Photo Lessons: Teaching Physiognomy during the Weimar Republic
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Texte intégral
1Photography flourished during the Weimar Republic as a prolific form of visual communication. Artists were remarkably aware of their era as a moment of transition in which an imagined future of a new photographic language was yet to occur.17 In a photographically illustrated essay published in 1928, the graphic designer Johannes Molzahn envisioned a future in which reading would be an obsolete skill. ‘ “Stop reading! Look!” will be the motto in education, ’ Molzahn wrote, ‘ “Stop Reading! Look!” will be the guiding principle of daily newspapers’.18 In an essay published in 1927 on the growing prevalence of photography in advertising, the Hungarian-born Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy predicted, ‘those ignorant of photography, rather than writing, will be the illiterate of the future’.19 Molzahn, Moholy-Nagy and others anticipated photography’s eventual achievement of a universally accessible and highly efficient form of communication. Germany’s immediate future did not fulfil such emancipatory predictions. By the end of the Weimar Republic, it was clear that one of photography’s most significant achievements was repackaging physiognomy, the ancient practice of identifying and classifying people according to racial and ethnic type, as a modern visual language.20
2 Repeated and paraphrased by critics, typographers, art historians, and photographers, Moholy-Nagy’s statement became a catchphrase of the era and justified the publication of countless photographic books. Walter Benjamin saw a connection between Moholy-Nagy’s prediction and August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time), which he described as a training manual for the increasingly vital skill of reading facial types. Antlitz der Zeit featured sixty of Sander’s portraits of German citizens taken between 1910 and 1929. The project has come to exemplify the systematic and comparative nature of physiognomic looking that photography facilitates. ‘Whether one is of the Left or the Right, ’ Benjamin writes, ‘one will have to get used to being looked at in terms of one’s provenance’.21 The statement is part of an essay on the history of photography. Yet a preoccupation with the future — what the outcome of this culture dominated by photographic media will be — haunts this essay by one of the era’s most important critics of photography. The urgency of Benjamin’s statement lies in its anticipation of a visual practice that would dominate the Third Reich — recognizing specific racial, ethnic, and political identities through different visual features. But it is also remarkable for its connection between the photographic innovations that Benjamin had watched emerge during the Weimar Republic and this foreboding future. The connection seemed inevitable to him by 1931, so much so that this form of looking was not something to resist, but something to get used to.
3Declarations of photography as a new universal language and its revival of physiognomic looking went hand in hand with the racialized and metaphysical pursuits of National Socialist photography. This continuity points to uncomfortable connections between Weimar modernism and the fascist ideology of totalitarian regimes. As Eric Kurlander points out in his forward to this volume, scholars acknowledge that National-Socialist-era culture developed from — rather than broke with — Weimar aesthetic traditions. The racial strategies of photographers during the Third Reich took advantage of efforts to instil a photographic literacy in a mass public during the Weimar Republic. In the first chapter of this volume, Rolf Sachsse argues for the ‘media modernity’ of the Third Reich — how some of the totalitarian regime’s most celebrated photographers developed from the strategies of ‘New Vision’ photography during the 1920s and early 1930s. This introduction establishes efforts to train modern viewers in photographic literacy during the Weimar Republic as an important parallel trend. The photographers discussed in the chapters that follow build on such skills already put in place by the photo-media culture of the Weimar Republic.
4Illustrated magazines and newspaper editors were aware that the growing dominance of the visual required their readers to possess new sets of perceptual skills. An article from 1927, published in the women’s magazine Praktische Berlinerin (see Fig. 0.1), presents physiognomy as a way to enhance the enjoyment of summer vacations:
For the married woman who is wrapped up in her occupation as housewife and mother, vacation is the only opportunity to meet new people… Luckily, the nature of man was created so that his character can for the most part be determined from facial features. Writing, hands, gait, posture, shape of the head, and face create a unity that good judges of character quickly utilize for their purposes.22
5Although its origins lie in the ancient world, the article describes physiognomy as a modern visual skill that can be developed through experience.
