Rebekka Grossmann. Jewish Social Studies. Volume 23, Issue 2, Winter 2018.
The new Jewish presence in Palestine brought about by Zionism and consolidated politically by the Balfour Declaration reintroduced into the German and German Jewish consciousness the idea of the proximity of Jews to the Orient while challenging their image as “orientals.” It was photography that showed such new Jewish appearances especially palpably and that confronted viewers with a changing Holy Land. This article discusses three photo books on Palestine published in 1925, using them as markers for the contested presences and absences of Jews and Judaism in Germany. The books discuss the status of Palestine and the role of Jews as its new, old colonizers, allowing for a plethora of opinions on the political meaning of Zionism, many of which would be attacked soon thereafter.
In 1925, three new photo books on Palestine appeared on the German book market. Featuring more than eight hundred photographs of Palestine’s plains, hills, towns, and “types,” the books offered the German armchair traveler more than enough material for a journey through the Holy Land. The books mirrored both Weimar Germany’s new prosperity and the demand for luxurious products such as coffee-table books and the new trust in and fascination with visual arts in general and photography in particular. This commoditization of views from abroad catered to the quest of the Bildungsburger (members of the German educated bourgeoisie) for a meaningful pastime, assuaged their Fernweh (longing for distant places), glossed over the strain of war memories, and allowed for a subtle burgeoning of the dreams of pre-World War I imperialist conquests. Palestine was a contested ground, and its 1925 photographic appearance condensed a multitude of political and social sensibilities on the critical turn between postwar depression and cultural and economic renaissance. The various representations of the country did not just mirror viewers’ self-perceptions or constitute prestigious means of escaping German postwar reality. The visual presence of Palestine in the photo books also carried the Middle East and its inhabitants into the German political discourse at a time when the first international treaties between Germany and its former enemies were allowing for a reconsideration of the global. Thus, the books constituted a platform that condensed various discussions by means of a distinctly new visual vocabulary. An especially challenging topic for the makers of these books was the question whether and how Zionism and the new Jewish presence in Palestine should be presented visually and which photographs would best represent Jews who inhabited the Orient but whose attire and aspirations appeared to embrace progress and modernity.
In the following I discuss these books and the visibility of Jews in the photographs as markers of the contested presences and absences of Jews and Judaism in German culture. The Jews’ existence in Palestine, at a time when Jewish visibilities were being reconsidered and newly contested by large numbers of Eastern Jews entering German consciousness, triggered new discussions on the role of the Middle East, on the status of Jews as its inhabitants, and on the position of Germany as a failed liberal imperialist state. It complicated the binary between East and West and manifested the Jews’ liminal position, immigrating to the East as Germans and colonizing it as “orientals.” The visibility of Jews in Weimar Germany, as has been shown in recent research, especially on the junctions of Jewish history and Weimar arts and culture, not only turned “Jews into Germans” but also rendered the Jewish element a natural part in the pluralist German visual culture of the time. Jews operated within a cultural and, especially, a visual code that negotiated cosmopolitan liberalism and gained them a space and a language with which to shape the cultural discourse of their environment. Using the lens of the photographic visibility of Palestine in Weimar German discourse, I introduce an additional focal point for the discussion of the role of German Jewry in Weimar culture. I draw on cultural histories and concepts of (Jewish) “visibility” and “presence” and on recent studies of orientalist and colonialist photography to show that the ruptures within German society confronted the makers of the photo books on Palestine with the challenge of staging the Holy Land according to a plethora of emotions and political attitudes.
Studying the history of the Weimar German orientalist imagination by means of the medium of photography allows for a new angle on the discussion of Jews in Weimar German culture. Initially, visual images of Palestine simply offered photographic and filmic escapes to the lieu de memoire (realm of memory) of a land that had remained aboriginal and untouched. After all, Holy Land photography had come to constitute a popular commodity long before the dawn of the Weimar Republic. Now, however, this traditional imagery clashed with an unprecedented Jewish presence in Palestine on the one hand and the young Weimar German avant-garde’s promotion of a new “way of seeing” on the other. Photo books and photo essays, as Daniel Magilow has shown, not only mirrored modern changes and developments but also affected them and presented platforms to challenge paradigms such as modern, political, and beautiful. It was in the trio of photo books on Palestine that appeared in 1925 that this agency on the part of photography manifested itself.
