¹ Historians have persuasively argued that photographs are more usefully thought of as performative props than as documents of historical reality. See, e.g., John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1988), 60–65; Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Performanz und Öffentlichkeit in der krisenhaften Moderne. Visualisierung des Politischen in Deutschland 1930–1936,” in Strategien der Visualisierung, ed. Herfried Münkler and Jens Hacke (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2009), 71–92. For a fuller discussion of photography and performativity, see the editors’ introduction to this special issue.

² The 1995 Verbrechen der Wehrmacht (Crimes of the Wehrmacht) exhibition was a classic controversy about both deliberate and accidental falsifications of historical photographs (the latter due to mislabelling). The exhibition relied heavily on photographs to document atrocities committed by ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers in World War II. See the overview in Francis Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 37–92.

³ Fulbrook, Mary and Rublack, Ulinka, eds., “Ego-documents,” special issue, German History 28, no. 3 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The introduction (pp. 263–72) explores the pivotal role of ego-documents in recent German historiography. The contribution on the Nazi period, Nicholas Stargardt's “The Troubled Patriot: German Innerlichkeit in World War II” (pp. 326–42), reveals the limits of such sources. Under this regime in particular, writing was subject to both formal censorship and informal self-censorship, and it was generally confined to individuals with very particular agendas—in the case explored by Stargardt, an educated, deeply reflexive pastor who saw the act of writing as a negotiation between his role as a soldier for the Third Reich and his Christian conscience.

⁴ The principal archives consulted for these projects are the Photoarchiv des Deutschen Historischen Museums, Berlin; Archiv des Schulmuseums Hamburg; the photographic collection (uncatalogued albums) of the Landesarchiv Berlin; as well as the detailed catalogue of the photographic collection of the Kempowski Archive, which is part of the Literaturarchiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin. The author would like to thank the staffs in all these archives most warmly for their support and cooperation. The author has also acquired a personal collection of around fifty private albums documenting civilian life in Germany during the Nazi period, as well as a smaller number of British and American albums from the same period.

⁵ Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

⁶ Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a New Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Among those who have emphasized the limits of fascist ideology's reach into everyday life is Richard Evans; see, e.g., his monumental trilogy The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, 1933–39, and The Third Reich at War (London: Penguin, 2003, 2005, and 2008); also see Stephenson's, Jill numerous works on women and the Nazi state, such as “Nazism, Modern War and Rural Society in Württemberg, 1939–1945,” Journal of Contemporary History 32, no. 3 (1997): 339–56Google Scholar; for Italy, see Bosworth, Richard J. B., “War, Totalitarianism, and ‘Deep Belief’ in Fascist Italy, 1935–43,” European History Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2004): 475–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An instructive survey of the current state of the debate about coercion and consent in the Third Reich is Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, eds., Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

⁷ Particularly interesting methodological arguments of this nature have been advanced in Alon Confino, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Stargardt, “The Troubled Patriot”; Michael Wildt, Hitler's “Volksgemeinschaft” and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939 (New York: Berghahn, 2011). Private life as a key site of the political history of National Socialism is also the theme of the ongoing research project “Private Life under National Socialism” at the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich-Berlin, under the direction of Andreas Wirsching and Johannes Hürter.

⁸ Hartmut Berghoff, “Enticement and Deprivation: The Regulation of Consumption in Pre-War Nazi Germany,” in The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, ed. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 165–84; Jonathan S. Wiesen, Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

⁹ Shelley Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Kristen Semmens, Seeing Hitler's Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); Wolfgang König, Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft. “Volksprodukte” im Dritten Reich: Vom Scheitern einer nationalsozialistischen Konsumgesellschaft (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004); Bernhard Rieger, The People's Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Silke Horstkotte und Olaf Jürgen Schmidt “Heil Coca-Cola! Zwischen Germanisierung und Re-Amerikanisierung: Coke im Dritten Reich,” in Amerikanische Populärkultur in Deutschland, ed. Heike Paul and Katja Kanzler (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2002), 73–87.

