The Visualization of the Political in German Illustrated Magazines, 1905 - 1945

图像在政治问题交流过程中的重要性是毋庸置疑的。然而，人们对世纪上半叶媒体中视觉图像的使用知之甚少。这个项目的目的是从经验上考察几十年来视觉政治传播的连续性和变化，并描述其政治层面。在这个时代的报道中，出现了一种趋势，从文字的首要地位转向照片或图像的内在价值。这几十年标志着图像历史上一个全新的时代。摄影图像成为大规模生产和分发媒体的核心元素，特别是插图杂志和电影行业的光泽。然而，它所提出的问题尚未得到研究的回答，即20世纪上半叶的政治问题在报纸和杂志插图中表现的程度和形式。杂志在传达视觉政治内容方面的相关性不容低估，因为在那些年里，它们几乎没有竞争对手。计划中的项目旨在通过对1905 - 1945年的全面调查，研究当时视觉政治传播的起源和发展。研究的重点是从两个方面比较五个不同历史时期的政治插图：第一，德意志帝国晚期君主立宪制，魏玛共和国的民主和国家社会主义者的极权独裁的不同政治制度之间;第二，帝国的战争与和平时期和第一次世界大战与第二次世界大战之间的独裁。问题是，在每个时期，政治话题是如何被阐释的，以及这些话题在视觉传达中扮演了什么样的角色。基于视觉框架的概念，该研究将对1905年至1945年期间三种不同杂志的约25，000张照片的内容进行标准化分析。这一分析将考虑每年春季和秋季三期的所有照片。那些具有政治内容的图像--无论如何解释--将成为更深层次的编纂对象，不仅允许对这一时期图像的使用进行描述性陈述，而且允许根据这一历史时期图像中的信息确定视觉框架和分配数字。

The significance of images in the process of communicating political issues is undisputed. Yet little is known of the use of visual images in the media in the first half of the twentieth century. The objective of this project is to empirically examine decades of continuity and change in the visual political communication and to characterize their political dimensions.The beginnings of a trend away from the primacy of the words, towards the intrinsic value of a photo or image emerge in the reporting of this age. These decades mark a completely new era in the history of images. The photographic image became the core element of mass produced and distributed media, especially illustrated magazines and film industry glossies. Yet the question it begs has not yet been answered by research, namely, to what extent and in which form political issues in the first half of the 20th century were shown in newspaper and magazine illustrations. The relevance of magazines for conveying visual political content cannot be underestimated, because in those years they had almost no competition.The planned project aims to research the beginnings and development of visual political communication of the day in a comprehensive survey for the years 1905 - 1945. The focus of the research is a comparison of political illustrations from five different historical periods, under two aspects: First, among different political systems of the constitutional monarchy of the late German empire, the democracy of the Weimar Republic, and the totalitarian dictatorship of the National Socialists; and second, between times of war and peace in the empire and dictatorship between WWI and WWII. The question is how political topics were illustrated in each of these periods and what role these topics played in visual communication in general. Building on the concept of visual framing, the research will provide a standardized analysis of the content from approximately 25,000 photos from three different magazines between the years 1905 to 1945. This analysis will take into account all photos in three issues of both spring and autumn of each year. Those images with political content - however it may be construed - will then be the object of a deeper codification, permitting not only descriptive statemente about the use of pictures over the period ot time, but also the determination of visual frames and assignement of numbers according to messages in the pictures in this historical period.