Consumer culture and bourgeois curiosity secured the continuity of the orientalist allure at a time when the discourse of possible German influence in the Orient, established in the wake of the German Empire’s imperialist advances, had waned with the experience of Germany’s defeat. Little remained of the “special relationship” between Germany and the Ottoman Empire from before the war, when Germany had acquired the status of a mentor to the Turk’s advances toward modernization. The protagonists of this colonial discussion, who had been busy drafting strategies for the establishment and control of German influence in the East, heard their voices muted with the collapse of the German Empire in 1918. Some of them would find a refuge in the photo books. Though they withdrew to forewords or theological commentaries, as will be seen, their writings marked a reconsideration of their ideas at a time when the greatest trauma had been overcome and geopolitical fantasies, partly infused by racial theories, were regaining some of their attraction. As a platform for various views and visions, the books therefore offered a new projection screen for Germany’s most significant social and political questions of the time.
One of the most prestigious products on the photo-book market was the Orbis Terrarum book series. The title drew on Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum (Theater of the World, 1570), widely considered one of the first modern atlases, which had sought to educate through maps. In homage to this project, the Ernst Wasmuth publishing house in Berlin aimed to introduce faraway places to the German public through a series of photographic books. The series was launched in 1921 with a photo book on Spain, entitled Das unbekannte Spanien: Baukunst, Landschaft, Volksleben. Books on Greece, China, Vol 23 Scandinavia, North Africa, and Germany followed, produced with the No. 2 help of a growing crew of freelance photographers. The series had its most prolific year to that date in 1925, with the appearance of photo books on Italy, Mexico, Canada, and, later that year, Palestine. In the meantime, several additional publishers had come to recognize the commercial opportunities of geographically themed photo books, and competition climaxed when, that same year, two more books on Palestine appeared, joining Ernst Wasmuth’s enterprise. The following examination of the books will help to elucidate what it was that might have appeared so intriguing about Palestine as a photographic object.
The Politics of Orientalist Pictorialism
Little has been preserved from the great times of the Old and the New Testament, and what the pilgrim to the Holy Land is shown, as the sites of the biblical incidents, can barely resist fierce criticism. But what does it matter whether the true place is located some hundred steps from what pious longing venerates today; the soil itself is holy. A peculiar atmosphere hovers over those lands and nobody can avoid it.
With these words Karl Grober, the photographer and author of Palastina, Arabien und Syrien: Baukunst, Landschaft und Volksleben, published by Ernst Wasmuth, introduced his readers to the country they would encounter in the book. Even if some knowledge and patience were required to unearth its treasures, he was confident that his photographs would carry the country’s aura into his readers’ living rooms and would revive the momentous episodes that had taken place in Palestine. Grober (1885-1945), chief curator at the Bavarian Office of Monument Preservation in Munich between 1911 and 1942, had replaced the photographers Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst Landrock, initially commissioned for the project, on a mission to Palestine for the publishing house. Though about a third of the photographs in his book were taken by other photographers (including Lehnert and Landrock), Grober took the rest of the images and by means of his camera recreated a biblical Palestine. His grandiose introduction prepared readers for a view of Palestine that would outperform all their expectations.