¹⁰ Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

¹¹ The spread of cheap cameras accelerated in the 1930s with models such as the so-called Agfa Box produced by Photo-Porst in Nuremberg, initially sold for 16 RM in 1931, then in a new version for 4 RM in 1932. See Timm Starl, Knipser. Die Bildgeschichte der privaten Fotografie in Deutschland und Österreich von 1880 bis 1980 (Munich: Koehler & Amelang, 1995), 95–98.

¹² Starl, Knipser, 98.

¹³ This phenomenon was particularly apparent in the photo albums of school trips and wartime child evacuation programs (Kinderlandverschickung, or KLV) available in the archive of the Hamburger Schularchiv. In cases where albums document the same trip, up to a third of the same photographs would appear in more than one: most negatives were printed multiple times and shared among all the children who had appeared in front of the camera.

¹⁴ On László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Benjamin, and other contemporary commentators on the spread of photography, see Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), esp. 339.

¹⁵ Fascism was central to the evolution of “full-blown ‘audio-visual regimes,’ telegenetic media cultures, and the more general ‘visualization of politics.’” See Betts, Paul, “The New Fascination with Fascism: The Case of Nazi Modernism,” Journal of Contemporary History, 37, no. 4 (2002): 542CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The idea of fascism as the aestheticization of politics was pioneered by its contemporary critic Walter Benjamin in his “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays ‘War and Warriors’ by Ernst Juenger,” New German Critique, no. 17 (1979): 120–28 (this was a translation of the original piece published in 1930). See also Rainer Stollmann and Ronald L. Smith, “Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art: Tendencies of the Aesthetization of Political Life in National Socialism,” New German Critique, no. 14 (1978): 41–60. In recent years, the notion of fascism as spectacle has been employed by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff , eds., Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 1 (1996): 109–44; Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a New Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).

¹⁶ Bernd Hüppauf, “Emptying the Gaze,” cited in Francis Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes, vii. The fullest version of Hüppauf's essay is “Emptying the Gaze: Framing Violence through the Viewfinder,” New German Critique, no. 72 (1997): 3–44. Hüppauf's focus here is on atrocity photos, but his points are also informed by his work on out-of-focus photography by artists such as Gerhard Richter, which, he believes, restores an openness to the gaze obscured by overfamiliarity with iconic motifs and postures in photographs. See Bernd Hüppauf, “Die Wiederkehr der Unschärfe,” Merkur, no. 659 (Mar. 2004): 211–19; idem, “Zwischen Imitation und Simulation. Das unscharfe Bild,” in Bild und Einbildungskraft, ed. Hüppauf and Christian Wulf (Munich: Fink, 2006), 254–77.

¹⁷ Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes.

¹⁸ There was likely no intentional link, but it is nevertheless worth noting that this rare alpine flower was symbolically associated with the emblem of an elite German mountain division in both world wars.

¹⁹ Mrs. Doreen Laven, in discussion with the author, Canterbury, April 2014. Her husband Peter Laven, who was born in July 1923, served in the British army during the occupation of Italy between 1943 and 1945.

²⁰ The term resistivity was popularized by literary scholars commenting on authors who operated within Nazi Germany but at arm's length from the regime. See Neil H. Donahue and Doris Kirchner, eds., Flight of Fantasy: New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German Literature, 1933–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2003). A related but more nuanced category is Martin Broszat's term Resistenz, which is sometimes translated as “resistivity.” It denotes not so much resistance per se as refusal, e.g., in everyday behaviors that evaded the regime's more totalitarian aspirations in the private sphere, but that were not intended as oppositional acts in a political sense. Alf Lüdtke has been pivotal in developing the notion of Eigen-Sinn (“stubborn idiosyncrasy”). See his Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Hamburg: Ergebnisse, 1993). For a recent survey of the state of this debate, see Koslov, Elissa Mailänder et al. , “Forum: Everyday Life in Nazi Germany,” German History 27, no. 4 (2009): 560–79Google Scholar.