6Physiognomic skills also prevent potentially duplicitous social interactions: ‘Lifelong friendships are often started on the beach, and of course disappointment often follows soon after a hasty, pleasant attraction, when one’s affections have been given away too quickly. Knowledge of humankind is necessary for all women’.23 The photographs accompanying the essay break up the human face into the most concentrated areas of physiognomic meaning: eyes, forehead, lips, chin, and nose. The layout of the article emphasizes the separation of the face into parts, yet it also allows the viewer to imagine their reorganization into a unified whole. Columns of text separate eyes from lips, foreheads from chins, while the photographs of noses appear in the middle of the page. The article’s photographs provide views of the face through which the overall character and identity of a person can be deduced. Two photographs of each part of the face appear, allowing us to compare, for example, a ‘softly outlined, good-natured nose’ to a ‘sharply outlined, egotistical nose.’ The physiognomic lesson of this essay depends on the cropping, close-ups, and montage-like arrangement of photographic images. Physiognomic reading is considered a skill necessary to interact with strangers in modern life. It requires modern viewers to organize information and establish a coherent worldview from an overwhelming visual field. As presented in this article, physiognomy involved determining the whole from the part, deducing characteristics of a person from a particularly telling detail. The determination of character from facial features cropped and isolated in photographs exemplifies the kind of visual training that Molzahn and Moholy-Nagy promoted.
7While illustrated newspapers like Praktische Berlinerin trained a mass audience in physiognomic looking, photographic archives of racial types were emerging as important tools in areas of specialized study. Dr Egon von Eickstadt’s Archiv für Rassenbilder (Archive of Racial Images) assembled ‘scientifically and technically flawless images from life’ into an archive of ‘all races and racial groups of the Earth’.24 Offered for sale to the public as a book in 1926, the archive consisted of small cards that could be used ‘for instruction and lectures’ and fulfilled ‘the needs of anthropologists and representatives of neighbouring fields (anatomy, ethnology, geography, and others)’.25 In order to convey scientific standardization and objectivity, each card showed a profile, frontal, and oblique photography of a member of a particular race. Eickstadt’s archive emphasizes the comprehensive nature of the physiognomic project that is so easily facilitated by the reproducibility of the photographic medium. Multiple photographs are compiled into one composite picture of a race or ethnicity.
8Such an approach anticipates photographic books like Erna Lendvai-Dircksen’s, Das deutsche Volksgesicht (The Face of the German Race), discussed by Andrés Zervigón in the third chapter of this collection. Erich Retlzaff’s Das Gesicht des Geistes (The Face of the Spirit) compiles photographs of elite German individuals into a comprehensive portrait of German national and cultural achievement, as demonstrated by Christopher Webster in chapter two.
9Chiromancy, the physiognomic study of the hands, was an occult yet prevalent part of Weimar culture’s obsession with the signifying potential of the body. Photographic books of hands helped to revive this mythical form of knowledge. Das Buch der hunderte Hände (The Book of a Hundred Hands) is compiled by an enigmatic ‘Mme. Sylvia, ’ who appears in the frontispiece of the book with her face covered by a black mask.26
10The photograph sets up a tension between visibility and invisibility and announces the mysterious nature of the knowledge contained on the following pages. Like many physiognomic projects subsequently produced during the Third Reich, Das Buch der hunderte Hände and its author, Mme. Sylvia, mixes the rational and the occult. Das Buch der hunderte Hände focuses on the hands of identifiable figures such as Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein (see Fig. 0.4).
11In addition to photographs of distinguished hands, the book contains several images of handprints, which conflates the photographic index and the direct trace of human hands in ink on paper. While publication does not establish a German national identity, like books of photographic portraits published by National Socialists, it establishes physiognomic looking as a form of mystically defined knowledge, a way of connecting what is seen in a photograph with spiritually sanctioned truth.
