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Douglas Klahr

The Stereoscopic Photo Album as Nazi Propaganda:

Ephemerality of Image in Vienna, The Pearl of the Reich

During the Third Reich, stereoscopic photography, which had reached

its heyday in the late nineteenth century, was transformed by the regime

into a tool of propaganda by creating a new format: the ste-reoscopic photo

album. This paper examines how the city of Vienna – which served as a

political triumph for Hitler upon the Anschluss of 1938 – was presented in a 1941 book, Vienna, The Pearl of the Reich.

Small-scale stereoviews and folding stereoscopes were integrated

into books, stored in pockets hollowed out of thick front and rear

covers. Twenty-two ste-reoscopic photo albums were produced by

the Third Reich’s major stere-oscopic publishing house, the

Raumbild-Verlag Otto Schönstein, whose controlling partner was

Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer. Two paradoxes characterized these books: the peculiar notion of a

stereoscopic photo album and the actual process of using a stereoscope.

Unlike other photo album formats, including digital ones, a stereoscopic

one does not allow simultaneous viewing and discourse between multiple

viewers. This is because the viewer requires the use of a stereoscope to

focus and then merge the dual photographs into one. Furthermore, a ste-

reoview never is merely depicted: it must be synthesized anew each time,

and the result will vary due to the impossibility of getting in focus simul-

taneously all the receding planes of depth that comprise a stereoview. The resulting ephemerality requires a viewer to create a new nar-

rative with each viewing, shifting focus not only among subjects in an

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image, but also between planes of depth. It is a narrative that can never

be shared or precisely repeated. Among all visual media, therefore, ste-

reoscopic photography is the quintessential individual visual

experience. It therefore undermines the idea of simultaneous discourse

and sharing that are tenets both of photography and of much political

propaganda. In Vienna, The Pearl of the Reich, although users could

simultaneously share the book’s text, the sequence and visual narrative

of each image was an individual, personal decision, removed from the

realm of the usual, non-stereoscopic bound photo album format that was

a cornerstone of Nazi propaganda. This degree of freedom, apparently not recognized at the time, dove-

tailed with an unusual degree of freedom accorded to the publisher, due to

Heinrich Hoffmann’s prominence. «As the “favorite photographer” of the

“Führer”, Hoffmann was named the “Reich Photographic Reporter”,

arguably the most influential man in the field of photography in Ger-

many»1. Hoffmann established a close personal relationship with Hitler that

surpassed in longevity and constancy that of any other high-rank-ing Nazi.

From the early 1920s in Munich until 1945, Hoffmann not only was

Hitler’s personal photographer, but also part of the Führer’s inner-most

circle, having lunch with Hitler on a daily basis – something Joseph

Goebbels and Hermann Göring did not do. As the historian Richard J.

Evans noted regarding Hitler’s daily habits, «Lunch was routinely pre-

pared for one in the afternoon […] Guests would generally consist of

Hitler’s immediate entourage, including his adjutants, his chauffeurs and

his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. Göring, Goebbels and Himmler

attended with varying degrees of frequency, and later on Albert Speer, but

most senior Ministers were seldom to be seen»2.

Moreover, Hoffmann was not accountable to Goebbel’s Ministry of

Propaganda: he reported directly and only to Hitler. «With the consol-

idation of institutional powers the small, private press photo agencies

also disappeared. Instead, three large firms divided the market amongst

them. These were the “Atlantik” and “Weltbild” agencies, which were

put directly under the control of the Ministry of Propaganda and – as a

private business – “Heinrich Hoffmann Press Illustrations”»3. The stere- 2

oscopic publishing house, which constituted a small component of

Hoff-mann’s enterprises, was classified as a Wehrwirtschaftsbetrieb

or army-as-sociated economic business, thereby securing all necessary

materials and excusing its workers from military service4. In his history of the Otto Schönstein Raumbild Verlag – the only

scholarly study to date about the publishing house – Dieter Lorenz

not-ed: «The connection with Heinrich Hoffmann and later with the

armed forces also had its advantages for the stereoscopic publisher

and its sur-vival through the war […] Moreover, as domestic paper

and printing capacity became restricted, orders could be shifted to

occupied France, at times through illegal paths»5. Historian Rudolf Herz noted that «the firm functioned apparent-ly

quite well as a system of governance and self-censorship out of sight of

those in power in the Ministry of Propaganda». Herz documented the

expansion of Hoffmann’s photographic publishing enterprises from the

original office in Munich to branches in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Vienna,

