Volume 85, Issue 3

This article introduces the themes and contributions of this special issue on Art and Environment in the Third Reich . The work of architect and reformer Paul Schultze-Naumburg is examined as a case study of the aestheticization of ‘race’ and landscape from the Wilhelmine Period to the National Socialism, particularly as it bore on German colonization and settlement projects in eastern Europe. Today’s resurgent far right and environmental crisis, it is argued, lend new urgency to critical interrogation of the relationship between environmental politics and the visual representation of nature under fascism. The articles collected in this issue illustrate a range of interdisciplinary approaches that move beyond iconography to address alternative media, materialities, and environmental history.

Between 1933 and 1935, as the Nazi regime was codifying its racialized understanding of the relationship between the German people and their land, the photographer August Sander published the cultural landscape series Deutsche Lande, deutsche Menschen (later Deutsches Land, deutsches Volk ). Focusing on the beginning and end of the series, this article charts Sander’s negotiation of the regime’s rhetoric and the fate of his Weimar-era methodology after 1933. It argues that while the photobooks were in dialogue with the changes underway in Germany from the very beginning, they moved closer to the visual culture and political imperatives of the regime as the series progressed. This article complicates simple narratives about Sander’s place in the visual culture of Third Reich Germany.

This article revisits sources on German maypoles and tree cults in the ancient, medieval, and modern periods. It opens important historiographic horizons on at least three fronts, from the church’s relationship to tree-oriented customs throughout the Middle Ages, to the National Socialist appropriation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century folkloric scholarship, and to the consequent postwar aversions to any trace of modern admiration for an alleged premodern veneration of trees. It shows how postwar art historians have remained so hesitant to perpetuate narratives about pre-Christian, homogenous belief systems that revered the forests of northern Europe that they have overlooked some of the few surviving physical traces in art from Slavic Eastern Europe, whose ancient ties to nature Germans toiled to erase in both the medieval and modern eras.

In the wake of Germany’s ascension to nationhood in 1871, “deutsches Holz”—the stuff of half-timbered houses, Bierkellers, and three-legged chairs—became the building material of a new nationalist politics. But in 1933, after a decade of modernist innovations in steel, glass, and concrete, wood appealed once more to the German cultural consciousness. Amidst economic depression, social upheaval, and political turmoil, wood felt familiar and trustworthy, warm and reassuring—ubiquitous and cheap. But whose Holz was it? This essay employs wood as both substance and symbol to investigate the entangled crises of the German nation, the German Werkbund, and, in particular, Werkbund leader and architect-designer Richard Riemerschmid, in the teeth of the Nazi propaganda machine.

This article examines the monumental mosaics, large stained glass windows, and illustrated maps that the German painter Werner Peiner (1897–1984), now best known for his designs for the representative buildings of Hitler’s dictatorship, produced between 1931 and 1935 for Shell Oil and its German subsidiary. The discussion of these commissions, which emerged from Peiner’s social networks of the 1920s and contributed to his career as a state artist after 1933, explains their function as ideological images promoting the interests of a global corporation and affirming modern automotive technology using conservative, mythologizing tropes of paradisical nature, traditional cultural landscapes, and immutable national communities that the painter later employed in his work for Hitler’s state.