²¹ Heinrich Schliemann, Trojanische Alterthümer (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1874).

²² Horst Umbach, in discussion with the author, Wedel/Hamburg, Aug. 2013.

²³ Frederick Cummings, “Boothby, Rousseau, and the Romantic Malady,” Burlington Magazine 110, no. 789 (1968): 659–66. On the wider context, which associated immersion in nature and its spirit with the productive energies of “genius,” see the 1788 essay by Karl Philipp Moritz, “Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen!,” in Schriften zur Ästhetik und Poetik, ed. H. J. Schrimpf (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962), 27–78.

²⁴ C.G. Boerner, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki (1726–1801) und seine Zeit (Düsseldorf: Boerner, 2001); Busch, Werner, “The Reception of Hogarth in Chodowiecki and Kaulbach,” Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 46 (1992): 9–19Google Scholar; Renate Krüger, Das Zeitalter der Empfindsamkeit. Kunst und Kultur des späten 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Vienna: Schroll, 1972).

²⁵ Ingrid Sommer, ed., Der Fortgang der Tugend und des Lasters. Daniel Chodowieckis Monatskuppfer zum Göttinger Taschenkalender, mit Erklärungen Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1977).

²⁶ Useful surveys of these two examples are included, respectively, in Baranowski, Strength through Joy, and in Catherine Epstein, Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The latter study looks at reforestation in the East.

²⁷ The close cooperation between Hitler and Hoffmann in both staging these photos and then selecting the right ones for circulation is discussed in Rudolf Herz, Hoffmann und Hitler. Fotographie als Medium des Führer-Mythos (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1994).

²⁸ Many of these albums survive in the photo archive of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. See Bernd Boll, “Vom Album ins Archiv. Zur Überlieferung privater Fotografien aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Mit der Kamera bewaffnet. Krieg und Fotografie, ed. Anton Holzer (Marburg: Jonas, 2003), 167–81.

²⁹ Thomas Zeller, Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930–1970 (New York: Berghahn, 2007); Shand, James D., “The Reichsautobahn: Symbol for the Third Reich,” Journal of Contemporary History 19, no. 2 (1984): 189–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rollins, William, “Whose Landscape? Technology, Fascism, and Environmentalism on the National Socialist Autobahn,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85, no. 3 (1995): 494–520CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Celia Applegate, “Senses of Place,” in The Oxford Handbook of German History, ed. Helmut Walser Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). The references to the photography volumes are Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Reichsautobahn. Mensch und Werk (Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayreuth, 1937); Wolf Strache, Auf allen Autobahnen. Ein Bildbuch vom neuen Reisen (Darmstadt: L. C. Wittich, 1939); idem,  Donnernde Motoren (Stuttgart: Tazzelwurm Verlag A. Jauss, 1942).

³¹ Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt/Main.: Suhrkamp, 1963).

³² For a fuller version of this argument, see Núñez Seixas, Xosé M. and Umbach, Maiken, “Hijacked Heimats: National Appropriations of Local and Regional Identities in Germany and Spain, 1930–1945,” European Review of History 15, no. 3 (2008): 295–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Ulrich Hägele, “Der zerstörte Blick. Fotografie im Dienst unmenschlicher Wissenschaft,” in Sinti und Roma und Wir. Ausgrenzung, Internierung und Verfolung einer Minderheit, ed. Ulrich Hägele (Tübingen: Kulturamt, 1998), 95–124; and idem, “Die Visualisierung des ‘Volkskörpers’. Fotografie und Volkskunde in der NS-Zeit!,” Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 82, no. 21 (2001): 5–20Google Scholar. The extent to which these and related classificatory practices permeated more general political consciousness is explored in Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