12 Hände: eine Sammlung von Handabbildungen grosser Toter und Lebender (Hands: A Collection of Images of Hands of Great Dead and Living People) mixes photographs of the hands of key historical figures with the anonymous hands of professions and ethnicities. The book’s preface states that the photographs in the book are meant to connect the appearance of man to an overall ‘world view’:
Observations and the conclusions drawn from them are based on the general recognition that the form and whole external appearance of man offers a symbolism that concerns itself intensively with the dependence of the worldview on the pure observation of objects. […] The more the pure function of this perception is intensified, this symbolism is given specific contents and a connection between man and world, between past and future can be created.27
13Along with the preface, the book includes brief commentaries on the photographs collected. The first thirty-five plates in Hände feature the hands of legendary names in European history, including Napoleon, Goethe, Victor Hugo, and Gottfried Keller.28 The book then shows the hands of contemporary notables that exemplify a certain type. The text points to the distinctive features of the hands, the lengths of certain fingers, the width of wrists, the lines on the palm, which indicate certain traits of the individual. For example, the ‘slender hand and long, strong, jointed fingers with youthful and long nails’ of Max Liebermann in plate 49 is associated with the ‘strong, subjective naturalism’ of his painting29 (see Fig. 0.5).
14Intermixed with such famous hands are also anonymous examples of the hands of members of a professional occupation. Plate 46, for example, shows the ‘short, stable, widely separated fingers with wide ends’ of an engineer, whose ‘strongly developed lines of the hand are repetitively crossed and sometimes broken’.30 Plate 48 displays the ‘strong and long hand with a regular and oval form’ of a photographer.31 Hands often appear with props appropriate to the profession being represented. The hands of a mountaineer in plate 59 are holding a pick and lantern. The hands of a potter in plate 60 appear in the act of working on a potter’s wheel. Other hands represent ethnicities, such as the ‘Brazilian’ hands in plate 75 and the ‘Somali’ hands in plate 76. Others are meant to express emotions. The limp hand in plate 82 is labelled as a ‘tired hand.’ The interlocking hands with bent wrists in plate 85 demonstrate ‘tense hands.’ Despite these brief commentaries that guide the viewer to notice certain characteristic features in each hand, and to compare the long fingers of the painter to the short, blunt fingers of the engineer, a brief note at the beginning of these introductory commentaries states that these remarks ‘in no way attempt to create meaning or an analysis’ but instead mean to ‘encourage precise observation’.32 The accompanying text guides the viewer to notice certain aspects of the photographed hands. While physiognomic meaning purports to be purely visual, text is nonetheless required to teach viewers how to look.
15 Hands act simultaneously as a bodily fragment and their own autonomous system of expression. Beyond the traits and emotions of an individual, Weimar-era physiognomic studies searched for evidence of unifying connections among social, ethnic, and racial groups. Bodily movements and gestures could potentially express the unifying features of a culture or race. In his book Das Gesichtausdruck des Menschen (The Facial Expression of Man), the physician Hermann Krukenberg wrote that ‘above all else it is an issue of whether a legitimate inner connection exists overall or whether facial expression is determined only by habits and upbringing. In the latter case, the entire study of facial expression can demand only a relatively small amount of interest’.33 Krukenberg indicates a desire to locate a unifying and eternal trait of humankind, something eternally present rather than shaped by circumstantial context. He also attempts to move the study of communication away from linguistic theory and semiotics.34 Human identity, and the expression of that identity, he argued, was not entirely discursive or arbitrarily motivated. Instead, unifying, eternal features of humanity remain constant, but manifest themselves in various forms. ‘The human Gesichtausdruck is a combination of facial expression and enduring features. The latter primarily forms the characteristic traces of humankind and the peculiarities of race specifically.’35 Because the face displays the ‘enduring features, ’ its expressions make up a universal form of communication that is unspeakable and purely visual: ‘One language is still understood by all people but is not taught in any school nor found in any grammar book, is understood by a child as well as by a language teacher: the silent language of the face’.36 Krukenberg acknowledges the multidimensional and transformative nature of the human subject and argues for the importance of his theories to doctors, psychologists, and artists.
16 Physiognomic theories guided discussions of portrait photography in the Weimar Republic. Manuals for amateur portrait photographers often included chapters that offered introductory lessons in physiognomy.37 An essay by the psychologist Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss appeared in the 1931 issue of Das deutsche Lichtbild, an annual publication devoted to debates and discussions in avant-garde photography.38 The publication by a psychologist in Das deutsche Lichtbild suggests a close connection between physiognomic applications of photography and artistic approaches to the medium. Clauss argues that modern man’s distance from nature has made it difficult to capture his ‘natural expression’ in a photograph. In opposition to ‘atelier portraiture, ’ Clauss calls for a photographic practice that ‘wants to capture the human face in the deepest sense of its expression of life’.39 It is easier, he states, to capture the ‘expression’ of animals, because they ‘know nothing about cameras or photographs’.40 Clauss goes on to contrast the unposed behaviour of animals with ‘the “modern urbanite,” who knows too much about the camera’ and has a tendency to unnaturally pose and ‘play a role’ while being photographed. Clauss emphasizes the importance of capturing what the sitter does not control. By virtue of their unconscious nature, certain details can provide access to the interiority of the subject. The less consciously such details are produced, the more purely interiority is being expressed.
Whether he is successful at guiding the play of expression on the face of his subject depends on the strategy of the photographer — his approach to the camera and towards an unconscious expression. There are hardly any general rules. The ways are as varied as the people themselves that we want to capture in photographs. Each person and each type, for example each racial type, demands a different approach.41
17Clauss argues that it is the responsibility of the photographer, rather than the sitter, to conjure up the interior ‘expression of life’. Like Krukenberg, Clauss argues that multiple photographs of a single person, seen from multiple viewpoints and various conditions, can expose previously unseen aspects of a subject’s inner being. ‘In the most seldom cases — even the most “fruitful” ones — is a single view enough to understand the entire character of a person, ’ Clauss writes. ‘A turn to the side, a change of lighting, a change in expression from something serious to laughing and already the style disappears in which we had understood the face and a new style suddenly breaks through’.42
18These attempts to articulate the ‘true’ identity of the human soul are unsettling for their assumptions of fixed meaning and implied hierarchies of authenticity. Not all studies blatantly discuss the racial applications of physiognomy that would inform the ideology of the National Socialist Party. Many did, however, including the work of Clauss. He applied physiognomic theories to the ordering of racial hierarchies, and published Von der Seele und Antlitz der Rassen und Völker (On the Souls and Faces of Races and People) in 1929, which used photography to show and compare the physical appearance of members of a variety of cultures.43 Clauss employs photography to scientifically record, measure, and codify physical traits that are ‘typical’ of a particular race44 (see Fig. 0.6).
19The strategies of physiognomic reading through photography discussed here were exploited by National Socialist photographers, but do not belong exclusively to this era of history. Cropping, selection, and accumulation were rediscovered in the post-war moment by a new generation of German photographers as forms of visual communication. Moholy-Nagy signals the endurance of this potential in the 1936 essay, ‘From Pigment to Light, ’ where he ends the essay with the prediction he first made nine years before: ‘The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the use of camera and pen alike’.45 Photography was used effectively by left- and right-wing political parties during the Weimar Republic to explore physiognomy as a new visual language. But according to Moholy-Nagy, all this belongs to a ‘confused and groping age’.46 The realization of a purely visual form of communication remained, perhaps perpetually, in the future.
