August Sander’s Regional Photobook Series, Nazification, and the Politics of Cultural Landscape

Abstract 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.