³⁴ Alexa Stiller, “On the Margins of Volksgemeinschaft: Criteria for Belonging to the Volk within the Nazi Germanization Policy in the Annexed Territories, 1939–1945,” in Regionalism between Heimat and Empire: Identity Spaces under National Socialism, ed. Maiken Umbach and Chris Szejnmann (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 235–51. The idea of an ethnically specific habitus is encountered in a wide variety of sources, including photojournalism. See Elizabeth Harvey, “Ich war überall. Die NS-Propagandaphotographin Liselotte Purper,” in ‘Volksgenossinnen’. Frauen in der NS-Volksgemeinschaft, ed. Sybille Steinbacher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 138–54; idem, “Seeing the World: Photography, Photojournalism and Visual Pleasure in the Third Reich,” in Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany, ed. Pamela Swett, Corey Ross, and Fabrice d'Almeida (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 177–204.

³⁵ Martina Steber, “Regions and National Socialist Ideology: Reflections on Contained Plurality,” in Umbach and Szejnmann, Regionalism, 25–42. On the relationship between German “tribes” and regions, see also von Hehl, Ulrich, “Nationalsozialismus und Region,” Zeitschrift für Bayrische Landegeschichte 56, no. 1 (1993): 111–29Google Scholar; Düwell, Kurt, “Regionalismus und Nationalsozialismus am Beispiel des Rheinlands,” Rheinische Vierteljahresblätter 59 (1995): 194–210Google Scholar; Umbach and Núñez Seixas, “Hijacked Heimats.”

³⁶ Thomas Williams, “Grenzlandschicksal: Historical Narratives of Regional Identity and National Duty in Gau Oberrhein, 1940–1944,” in Umbach and Szejnmann, Regionalism, 56–71.

³⁷ See, e.g., Werner Busch, Caspar David Friedrich. Ästhetik und Religion (Munich: Beck, 2003); Cordula Grewe, Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

³⁸ On the iconography of representing eastern European landscape as both empty and marked by the practices of “idle” races in German discourse, from propaganda to school textbooks and feature films, see Sheona R. Davies, “Imagining Germany's Medieval Past, c. 1920–1945: Knighthood and the Mission in the East” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nottingham, 2013); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 251–311; Sunseri, Thaddeus, “Exploiting the Urwald: German Post-Colonial Forestry in Poland and Central Africa, 1900–1960,” Past & Present 214, no. 1 (2012): 305–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilke, Sabine, “Romantic Images of Africa: Paradigms of German Colonial Paintings,” German Studies Review 29, no. 2 (2006): 285–98Google Scholar. On empty space and German cartography in the East, see Henrik G. Herb, ed., Under the Map of Germany: Nationalism and Propaganda, 1918–1945 (London: Routledge, 1996). An interesting interpretation of the idea of empty space and German warfare—in which the inability to master nature, rather than a vision for doing so, radicalizes colonial violence—is Lehmann, Philipp N., “Between Waterberg and Sandveld: An Environmental Perspective on the German–Herero War of 1904,” German History 32, no. 4 (2014): 533–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Nazi propagandists were well aware of the problem. Rather than denying the disorientating, “uncanny” nature of the landscapes of the East—which were, for many, the direct antithesis of the German idea of Heimat—commentators insisted that the ability to transform gradually one into the other was the key to a successful colonization effort. See Elizabeth Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), esp. 119–46.

⁴⁰ The most authoritative study to date is Petra Bopp, Fremde im Visier. Fotoalben aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2012), which documents an exhibition with the same title. See also Willi Rose, Shadows of War: A German Soldier's Lost Photographs of World War II, ed. Thomas Eller and Petra Bopp (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004); Boll, Bernd, “Das Adlerauge des Soldaten. Zur Photopraxis deutscher Amateure im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Fotogeschichte 85–86, no. 22 (2002): 75–87Google Scholar; Holzer, Mit der Kamera bewaffnet; Hoffman-Curtius, Kathrin, “Trophäen und Amulette. Die Fotografien von Wehrmachts- und SS-Verbrechen in den Brieftaschen der Soldaten,” Fotogeschichte 78, no. 20, (2000): 63–76Google Scholar.

⁴¹ See note 15.