LAUSR

Chapters Three and Four examine photographic practices by major theoreticians of race in Nazi Germany, Hans F. K. Günther and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß, in which single photographs based on the notion of type were replaced by series. Chapter Three centres on Günther, the most influential writer on race in the Nazi period, who made particularly sophisticated use of serialisation. In addition to seeking to visualise racial difference for clear political ends, Günther also subscribed to the idea of relative forms of seeing, proposing an inherent Aryan type of vision. Günther employed the language of suspicion, arguing that German populations were now largely racially mixed and using photographs to instruct readers in the identification of ‘racial components’ (124). The dialectic between the seen and unseen is also central to Clauß’s use of photography in racial science, the subject of Chapter Four. Clauß’s argumentation follows the logic of particulars about sequences of photographs to communicate defining characteristics of racial types. He discusses Jews in the category of ‘redemption man’ and relying on Gestalt psychology, or phenomenology, analyses elements such as the gaze and the soul in contrasting him to the Nordic ‘performance man’. A member of the Nazi party, Clauß employed language that supported much of the party’s propaganda in normalising and justifying political and human atrocity against the Jews.