The first photograph on what is a restaged visual journey through the country shows the citadel tower of Jerusalem’s Old City, near the Jaffa Gate. The viewer is forced by the low angle to look up along the tower, and beaming light paints strong lines on the heavy stones of the city wall. The image seems to introduce the whole tapestry of Holy Land photographs: solid walls of ancient monuments, glistening light, and empty plains. Grober focuses on the traces of ancient and medieval Christianity; regions that are mentioned in the New Testament take center stage, and he explicitly searches out motifs that allude to biblical scenes or the ephemeral existence thereof in establishing this land as the center of Christian origins. Grober’s romantic gaze shows Palestine as both familiar and uncanny; as he draws on earlier Palestine photography, for example, that of Lehnert and Landrock, readers are led to feel that the place has maintained an aura that can reconnect them with their spiritual roots and revitalize their faith. Grober carefully decides where to place the land’s inhabitants and where to grant them visibility, making them extras in the staging of their own home. When they are shown from afar, they are not distinguishable and seem almost degendered, as in the photograph of a view of Hebron. No distinction can be made between Arabs, Bedouins, Jews, and oriental Christians. In contrast, when the land’s inhabitants are shown in close-ups, attention is paid to the details of their appearance, clothes, and facial expressions, distinguishing their physical traits, as in the photograph of an Abyssinian priest.
With its techniques of photographic pictorialism, such as soft-focus effects, coarse resolution, strong contrasts between light and shadows emphasized in the darkroom, and gravure printing, which made the photographs resemble copperplate etchings, the book promised to be a photographic treasure that would adorn a German living room with high-quality art. Unlike the avant-garde movements of the time, for which photography had taken on an equalizing role, Grober’s Palestine is one in which photography distinguishes between high and low art, improving on the original views.
Grober, following in a long tradition of orientalist depiction, situates the Orient largely in the past, while he, the Western observer, has moved on. To be sure, Grober’s aesthetic conservatism was also commissioned by the publishing house, which aspired to present the reader with “pure” and “unadulterated views” of the globe. This desire featured especially prominently among but was not limited to photographs of the Levant. The dehumanization of the people of the Orient and their erasure from the landscapes they inhabited was also not specifically a German habit but mirrored historic German ambitions to explore the Orient as a “friendly” harbinger of civilization creating strong economic, political, and cultural ties with the countries in the Middle East. Missionary societies, branches of German banks, scientific explorations, and military training belonged to Germany’s concept of soft conquest, which it understood as an antipode to aggressive British imperialism. To some, Grober’s “vacant” plains might have presented a welcome reminder of such pre-war, semicolonial German aspirations.
No particular group was chosen to represent the “backward” Levant in a particular way; all presented an allegedly degenerate form of living. However, the depiction of oriental Jews shown to the readers of 1925 Germany could entail more serious consequences than, for example, the aforementioned portrait of the Abyssinian priest. The priest is merely reduced to one of the backward and yet respectable locals, while the enlightened beholder knows that modern Christendom has moved on, to the West. The photograph of Jews praying at the Western Wall, on the other hand, can be seen as touching upon a distinct set of sensitivities in light of inner German tensions.
Since the end of the nineteenth century and especially during World War I, large numbers of Eastern Jews had migrated westward to escape increasing poverty and discrimination. The antisemitism that the Eastern Jews’ appearance in Germany unearthed was grounded in considerations of the Jews’ inferiority due to their oriental origins and their refusal to adopt Christianity as the “logical” conclusion to Judaism. Claims of this kind, first promulgated by orientalist scholars such as Johann David Michaelis (1717-91) and developed into a “cultural code” during the nineteenth century, galvanized radical anti-Jewish resentments. After the war, pogrom-like antisemitic riots erupted in several German cities. Though they were directed against Eastern Jews, they eventually led to questioning the status of German Jewry in its entirety. Common reactions of German Jews varied between self-hatred and the desire to simply “pass” as not Jewish or as “less” Jewish.
An image of Jews praying at the Western Wall, resembling the Eastern Jews who were increasingly visible in German cities, seemed to provoke unease among those readers who were keen to hold on to their status as “invisible,” integrated Jews. In a review of Grober’s Palestine panorama, art historian and amateur photographer Theodor Harburger expressed dismay over the one-sided presentation of the oriental Jew, which he feared would inform new stereotypes. Harburger did not complain about the images showing devout oriental Jews, whom he called “witnesses to Palestine’s centuries-old history,” but he wished that the views of Palestine had been “corrected” by including images of the Zionist “new Jew,” who, after all, presented a logical conclusion to the Jews’ various experiences and achievements made over centuries: “As the book claims to show the lives of the people [Volksleben], too, images should not have been limited to the ‘Jews on the Wailing Wall’ and the praying men and visitors to the synagogues but should have included the new but meaningful image of the Halutz.”
