Filling the Frame: Photography of May Day Crowds during the Early Nazi Era

Abstract

Filling the Frame: Photography of May Day Crowds during the Early Nazi Era

When one thinks of festive crowds under National Socialism, the state-orchestrated events at Berlin's Tempelhofer Feld, the Bückeberg or at the Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nuremberg are what first come to mind. But apart from the huge festival grounds, festive crowds also came together on sports fields and town squares all over Germany. They were certainly smaller in number, yet the presence of the many was clearly also of great ritual importance in small towns and rural communities. Whenever they came together, a camera was there to document. It is especially in forms of representation that the crowd becomes negotiable. Stories of crowds unfold along images. The article examines the role of photographs of crowd scenes in the process of community-formation during the early Nazi era when the idea of a racially defined Volksgemeinschaft was ubiquitous throughout the German Reich. It focuses primarily on the particular importance of photography as a means of negotiating, adapting and transforming social affiliation. Also addressed is the overall relationship between photography and the masses. Inspired by Elias Canetti's typology of crowds, a comparison of state-controlled and local depictions of May Day festivities reveals a variety and ambivalence of photographic representations of crowds during the early 1930s, which has been overlooked by historic research so far. A surprising visual openness made the crowd images adaptable to traditional ideas of community as well as able to respond to the need to position oneself in the new social framework.