Abstract

In 1939, photographer Ilse Steinhoff published a photograph album of her 1937 trip to the former German colonies of Southwest and East Africa. Through a close study of this photograph album, this article elucidates larger themes in the visual culture of post-colonial and National Socialist Germany. The photographs in Deutsche Heimat in Afrika visualize the colonialist imaginary—peaceful but separate racial relations; the German qualities imposed by the settlers on the landscape and in the cities; an expansion of German women’s roles that still maintained the traditional realm of family and culture; and the fertility of the African landscape and the next generation of colonial Germans. Steinhoff showed metropolitan Germans the importance of the colonial space through a visual aesthetic that resonated with that of Nazi Germany, thereby combining the fantasy of the past with the ideals of the present to further colonial revisionism in the Third Reich.

pdf

Share