However, the book also invited alternative readings of the kind that bore positive effects for German Jews, and it is Harburger’s overall assessment of the book, praising “the warmth of its colors,” which allow “for a most beautiful imprint of the subtleties of artistic photography,” that suggests he was aware of this possibility. Placing the oriental Christian next to the oriental Jew could have resonated with nineteenth-century orientalist scholarship that sought to prove the common origin of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Orient. These shared roots, as Abraham Geiger for example saw it, made the Jews’ active integration redundant. They showed that the Jews were already a natural part of their environment and could, as Jews and without the need for conversion, be equal German citizens. Harburger seems to have acknowledged that the photographs could be seen as cherishing such a common past. Grober and Harburger’s shared interests and ongoing professional cooperation on matters of Jewish history and art in Bavaria suggest that the orientalist view of Palestine was not necessarily intended to fuel anti-Jewish resentments. When Theodor Harburger curated an exhibition at the Konkordiasaal in Munich in 1930, Grober visited the exhibition and wrote an almost enthusiastic review in the Bayerische Israelitische Gemeindezeitung in which he marveled over the treasures Harburger had unearthed. In his sympathetic account of the history of the Jewish art being showcased, the Catholic Grober demonstrated relevant background knowledge of Jewish life and customs in Bavaria and explained the lack of Jewish art from the period before the eighteenth century with reference to the insecurities Jews had faced, their German experience shaped by pogroms and persecutions. Grober’s praise of the vibrant and important role of Jews in Bavarian culture, made visible by Harburger, implied open criticism of antisemitic tendencies in his own Weimar German reality.
Grober’s images made full use of a pictorialist gaze and orientalist stereotypes. And yet his photographic techniques and styles reflected a role for the twentieth-century photographer of Palestine that was more complicated than the one his predecessors of the nineteenth century had played. Grober venerated an “empty” Orient that had yet to see the destructive force of modernity. At the same time, he comforted those who continued to project their hopes of a better, more modern future onto its plains, brought either by Zionist settlers or by “friendly” German colonizers. The reception of Grober’s conservatism shows that orientalist photography in the mid-1920s began to be challenged by viewers who expected to see a newer version of the Middle East. The two other photo books that appeared that year demonstrate that the discussion over whether imagery of the “old” Orient was to be replaced by a more “current” version had begun to gain political weight.
Contested Encounters
Christopher Pinney aptly employs Roland Barthes’s concept of a “sovereign contingency” of photography when he hints at the impossibility of instrumentalizing photography for a distinct (in his case, orientalist) agenda. Barthes’s concept points to the simultaneous existence of various temporalities reflected in photographs, even if they were taken at the same or at similar points in time, impeding the subjective presentation of this point as representing one objective temporal truth. Such contingencies were provided by the two additional photo books on Palestine that became available to the German shopper in December of 1925: Georg Landauer’s Palastina: 300 Bilder, published by Meyer and Jessen in Munich, and Palastina und das Ostjordanland, published by the Julius Hoffmann publishing house in Stuttgart and written by Ludwig Preiss and Paul Rohrbach. These two photo series, engaging the presentation of a different Palestine, contested Karl Grober’s meticulously molded simulacrum of the lands of the Bible based on his Christian education. Drawing on different techniques, their books promised a fresh eye on the Levant, freeing Grober’s gaze from the dust of bygone centuries and carrying Palestine into a Middle Eastern present.
