Photofascism

Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy

Vanessa Rocco

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501347078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Fascism & Totalitarianism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Photography and fascism in interwar Europe developed into a highly toxic and combustible formula. Particularly in concert with aggressive display techniques, the European fascists were utterly convinced of their ability to use the medium of photography to manufacture consent among their publics. Unfortunately, as we know in hindsight, they succeeded. Other dictatorial regimes in the 1930s harnessed this powerful combination of photography and exhibitions for their own odious purposes. But this book, for the first time, focuses on the particularly consequential dialectic between Germany and Italy in the early-to-mid 1930s, and within each of those countries vis-à-vis display culture. The 1930s provides a potent case study for every generation, and it is as urgent as ever in our global political environment to deeply understand the central role of visual imagery in what transpired. Photofascism demonstrates precisely how dictatorial regimes use photographic mass media, methodically and in combination with display, to persuade the public with often times highly destructive-even catastrophic-results.

1

Last Stop before Photofascism

Activist Photo Spaces and the Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions, Berlin, 1931¹

If on previous occasions, the viewer marching past the picture-wall was lulled [. . .] into a certain passivity, now our design should make the man active. This should be the purpose of the [exhibition] room.

—El Lissitzky (undated typescript)

The BWU exhibition was an example of precisely the opposite of what is offered in the rest of this book: it exemplified the possibility of exhibitions that educated the populace about complex economic ecosystems—in a dynamic way—rather than manufacturing compliance about a reductive set of principles. Particularly through the use of haptic devices and viewer control systems, BWU represents more of an authentic bottom-up model than a veiled top-down, and therefore subverts the surveillance-like “exhibitionary complex” evident in the rest of the displays in this book.²

Indeed, this overlooked exhibition should become more of a touchstone of thwarted experimental techniques, on par with Lissitzky’s Pressa.³ BWU as a case study reveals the complex circumstances embedded in a transitional moment of exhibitionary practice, one that paralleled one of the most incendiary political transformations of the twentieth century. It was a transformation whereby the year 1931 turned out to be pivotal.

The Political at BWU

The journal Soziale Bauwirtshaft (Social Construction), published by the VsB (the Association of Social Construction Companies), provided an introduction to the Bauausstellung, the sprawling Building exhibition encompassing the BWU and various other displays, by giving some dry, basic facts. The text then provided an enormously detailed and surprisingly engaging guide to the one-room BWU display within. The fact that the BWU room was highlighted above others in the article was not surprising, given the mutual job of the journal and the show to espouse the position of the trade unions, a group assumed to be aligned with the political left. The VsB had many berths devoted to its enterprises at the BWU, and co-existed with those of several other building union organizations, including the Baugewerksbund (Building Workers Association), the Roofers Association, and Dewog (finance union enterprises). The societal urgency expressed in this publication for a strong free trade union movement was palpable. Indeed, the organized labor movement would become, especially in 1932 and early 1933, the final political bulwark against the vicious assaults of the National Socialists.

Eighteen months before Hitler assumed the German chancellorship, the organizers of the Bauausstellung were still convinced of the self-evidence of collective—rather than autocratic—prescriptions for the economic malaise racking Germany. Otto Rode included a manifesto-style list that equated the workers’ enterprise with that of “economic democracy.” Through the mounting of the larger exhibition, this was realized as a kind of spatial manifesto. His list advocated the myriad ways that trade unions held a special place in the economy:

1) The lost war in the consciences of the workers elevated responsibility for the state and economy [. . .]. 2) The workers desire [. . .] economic democracy through responsible participation in the production process and fair distribution of labor. 3) The working man should [be] in the future not only the object but also the subject of the economy. 4) The free trade unions have taken up this idea and organized.⁴

Thus workers were considered essential to the functioning of the economy and its future recovery. Up until that point, the article addressed the social importance of architectural developments in general. Rode’s spatial manifesto then switched specifically to the BWU exhibition and the central position of the workers and unions who make buildings “happen.” The purpose of the construction unions was emphasized as serving the community, building the character of the public sector union members, and raising the standard of living of workers. The text then described specific sections of the BWU display that keyed into installation shots. Rode summarized the purpose of the show at the end of his article as one of both showing accomplishments and searching for new forms of expression in the areas of a social economy. It concluded with a list of credits for Gropius, Bayer, and Moholy-Nagy.⁵ Taken together, the different parts of Rode’s article in Soziale Bauwirtschaft created an inextricable connection between the enterprises of artists and those of workers.

