Photography and Cinema

Abstract

Abstract One of the Nazis’ main priorities after 1933 was to transform the ways that Germans saw the world and themselves. Although this project of reshaping popular perceptions and subjectivities employed written and spoken language, as well as music, it depended heavily upon images, particularly photographic and filmic images. The Nazi rise to power coincided with the breakthrough of photography and film as mass cultural and social practices in Germany. Between 1933 and 1945, millions of Germans took photographs and millions more consumed photographic images in illustrated magazines and went to the movies. What role did this unprecedented and pervasive visualization of popular culture play in constructing new views of the world that were consonant (or perhaps also in tension) with Nazi values? This chapter responds to this question by exploring the encounters with photographs and filmic images that an ordinary German could experience as he/she pursued the activities that constituted his/her everyday life. The aim of this chapter is to look at photography and film not only in terms of the images themselves but more importantly as mass social and cultural practices that became normal, ubiquitous constituents of everyday life in the Third Reich. Although the chapter tries to give readers a clear sense of all the different sites where Germans might have engaged with photography and film during the Third Reich, it concentrates on three of the most important mass practices—reading illustrated magazines, going to the movies, and taking private photographs.