Georg Landauer (1895-1954) was no professional photographer, but his role in Germany and the nature of his book shed light on the question of why he, too, joined the Palestine photo craze. Landauer, a native of Cologne, fought in World War I before studying law in Bonn, where he joined the Kartell judischer Verbindungen and later the Zionist labor organization Ha-po’el Ha-tsa’ir. After working in Jerusalem for three years, between 1926 and 1929, he became the head of the Berlin-based Palastina-Amt, where he shaped Zionist Gegenwartsarbeit (work in the present) in Germany and organized fundraising campaigns and emigration to Palestine. Situated at the heart of German Jewry’s inner struggles between nationalism and integration, Landauer seemed to aspire to introduce a new Palestinian presence to the German eye. By populating Palestine’s empty plains through photography, Landauer hoped to undermine the perception of Palestine as an idle wilderness. His Palestine was to show a modern political and cultural reality of the Middle East that invited a new evaluation of its role. His photos confronted the chauvinist gaze of Western culture, which turned Palestine into a museum of ancient sites that invited a liberal form of colonization. At the same time, they also undermined the Zionist slogan, popular among some groups, of Palestine as a “land without a people for a people without a land.”
The contrasts between Karl Grober’s view on Palestine and Landauer’s vistas are apparent from the beginning. One of the first photographs chosen by Landauer shows the very same citadel that Grober chose to mark the starting point of his journey through Palestine. Now the tower is merely the background for a scene of city life. Long shadows indicate the end of a bustling day, during which merchants have offered their products in front of the Jaffa Gate. Camels are waiting to be loaded with goods. The photograph has not received any special treatment in the darkroom and instead seems almost like a snapshot. The scenery in front of the Jaffa Gate has, in the words of Michel de Certeau, become a “practiced place,” a space formed by the subjects that give it meaning.
Unlike Grober’s work, Landauer’s book does not present a portfolio of his own photographs or those of his wife, the photographer Lou Landauer. Instead, his compilation of photographs, with captions in English, French, and German, is a melange of works of various local and visiting photographers traveling through Palestine, such as the German Jewish photographer Erich Brill, the photographer of the aforementioned picture of the citadel. Next to Brill, Landauer employs the works of photographers Theodor Benzinger, Bruno Hentschel, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, and Vester and Company of the American Colony, a group of American Christians living in East Jerusalem who, by the turn of the century, had established different tourist businesses, among them a photography shop. Landauer also makes use of images by local Jewish photographers in Palestine, such as Yaakov Ben Dov, Avraham Soskin, Zvi Oron Orushkes, and the Eliyahu brothers. By far the largest collection of photographs is that of Chalil Raad, a Christian Palestinian photographer from Jerusalem. The photographers’ names are listed at the end of the book together with the page numbers where their works appear. Together, so Landauer seems to have hoped, the works would present a conscious confusion of different photographic gazes on the land and thus create a Palestinian “now.” By offering various alternative realities, Landauer not only contests Grober’s stylized panorama but also appears to shed the individual objectives of the photographers and to demonstrate that only the whole of their works enables a complete view, denying the immediate control of one photographic gaze.
The accumulation and montage of the various photographs in Landauer’s collection shows multiple simultaneities and works to nullify the idea that there is one true depiction of Palestine. Landauer’s locals come to life and, by populating the ruins, villages, and cities, contest Grober’s Disneyfied, antiurban Orient. Pictures of Palestinian bread and spice sellers or children enjoying their visit to a fair alternate with images of Christian processions, of traveling fellaheen, and of Jewish pilgrims to Mount Meron. Both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews feature on several occasions, the latter as the keepers of Jewish traditional life in Palestine and the former as its innovators. This pluralist view, valuing Palestine’s oriental past and praising its present innovations, resonated with Landauer’s (and fellow German Zionists’) fascination with Martin Buber’s embrace of the German Jews’ liminal position between East and West. According to Buber, the appraisal of the Jews’ role as mediators would not only unify a Jewry that had fallen back to a strong East-West binary but would also create a genuinely modern form of Jewish living. Situated between East and West and embracing both, Jews in Palestine would, moreover, bridge the profound rift that imperialism had drawn between Orient and Occident. The Bayerische Israelitische Gemeindezeiting, which had reprimanded Grober’s one-sided views, praised Landauer for the comprehensive nature of his photographic collection.
