NS racism as a visual ideology

A presentation by Miriam Yegane Arani: NS racism as a visual ideology

We finally translated this presentation into English, and you can find it in our journal: TIERAUTONOMIE, Jg. 7 (2020), Heft 2: https://simorgh.de/about/mya-race-as-visual-ideology/ or at the DNB: https://d-nb.info/1222998904/34

Background: This presentation by Miriam Yegane Arani of an introductory iconographic analysis of National Socialist racism, provides a good entry point to Yegane’s basic research on sociological and photo-historical methodology of analyzing visual materials, in particular photographic sources, from the Nazi era. It is striking that the images published under the Nazi regime followed a certain program that polarized between idealized body norms and deviations from them. The Ministry of Propaganda presumably controlled the photo-publication to ensure that only photographs that conformed to the racial ideology were published. It can be assumed that under the Nazi regime there was an increasingly rigid polarization between the guiding and enemy images within the government-controlled image program. During the pre-war period, the focus seems to have been on propagating the “Nordic” model, whose visual counterpart is expressed in the “racially” pejorative enemy images of the war years. Particularly noticeable is the practice of distinguishing between people according to their outward appearance in pairs of pictures typical of the period, which were intended to illustrate “racial” antagonisms.

Tags: NS racism, National Socialism, propaganda, sociology of images