Photography as Political Practice in National Socialism

无论是对同时代的人还是后世的人来说，照片都至关重要地定义了国家社会主义（NS）。然而，在一些正式宣传的例子之外，学者们很少关注照片——照片带来的道德后果，今天仍在影响着我们对纳粹主义及其受害者的记忆方式。在这一时期，业余爱好者和业余摄影师拍摄了数百万张照片；据估计，1939年有10%的德国人拥有相机，更多的人参与了这一活动。这些照片既记录了人们与独裁政权的接触，也记录了他们与独裁政权保持距离和分离的努力。它们是意识形态与主体性、政治与生活经验之间相互作用的证据：从物质上讲，因为许多相册混合了个人照片和意识形态的人工制品，例如剪报；从隐喻上讲，因为许多人通过照片将自己定位为纳粹统治下的公共生活、政治活动和集会、有组织的休闲活动、儿童撤离、志愿者和强制劳动服务或战争中的参与者。一些照片还提供了对另类私人世界的见解，个人试图将其构建为避难所或与政治分离的地方。就犹太裔德国人而言，照片展现了不同的情感倾向、收缩的社会空间、移民和逃亡的叙事，或迫害的经历，以挑战官方摄影记录的方式。这个项目带来了一系列方法论的见解——从摄影史、政治肖像学、视觉人类学，从对自我文件和意识形态日常生活的研究——不仅要理解这些照片所展示的内容，还要理解摄影实践本身如何塑造政治行为：拍照促使并使人们能够在政治上定位自己，对他人行使权力，或反对政权的意识形态霸权。我们的团队结合了分析纳粹摄影的学术专业知识，特别是关于政权将“私人幸福”作为政治奖励的营销，以及对被占领领土及其人口的描绘和重塑，我们在与博物馆和教育部门的从业者共同开发挑战驱动的研究问题方面的记录，专门研究纳粹和大屠杀。我们已经在两个试点项目和出版物中改进和测试了我们的方法，并且相信这里提出的对我们的源库的系统分析将产生重要的结果。我们将在两本专著中展示我们的发现，分别致力于纳粹人民团体中德国人和被排除在外的犹太人的个人照片，在关于中间群体的学术文章中，如所谓的“德意志民族”，以及在致力于本研究创造的教学机会的出版物中。这个项目对于当今纳粹主义历史照片的学术和公众使用都具有重要的伦理意义。我们将与我们的项目伙伴、国家大屠杀博物馆以及博物馆和学校的其他专业人员合作，开发新的教学方法，利用反映受害者和肇事者目光的私人照片。我们将使参观者和学习者能够观看照片——最初的设计是为了使他们的主题失去人性——以达到相反的效果。为了实现这些目标，我们作为一个跨学科的团队开展工作：Umbach和Harvey是研究生活在纳粹政权下的不同群体的主体性和意识形态之间关系的专家；米尔斯，学校大屠杀教育专家；Benford是支持博物馆使用数字技术吸引游客参与棘手道德问题的专家；Necker，他参与了NS和犹太历史的创新展览设计；格里菲斯是大屠杀博物馆的项目顾问和学习主任。

Photographs crucially defined National Socialism (NS), for contemporaries as well as later generations. Yet outside some instances of formal propaganda, scholars have paid little attention to photos -- with ethical consequences that continue to affect the ways we remember Nazism and its victims today.Millions of photos were taken in this period by hobbyist and casual photographers; an estimated 10% of Germans owned a camera in 1939, many more participated in the practice. These photos are records both of people's engagement with the dictatorship, and of their efforts to distance and separate themselves from it. They are evidence of the interaction between ideology and subjectivity, of politics and lived experience: materially, because many albums mixed personal photos and ideological artefacts, e.g. newspaper cuttings, and metaphorically, because many people positioned themselves in and through photos, as participants in public life under Nazism, at political events and rallies, in organised leisure programmes, child evacuations, volunteer and compulsory labour services, or in the war. Some photos also offer insights into alternate private worlds that individuals sought to construct as a refuge or a place of separation from politics. In the case of Jewish Germans, photos show different emotional dispositions, contracting social spaces, narratives of emigration and escape, or experiences of persecution, in ways that challenge the official photographic record.This project brings a range of methodological insights -- from photographic history, political iconography, visual anthropology, from the study of ego-documents and the everyday lives of ideologies -- to bear on understanding not just what these photos show, but also, how the practice of photography itself shaped political behaviours: taking photos prompted and enabled people to position themselves politically, to assert power over others, or to oppose the ideological hegemony of the regime. Our team combines academic expertise in analysing photography under NS, especially in regard to the regime's marketing of 'private happiness' as a political reward, and for depicting and re-shaping occupied territories and their populations, with our track record in co-developing challenge-driven research questions with practitioners in the museum and education sectors specialising on NS and the Holocaust.We have refined and tested our approach in two pilot projects and publications, and are confident that the systematic analysis of our source base proposed here will yield significant results. We will present the findings in two monographs, devoted respectively to the personal photos of Germans included in the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, and the Jewish population excluded from it, in academic articles on in-between groups, such as the so-called 'ethnic Germans', and in publications devoted to the pedagogic opportunities created by this research. This project has important ethical implications for both the academic and public use of photos of the history of Nazism today. We shall work with our project partners, the National Holocaust Museum, and other professionals in museums and schools, to develop new pedagogies that draw on private photos reflecting the gaze of victims and that of the perpetrators. We will enable visitors and learners to view photographs -- originally designed to de-humanise their subjects -- to do the opposite.To achieve these aims, we work as an interdisciplinary team: Umbach and Harvey, experts on the relationship between subjectivity and ideology among the different groups living under the NS regime; Mills, specialist in Holocaust education in schools; Benford, specialist in supporting museums to use digital technologies to engage visitors with difficult ethical issues; Necker, who has been involved in innovative exhibition designs for NS and Jewish histories; and Griffiths, project consultant, director of learning at the Holocaust Museum.