Georg Landauer seemed to succeed in catering to the Jewish crowd he hoped to impress without, however, presenting a unanimously “Jewish” book. Non-Jewish readers in Germany could see this plethora of views as a testimony to the so-called orientals’ ability to assume new roles in modern society by bringing Western values back to an allegedly deteriorated region without destroying its aura of antiquity. In their role as pioneers and instructors of their oriental neighbors, the Jews of Palestine were given the status of an enlightened, westernizing vanguard. Criticism came merely from the small group of German Templers and their proteges in Germany, who lamented the lack of vistas from inside the life of Palestine’s German Templer community.
And yet it should be noted that Landauer’s compilation was not entirely free of the colonial gaze. Jeopardizing his pluralist panorama was his choice to juxtapose the old Palestine shown in the first two thirds of the book with that of a new, Zionist one. Using a somewhat triumphalist narrative structure that featured quite prominently in contemporary Zionist visual culture, Landauer showed the land twice, before and after the progress brought about by a Zionist zest for change. The logic of this photographic order was confirmed in an afterword in which Landauer promoted the idea of a Jewish majority in Palestine that, while living in peace with the Arab population, would connect “Palestine’s magnificent past with a splendid future.” Interestingly, the new vistas of Palestine in the back of the book tend to be less populated than the photographs on earlier pages. For example, a picture of Pinchas Rutenberg’s Palestine Electric Company plant shows notable parallels with Grober’s photograph of the Jerusalem citadel discussed earlier, venerating the purity of empty space.
Moreover, while Landauer did not look without sympathy on those who had kept the centuries-old traditions, he made clear that Judaism’s new outlook entailed benefits to both humans and soil. The Zionist settlers, who feature in long shots during their work on the fields, appear as organic elements of the environment they shape, whereas Sephardi life is framed by the narrow walls of study rooms and fences of school yards, denying the young pupils a natural connection to the land. Even Chalil Raad’s insights as an Arab Christian photographer into the lives of Arab Muslim and Christian merchants, housewives, and children seem staged, partaking in what has been labeled “photo-exoticism.” It is largely because of Raad that Landauer could present so many gazes on the land, but Raad too was engaged in the creation of touristic types.
German Zionism, though it was a child of Western imperialism and was aware of this legacy, tried to present itself as mediator between Western colonialism and non-Western, anticolonial movements. Yet in the end it remained caught in a German colonial semantics, indulging in the desire to educate the “natives.” Landauer’s Palestine photographs simultaneously contend that there is no single view of the land and present the land’s newer, more sophisticated version, mirroring the paradoxes and conflicts in the self-perception of German Zionism.
Ludwig Preiss’s Palastina und das Ostjordanland seems to offer a synthesis between the outwardly ethnographic work of Landauer and the museum-like vistas of Grober. Preiss’s book promises a modern view of ancient places by means of the new uvachrome technique, presenting not the first but the most authentic color photographs of Palestine to date. Though only 21 out of a total 214 pictures were color photographs, they nevertheless constituted the book’s major attraction. The color prints allowed readers to enjoy the vivid mosaics on the walls of the Dome of the Rock and the Dome of the Chain and to marvel at the panorama of the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene, with its golden spires, perched on the slopes of the verdant Mount of Olives. With its stylized emblem of an oasis on the cover, Preiss’s book promised a state-of-the-art view of Palestine.