Prague, Posen, The Hague, Strasbourg, Paris, and Riga. By 1943, total

annual revenues were 15.4 million Reichsmarks, making Hoffmann a

multi-millionaire, and by the end of the war, his photographic publish-

ing empire had worked on 2.5 million photos6. The political situation in Vienna in 1940-1941 served as the impetus

for Vienna, The Pearl of the Reich. Although the Nazi regime rapidly

seg-regated Vienna’s Jewish population from society after the Anschluss, it

still had to contend with two masses of opposition: former socialists and

the city’s Catholic establishment. Hitler and Goebbels regarded the con-

tinuing opposition in Vienna as a threat. At the end of June 1940, Hitler

decided to replace the Gauleiter of Vienna, Josef Bürckel, with Baldur von

Schirach, the head of Hitler Youth, who incidentally was married to

Heinrich Hoffmann’s daughter Henriette. Hitler felt that Bürckel lacked the

necessary tact needed to navigate the political situation, and accord-ing to

Schirach’s memoirs, Hitler assured Schirach that he would be in complete

charge: not even Goebbels «will be allowed to contradict you»7. Schirach’s task was two-fold: quietly continue to eliminate political

opposition, and recast Vienna as an economic powerhouse of the south-

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east Reich, thereby diluting the cultural hegemony it had long enjoyed

among German-speaking cities. Schirach therefore would have to both

flatter the Viennese regarding their cultural history yet remind them that

Berlin was now the cultural capital of the Reich. It was in this un-settled

political environment of 1940-1941 that Vienna, The Pearl of the

Reich was produced. Accompanying this situation was the freedom

from the Ministry of Propaganda that both Schirach and his father-in-

law en-joyed. The result was an ambiguous piece of propaganda in

which Nazi ideology played a minimal role and a surprising amount of

freedom was given to both the essay writers and the readers/viewers.

The 1941 photo album about Vienna followed a late 1938 stereo-

scopic album entitled Greater Germany’s Rebirth: World History Hours

on the Danube, which featured between 100 and 120 stereoviews taken by

Hoffmann, depending on the edition. This 1938 book recapped the

Anschluss, Hitler’s 1938 incorporation of Austria into Greater Germa-ny,

documenting Hitler’s passage through Austria in March 1938 that

culminated with his triumphal entry into Vienna. It is overtly political not

only regarding its text, but also the majority of stereoviews, which are

grouped in a section labeled «Political Part». This featured views such as

Austrian police taking an oath to Hitler, a giant banner urging Austrians to

vote «Yes» in the 10 April 1938 plebiscite, and buses of the Reichs-

Autozug Deutschland, the mobile propaganda troops of the Nazi party.

Chronicling Hitler’s travels through Austria, Hoffmann obviously had a

dramatic subject and historic moment to document – Hitler and his adoring

crowds – thereby making tight correlations between text and image easier

than in a more static representation of a city without the Führer’s presence,

as in Vienna, The Pearl of the Reich. The 1941 book that is the subject of this paper utilized the services of

four photographers: August Makart, Ellen Rörig, Hans Schreiner, and Fritz

Wisberger. It presented 100 stereoviews of the city and its sur-roundings

whose order was not coordinated with the collection of essays that

comprised the book’s 120-page text. Each image was numbered on the

front and then described on the back, and the book’s numbered list of

stereoviews also repeated the captions. The first major aspect of am-

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biguity arose from the numerical sequence, for it sharply departed from the

established sequence that had been a feature of photographic albums of

Vienna for a half-century. One always began at Sankt Stephan and then

immediately segued to the Hofburg, Vienna’s imperial palace. Vien-na,

The Pearl of the Reich commenced at the cathedral but then careened

around the inner city before finally arriving at the Hofburg at image 30. Other departures from established image sequencing occurred, but

the most noticeable pattern was a decision to include more of Vienna’s

surrounding countryside than usual in photo albums about the city: 12%

versus 4% in a comparable mid-1930s non-stereoscopic example. While

Vienna’s famous Heuringe or wine taverns on the outskirts of the city

always appeared in albums, a new emphasis upon the far countryside

was underscored in the book’s essay about the Viennese by Friedrich

Mazenauer: «The Viennese native is no large- city, hot-house plant […]

For the Viennese city soul still has a basically rural tone: its banner is a

delicately luminous green, untouched by the gray city dust»8. Coun-

tryside views therefore showed Viennese city-dwellers ostensibly com-

muning with nature as they returned to their roots as brief respites from

their urban lives. The desire to counteract Vienna’s cosmopolitanism by

emphasizing its inhabitants’ supposedly rural inner cores was not sur-

prising, given Hitler’s well-known antipathy to this aspect of the city. The book’s essays, written by scholars, explained the history of

Vienna’s architectural, theatrical, and musical legacies. Only two prop-

agandistic aspects infiltrated these essays: the omission of any Jewish

names from the pages and the obligatory sentence or two denouncing

the Jewish influence upon Viennese culture when the post-World War I

years were discussed. This format – having scholars write lengthy

essays that were not coordinated with the images – was common within

the stereoscopic albums produced by Otto Schönstein under the

supervision and control of Heinrich Hoffmann. The most overtly propagandistic elements of the book were three short

dedications: several sentences spoken by Hitler when he was in Vi-enna in

April 1938, and dedications by Baldur von Schirach, and Hanns Blaschke

of the Kulturamt. The book’s title derived from Hitler’s sen-

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tence, «in my eyes, this city is a pearl!»9. Schirach opened his dedication

by praising the city’s cultural significance but then rapidly shifted tone,

noting that Vienna was a harbor and trade center, underscoring Hitler’s

desire to recast the city as the economic powerhouse of the southeast Reich

and thereby mitigate it as a cultural competitor to Berlin10. Hanns Blaschke

reiterated this emphasis in his dedication. Although most of Vienna’s architectural highlights were covered, three

of its most important cultural institutions were not photographed: the

Musikverein, Volkstheater, and Konzerthaus, all prestigious mu-sic and

theater venues. This is surprising, considering that one of the book’s essays

– «Vienna as a Theater-and Music-City» – comprised 40% of the book’s

text. The buildings’ omission is puzzling, especially since Vienna’s famous

Karl-Marx-Hof housing complex is included, the so-called Ringstrasse of

the Proletariat that was constructed during Vienna’s socialist years in the

1920s. Renamed by the Nazis, its inclusion perhaps can be read as a

symbol of Nazi triumph over socialism, yet ambiguity remains, for an

unambiguous work of propaganda would have ignored the building. Given

Schirach’s and Hoffmann’s independence from min-isterial oversight,

perhaps this stereoview was intended as a conciliatory gesture toward the

Viennese, acknowledging a powerful architectural manifestation of what

was political anathema to Nazi ideology, yet was a singular achievement in

Viennese post-World War I housing. Conciliatory gestures are not usually associated with the Third Re-ich,

yet this one appears to be an example of what historian Thomas Weyr has

termed «Schirach’s expansive cultural policies». A prime ex-ample of an

expansive cultural policy occurred in December 1941 – after the

publication of Vienna, The Pearl of the Reich – when the city held a

Mozart Week to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s

death. Goebbels feared that this festival «might have Austrian, Vien-nese,

or even worse “separatist” overtones». Not only did the Viennese seize

upon the festival to indirectly assert their pre-Nazi history, but Schirach

also internationalized the occasion by letting the event’s music director,

Walter Thomas, invite artists from other nations to perform. Goebbels was

livid, and his letter to Thomas was also an indirect assault

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upon Schirach: «You support Vienna separatism. Your policies are

hos-tile to the Reich […] This Mozart Week is a scandal that has

nothing to do with us. It had only one aim – to give Vienna a

monopoly on the arts. You go ahead without my permission to invite

Frenchmen, Belgians, Romania, Hungary and God knows who else

in order to swindle the Viennese illusionism». By mid-1942, Hitler

«was queasy about Schirach’s expansive cultural policies and shared

his feelings with Goebbels who stoked his doubts»11. Moreover, the element of ambiguity produced by including the

Karl-Marx-Hof aligns with where the book was positioned regarding

Hitler’s philosophy of propaganda. Simply stated, it existed outside

the focus of Hitler’s propaganda, which he voiced in Mein Kampf: To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically

trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses? It must be

addressed always and exclusively to the masses […] The receptivity

of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but

their power of for-getting is enormous. In consequence of these facts,

all effective propa-ganda must be limited to a few points and must

harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public

understands what you want him to understand12. Vienna, The Pearl of the Reich was not produced for the masses:

it was targeted toward an elite audience who could afford its price of 30

Reichsmarks, which was the equivalent of half the national average

monthly rent in 1938 for a two-room flat. Unlike Hitler’s formula for

mass-market propaganda, here there was room for nuance and expan-

sive cultural policies, especially when the product was produced under

the aegis of Heinrich Hoffmann and Baldur von Schirach. In conclusion, when image selection, image sequence, text and po-litical

contexts are taken into consideration, Vienna, The Pearl of the Reich

becomes an ambiguous piece of propaganda, defying easy classification. This

ambiguity is amplified when the paradoxes with which I opened this paper are

reintroduced: the unstable ephemerality of the stereoscop-ic image and the

resolutely individualistic quintessence of this visual ex-perience. Stereoscopic

photo albums therefore were problematic formats

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for propaganda, and the freedom that such a medium offered viewers

was augmented by the freedom from ministerial oversight given to

the book’s creators: an unlikely scenario within a regime not known

for freedom.

Note

1 R.G. Reuth, Fotographie und Stereofotographie im Dienst der

nationalisozialis-tischen Propaganda, in Das Gesicht der Diktatur. Das Dritte

Reich in 3D-Photos, R.G. Reuth (hrsg), Munich, Prendo Verlag, 2011, p. 14.

2 R.J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, New York, Penguin Books, 2005, p. 612.

3 R.G. Reuth, Fotographie und Stereofotographie, cit., p. 23.

4 Ivi, p. 30.

5 D. Lorenz, Der Raumbild-Verlag Otto Schönstein. Zur Geschichte der

Stereoskopie, «Deutsches Historisches Museum Magazin», 27, 2001, pp. 1-56: 5.

6 R. Herz, Hoffmann & Hitler. Fotographie als Medium der Führer-Mythos, Munich, Münchener Stadtmuseum, 1994, pp. 13, 53.

7 Baldur von Schirach quoted in T. Weyr, The Setting of the Pearl: Vienna under Hitler, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 170.

8 F. Mazenauer, Die Wiener, in Wien – Die Perle des Reiches, Herausgeber Ernst

Holzmann, Munich, Raumbild-Verlag Otto Schönstein, 1941, p. 103.

9 A. Hitler, dedication inWien – Die Perle, cit., p.

5.

10 B.V. Schirach, dedication, ivi, p. 7.

11 T. Weyr, The Setting of the Pearl, cit., pp. 202, 212.

12 A. Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim, Boston, Houghton

Mifflin Company, 1943, pp. 179-181.

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Wien – Die Perle des Reiches. Front cover, inside front cover with stereoviews and

stereoscope stored in pockets, and the folding stereoview fully extended.

Photograph by author. 9

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