional and amateur or snapshot photography to elucidate problems in 20th-century German history. We argue that an approach is required that focuses on the transformative impact of the mass production and circulation of images in this period, and the way in which this altered people's consciousness of their own role vis-a-vis larger social and political process, and in changing the boundaries between public and private life. We also explore the role this practice played in enabling new forms of politics, including, but not confined to, so-called totalitarian regimes.