Prelude to BWU: The Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition

Bayer shared many of the enthusiasms of the New Vision. He laid the foundation for his radical photo exhibition designs at BWU the year before when he designed, among other sections, the photography display for Germany’s contribution to the Exposition de la Société Des Artistes Décorateurs in Paris in 1930. The German entry was organized by the Deutscher Werkbund, and officially called Section Allemande, but it was essentially a Bauhaus exhibition.⁶ Due to the fact that it was partly organized by four famous Bauhaus artists (Gropius, Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and Moholy, all of whom left the school in 1928), the Werkbund exhibition was the beginning of a developing implication that the Bauhaus’s best years were behind it and that these were the “geniuses” who should define what it had been, despite the school staying open until 1933. It can thus be read retroactively as a staging ground for the iconic Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, in 1938.

These facts have led the Werkbund exhibition to become canonical in the emerging scholarship on exhibition cultures. But when compared to the truly radical innovations and fusions of photo/text/physicality of BWU of the following year, the Werkbund show appears less ambitious. True, Bayer’s jutting wire suspension supports for the photographic blowups were masterful and highly innovative (see Figure 6.1, top). Yet niche after niche of the BWU demonstrated a desire to not just use these techniques to celebrate or promote a single organization, but to truly stimulate the mind through using the eye and the hand. The designers promoted deep thought about real issues and problems and through that process espoused a political position—that unions are beneficial institutions, that workers should join unions, that the public should support unions—by using radically non-conventional photographic practice.

Photo Display and Lissitzky at the BWU

BWU was installed in one large room, 900 square meters, and, as mentioned, part of a much larger, sprawling exhibition: the Deutsche Bauausstellung (the German Building Exhibition), held at the Ausstellungshallen am Funkturm in Berlin, from May to August in 1931 (Figure 1.1). The intended audience for the Deutsche Bauausstellung was a general one, and the purpose was interpreted at the time as one to “give over to the general public new ideas and new architectural thinking.”⁷ Organizers achieved this through a large variety of display rooms. In addition to the BWU, thematic rooms included subjects ranging from urban planning and housing to issues of rural settlements. The organizers, at least according to the reception from socialist-leaning quarters at the time, considered buildings as amalgams capable of summarizing many of the current economic problems facing Germany, as well as the most fruitful solutions to those problems:

Figure 1.1 Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions (1931), installation view. Photo: Walter Christeller, courtesy Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin. Bayer: © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Gropius: © 2020 ARS, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Moholy-Nagy: © 2020 Estate of László Moholy-Nagy / ARS, New York.

Five million unemployed. Loss of sales markets. Idleness in all industries. Collapse, hunger, poverty. The best heads are looking for a way out, a valve, which could ease the mental and physical pressure. We know that economic, social, cultural and political aspirations hang together to form a unit. [. . .] Which is better suited to identify society, the social, economic and technical context that the new liberating ideas can produce, as the general house, the building?⁸

In other words, as the social, cultural, and political aspirations “hang together,” they form a dynamic cluster. In the case of the Deutsche Bauausstellung, a locus of these forces that could help understand how they functioned productively together was “the building.” And in the case of this specific exhibition within, the BWU, the locus was those who build, that is, the men and women who contributed their efforts as roofers, painters, bricklayers, etc.

As with the documentation of many historical exhibitions, there is an acutely repetitive nature to the way this exhibition has been presented in previous scholarship. Until the publication of the Jorge Ribalta’s Public Photographic Spaces (2008)—when mentioned at all—the same aerial views of the Gropius-designed upper ramps were usually the only ones reproduced of this exhibition, sometimes with one or two additional close-ups.⁹ However, the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin has a deep well of documentation relating to this particular display, one which allows for one of the closest possible readings of Bauhausler engagement in fusing Russian Constructivism—which by 1921 advocated that Soviet artists would work on utilitarian projects—and the New Vision photography to create a dramatic and daring integration of photos, physicality, and information. A clearer linkage than has previously existed is needed between the most radical—and particularly the most radically haptic—of the Constructivist spatial designs of Lissitzky, Bayer and Moholy’s appropriation and transformation of those designs. There has been ample research on the often-frosty relations between Lissitzky and Moholy, particularly in the photographic sphere.¹⁰ Much has a lso been written on the touch-feel nature of Lissitzky’s innovations, some of which will be discussed below. However, pre­vious Bayer/Moholy analyses tend to emphasize visually stimulative innovations in their exhibition designs. BWU demonstrated just ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Designing, Displaying, and Facilitating Fascism
• 1 Last Stop before Photofascism: Activist Photo Spaces and the Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions, Berlin, 1931
• 2 “Acting on the Visitor’s Mind”: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, Rome, 1932
• 3 Nazis in Ascendance: Die Kamera, Berlin, 1933
• 4 “A Fundamental Irony”: International Art in the Age of Nationalism at the Venice International Film Festivals, 1932–6
• 5 Both/And: German and Italian Photography Exhibitions in 1936–7
• 6 Epilogue: From Hegemony to Terror: 1938–42 and Visual Culture in the Twenty-first Century
• Appendix: Listings of German, Italian, and American Films from Venice Film Festivals, 1932–8
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright