Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography

Abstract

Racial purity and supremacy were central to Nazi Germany’s claims to European dominion. At the same time, their very own “racial scientific” research showed that most Germans were “mixed-race.” Given the dissonance between phenotypical aspirations to a Nordic ideal and the reality of a largely nonblond German population, how did the National Socialist regime maintain legitimacy to rule? Anthropologists, bureaucrats, and artists resolved this racial misalignment through horror vacui racialization, an excessive social classification that manifested as a racializing turn inward aimed at Christian Germans. I theorize the role of culture and art in stabilizing race-based rule in authoritarian and colonial contexts through racial repair that realigns desired and actual racial self-understandings. The article shows how an ostensibly biologically essentialist regime strategically used racial relativism in science, politics, and popular culture. I outline the sociological implications of this work for the sociologies of culture, of race and ethnicity, of theories of the state, of empire, and of science and technology studies.