Corey Ross, Pamela Swett, Fabrice dAlmeida Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany (2011)

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.53Just as Purper enjoyed her travels, so she was excited at the idea of herphotos being seen in the farthest corners of fascist-dominated Europe: Just imagine, we have sold photos via the Reich government to Spain,Italy, Romania and Norway.Did I tell you that in a tiny hovel in thatgodforsaken village Rogow in the expanses of former Poland there wasa photo of mine hanging on the wall? Isn t that fun? You do understanddon t you? Or that they showed an advertising slide with one of my pic-tures in the cinema in Lodsch? Or the brochure The Family in the NewGermany written by my Frau Reimer, illustrated partly by L.P., thatthey ve sold 100 000 copies of abroad. 54 Doing some dissemination ofher own, she supplied Kurt with prints of typical German landscapes todistribute to his comrades in response to their request for pictures to dec-orate their bunker and told him how much she liked the idea of her pic-tures cheering up a bunker in the midst of a gloomy Russia in winter.55Purper s photography, like that of Schmachtenberger, Steinhoff andother women photographers in wartime, created advertising mate-rial for Nazi women s organizations and their counterparts elsewherein fascist Europe, together with picturesque images conveying theexpanding sphere of German rule.She helped create positive images ofHimmler s programme as Reich Commissioner for the Strengtheningof Germandom to resettle ethnic Germans from different parts of east-ern Europe in the annexed territories of Poland by focusing on the careand support provided by German women to the incoming settlers.56Her photos showed the incorporation of the women of occupied or friendly nations into the German sphere of domination and their col-lective mobilization for the Axis war effort.At the same time, she sug-gested with images of sunlit fields and peasant customs a more timelessand peaceful world enduring despite the war.Purper s photos are full of the visual clich�s characteristic of Nazipropaganda photography.A number of these are evident in her 1942photo-essay on Romania (Figure 9.5).Subjects were selected that weresuitable for the projection of an upbeat message, and portrayed in wayswhich drew on established conventions for beautiful landscapes and striking human portraits.The main picture on the left-hand page,captioned view of the southern Carpathians , combined attractivescenery with ripening corn; the image of the fortified church in HeltauSeeing the World 195Figure 9.5 Continued196 Elizabeth HarveyFigure 9.5 Pictures from RomaniaSource: Photos by Liselotte Purper.Frauenkultur: Zeitschrift des Deutschen Frauenwerkes,November 1942, pp.6 7.Seeing the World 197in Transylvania placed Romanian German women in the foregroundgathering foodstuffs for soldiers passing through, thus juxtaposingthe long history of the Romanian Germans with their up-to-the-minute engagement in the war effort; the image of the farmhouseinterior reinforced a notion of rich peasant heritage preserved amongthe Transylvanian Saxons, while the main top-right image showed aTransylvanian Saxon woman photographed by Purper in the village ofRode.Purper enthused in her diary about this woman s tanned face,her delicate purple veil and her Holbein expression and sought to cap-ture this (in her words) old master quality in her photograph.57 Thisrepresentation of traditional womanhood contrasted with the bottomtwo images on the right-hand page showing modern women in action :women with wounded soldiers in a military hospital in Bucharest, andRomanian women ambulance drivers working in Bucharest for theRed Cross.58 In another image from the same series, Purper has theRomanian ambulance drivers smiling broadly at each other, one witha cigarette in her hand (Figure 9.6).When an exhibition of her work was shown in the DeutschesHistorisches Museum in Berlin in 1997, Purper tried to defend herselffrom the charge that she was a propagandist for the regime by sayingthat she did not write the captions for her pictures and was thereforenot responsible for a message that was an ensemble of images and text.59In fact, she and Margot Monnier worked very closely to put picturesand texts together: a letter from Monnier to Kurt Orgel in October1944 described how the two women had Purper s pictures all over thefloor in Purper s quarters in Osterburg while Monnier composed thetexts.60 Moreover, Purper s diaries and letters underline how far herprivately expressed views were in tune with the message her photo-graphs were used to project.Purper supported Nazi conquests and theidea of a Greater German Reich.She wrote in 1940 of her joy to see herbirthplace Strasbourg back under German rule, and in 1943 how sherebuked inhabitants of Tirol who did not regard themselves as being from the Reich.61 She was enthusiastic about Himmler s resettlementprogramme.Having visited Volhynian German settlers in their newhomes in occupied Poland in October 1940, she echoed in her diaryentry the clich�s used in the Nazi press about settlers setting an exam-ple to other Germans: she commented on how grateful the VolhynianGermans were to be on German soil again and how their readiness tomake sacrifices puts us to shame.62Just as the enthusiasm that Purper expressed privately about Germanyand its conquests was in accord with the message that her images were198 Elizabeth HarveyFigure 9.6 Romanian women ambulance driversSource: Photo by Liselotte Purper (1942).Courtesy of Bildarchiv Preu�ischer Kulturbesitz.meant to promote, so her own tastes underpinned the drive to deliverwhat was required: she enjoyed finding and photographing the attrac-tive faces and athletic bodies that the illustrated press expected.ForPurper, as it seems to have been for Steinhoff and Schmachtenberger, itSeeing the World 199was axiomatic that images of attractive women were needed to sum upwhichever theme she happened to be documenting [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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