Notes de bas de page
17 See Pepper Stetler, Stop Reading! Look!: Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015).
18 Johannes Molzahn, ‘Nicht mehr lessen! Sehen!’ Das Kunstblatt 12: 3 (1928), p. 80.
19 László Moholy-Nagy, ‘Die Photographie in der Reklame, ’ Photographische Korrespondenz 63: 9 (1927), 259.
20 The bibliography on physiognomic theories during the Weimar Republic is extensive. In addition to Rittelmann’s work (see for example her essay ‘Facing Off: Photography, Physiognomy, and National Identity in the Modern German Photobook’ Radical History Review 106 (December 2010)), studies particularly relevant here are Rüdiger Campe and Manfred Schneider, eds, Geschichten der Physiognomik: Text, Bild, Wissen (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach Verlag, 1996); Sander Gilman and Claudia Schmölders, eds, Gesichter der Weimarer Republik: eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte (Köln: DuMont, 2000); Sabine Hake, ‘Faces of Weimar Germany, ’ in Dudley Andrew, ed., The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Reproduction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), pp. 117–47; Claudia Schmölders, Das Vorurteil im Leibe: eine Einführung in die Physiognomik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995); Wolfgang Brückle, ‘Politisierung des Angesichts: Zur Semantik des fotografischen Porträts in der Weimarer Republik, ’ Fotogeschichte 17: 65 (1997), 3–24; Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Helmut Lethen, ‘Neusachliche Physiognomik: gegen den Schrecken der ungewissen Zeichen, ’ Der Deutschunterricht 2 (1997), 6–19.
21 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography, ’ in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, eds, The World of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 287. Originally published in Die literarische Welt (September-October 1931).
22 ‘Physiognomik, ’ Praktische Berlinerin 16 (1927), 15.
23 Ibid.
24 Egon von Eickstedt, ed., Archiv für Rassenbilder: Bildaufsätze zur Rassenkunde (Munich: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1926). An advertisement for the archive in the back of Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Von Seele und Antlitz der Rassen und Völker: Eine Einführung in die vergleichende Ausdrucksforschung (Munich: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1929) states, ‘Das Archiv will in absehbarer Zeit von allen Rassen und Rassengruppen der Erde wissenschaftlich und technisch einwandfreie Bilder vom Lebenden bieten.’
25 From advertisement in the back of Clauss, Von Seele und Antlitz der Rassen und Völker (1929).
26 Mme. Sylvia, Das Buch der hunderte Hände: mit einer Geschichte der Chirosophie (Dresden: Verlag von Wolfgang Jess, 1931).
27 Hände: Eine Sammlung von Handabbildungen grosser Toter und Lebender (Hamburg: Gebrüder Enoch Verlag, 1929), p. 5.
28 Hände does not explain how photographs of the hands of such historical figures were obtained.
29 Hände: Eine Sammlung von Handabbildungen grosser Toter und Lebender (1929), p. 15.
30 Ibid., p. 14.
31 Plates 46, 48, 57 (Office Worker), 60 (Potter), 64 (Worker), and 66 (Draftswoman) are credited to Albert Renger-Patzsch. The hand of the photographer in plate 48, is possibly a self-portrait, although it is not identified as such.
32 Hände: Eine Sammlung von Handabbildungen grosser Toter und Lebender (1929), p. 3.
33 Hermann Krukenberg, Der Gesichtausdruck des Menschen (Stuttgart: Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, 1920), p. 8.
34 Frederic Schwartz discusses the revived interest in physiognomy in the 1920s and 1930s as an effort to move theories of communication beyond the arbitrary motivation of signs. See Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical theory and the history of art in twentieth-century Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 188–89.
35 Krukenberg, Der Gesichtausdruck des Menschen (1920), p. 3.
36 Ibid., pp. 1–2.
37 For example, see chapter 15, ‘Etwas Physiognomik, ’ in Franz Fiedler, Porträt-Photographie (Berlin: Photokino-Verlag, 1934).
38 Annual issues of Das deutsche Lichtbild began in 1927 and were published by Robert and Bruno Schultz.
39 Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, ‘Das Menschliche Antlitz, ’ in Das Deutsche Lichtbild (Berlin: Verlag Robert & Bruno Schultz, 1931), unpaginated.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Clauss, Von Seele und Antlitz der Rassen und Völker (1929).
44 On nineteenth-century physiognomic practices, see Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2001).
45 László Moholy-Nagy, ‘From Pigment to Light’ (1936) in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), p. 348.
46 Ibid.
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