Yet instead of presenting modern views in form and content, the book’s outlook is conservative, and the impression of the synthesis between modern technique and old place is shed early on. It is color photography, initially promising a new outlook on the land, that does away with the idea of a modern gaze on Palestine. Color photography had a mixed reputation among the guild of photographers of the 1920s, at least in its early years and at least among the rising stars of Germany’s New Vision movement, who dismissed color as deluding, sentimental, and distracting because its seeming authenticity risked catapulting both photographer and spectator back into the age of romanticist pictorialism. Some of Preiss’s color photographs justify such skepticism. For example, a picture of Rosh Pina appears in almost mural-like fashion. Nothing about the picture, taken from afar and from a high angle, suggests modern Zionist settlement activity, and instead of the Jewish activism it ostensibly epitomizes, the sight probably impressed the photographer with its resemblance to a southern European landscape. Color, instead of bringing the spectator closer to the scene, freezes the photographer’s nostalgic fantasies and increases the distance between the object and the observing subject. Unlike Grober’s work, nostalgic longing is fueled not by soft-focused ruins but by the colorized vista of a recent addition to the landscape.
Preiss’s “reactionary modernist” vision comes to the fore not only in his use of the uvachrome technique but also in the general array of his motifs, which mirrors his orientalist view. Again the land’s plains are rather empty, cities feature rarely, and people are reduced to the usual types. Most of them seem to merge in the oriental figure of the Bedouin, who is presented as the typical dweller in the land. Much in accordance with the long tradition of orientalist visual arts, Bedouins feature as the quintessential figures of the Orient, including both Jews and Arabs and thus presenting a “Semitic” combination of both. More unadulterated by modernity and less sophisticated at the same time, they meet with respect on the one hand and arrogance on the other, nourishing colonial desires.
The same photographic contingency that impeded Grober’s mission, however, also puts the narrative of the photographer Preiss at risk. It is not only the simultaneous existence of additional photo books and of other possible views that infringes on Preiss’s effort to stage a particular Palestine; uvachrome technology itself poses a threat because it reminds the spectator that Preiss’s trip to Palestine could only have taken place recently. The immediacy of Preiss’s travels becomes especially evident in those cases where some of the Palestinian types come to life in the form of portraits of the inhabitants of the land. Unlike the locals who feature in Raad’s images, for example, these Bedouins realize the presence of the camera and decide not to engage as actors. One such encounter with the camera happens in a sequence of two black-and-white photographs, one of a Bedouin woman and one of her grandchild and great-grandchild.
The old woman’s face is laced with wrinkles that extend to the pleats of her simple garment and on to the cracks in the stone wall behind her. And yet she clearly resists the label of a “living fossil.” Though she is aware of the look of the photographer, she denies him a direct visual encounter. Her headscarf and bracelet, her covered hands and countenance connote confidence and radiate a distinct dignity. As if to underline the intensity of her reaction, her eyes and the corners of her mouth suggest worry or discontent, an emotion that is mirrored by that of her great-grandchild on the opposite page. Sitting in the arms of a teenage girl, the toddler expresses unease. The girl holding the toddler is the only one who smiles, but toward an unknown point beyond the frame, not into the camera. By resisting representation as mere types, they take an active part in the photographic dialogue and become participants in what Ariella Azoulay has labeled the “civil contract of photography.” The photographer apparently warrants this agency; after all, he seems to want to find out more about his photos’ subjects and grants their discontent a place in his book.
It is this photographic contingency that rehabilitates, partly, the view of a photographic synthesis, because it might have planted hope among German Jews for that actual, colorful, and modern reality of the Palestinian landscape. It helped to make Preiss’s book a “contact zone” between Zionism and a German semicolonialist gaze, even if, for sales’ sake, Preiss largely withdrew to the original mode of seeing for all other German viewers.
Like Grober’s book, both Preiss’s and Landauer’s books came with texts that located the photographs in a distinct political and social setting. Whereas Preiss got thejournalist Paul Rohrbach to write two of the introductory texts, Landauer or his publisher succeeded in engaging the popular travel writer Sven Hedin to feature in his book. Both Hedin and Rohrbach had been to Palestine before and thus appeared as authorities in the field, but it is only with the background of their pre-war political writings and their status in the “new” Germany that these men’s motivations to contribute their views on Palestine can be understood in their entirety. Their introductory essays were meant to prepare the reader for the images they would see in the book. Instead, they added new angles altogether on the presence and the role of the Middle East in general and the visibility and invisibility of the oriental and the “new” Jew in particular. Their contributions, directing the readers’ eyes, will be read against the photographs.
Framing the Photographs
Sven Hedin (1865-1952), who was born in Stockholm, discovered his passion for geopolitics at an early age. Beginning in 1885, he traveled through Central Asia, returning with the insights of a Western beholder that would soon gain him popularity. During his studies in Berlin, Hedin looked favorably on Germany’s efforts to become a world power, whereas he viewed the Russian quest for hegemony with suspicion. In his 1917 travelogue Jerusalem,, he offered a mixture of ethnographic study and condescending political assessment, demonstrating how he embraced the notion of Western superiority while distinguishing between what he called the greedy desires of British imperialism and the genuine and noble aspirations of the German humanist mission:
Do you really believe that England, which lit the blaze of the World War in order to profit from the devastating damage, will be satisfied with the enormous territories it has already looted by means of violence or tricks? An empire like this one can only be kept together by ever-increasing conquests. Spread the world map in front of you, identify the British possessions with the years of their conquest—and then decide whether my claim is true or not…. The only thing that can free the world from this vampire is Germany’s victorious sword.
Hedin’s Anglophobia was shared by Paul Rohrbach (1869-1956), who received training as a Protestant theologian and undertook several trips to Palestine at the turn of the century. A specialist in German colonizing strategies in Africa, Rohrbach also shared an abundance of political opinions on matters of the Middle East, conforming, generally, with Friedrich Naumann’s “liberal imperialism,” which advocated a “friendly alliance” with the Ottomans. Though Rohrbach found gentler words to express his political position than did Hedin, his strategies and his writings resonated with those of his Swedish colleague, openly revealing the German desire for colonial advances. After the war, both Rohrbach and Hedin would come to publicly propagate the theory that the November Revolution of 1918 led by German republicans had hindered the victory of the German army over its enemies, mourn the “ignominy of Versailles,” and turn to a colonial revisionism that would result in both men’s admiration for Adolf Hitler’s geopolitical goals.
In the photo books, both Hedin and Rohrbach refrain from openly manifesting political biases. Rather, they phrase their comments as a series of tacit observations that transform the books into a stage for their political agenda. The words Hedin finds to describe Palestine in his introduction to Landauer’s book, reminiscing about his 1916 visit, are colored by nostalgic neologisms and metaphors meant to aggrandize the splendor of a land that is hidden behind a “fog of myths,” that has sunken into a “slumber” and yet “echoes” a past that heard the Christian Our Father prayer being spoken for the first time. Like Grober, Hedin addresses enlightened Christian readers by reminding them that it does not matter where exactly the scenes of the New Testament took place, as long as the sacred grandeur still radiates from the old stones. But Hedin, a descendant of Jewish ancestors who immigrated to Sweden and converted to Christianity, also knew to accommodate his Jewish readers. In his closing paragraph, he suggests that Zionism might be able to defend the frontier region of Palestine that he locates on the verge of the West, not the East, and that he considers threatened both by decay and by conquest from the “Peoples of Asia.” Hedin thus attunes both Jewish and non-Jewish readers’ eyes to the Zionist achievements visible in the pictures. Thereby, not only does he create a positive “public model of Jewishness,” but he also emphasizes the political significance of Jewish settlement in Palestine.
Rohrbach, in his role as editor of the journal Grosseres Deutschland, expressed similarly positive views when he met with Zionist students of the Kartell Judischer Verbindungen in 1915 to discuss with them “the future of the Orient.” In accord with the precepts of liberal imperialism and drawing on the apparent eagerness of Western Jews to serve as mediators between East and West, Rohrbach hoped Zionism would strengthen Germany’s influence in the East and corroborate its image as a peaceful benefactor. Rohrbach’s texts in the photo book reenact the reader’s journey through a 1925 Palestine, presenting both Zionism and the German Templer communities, whose work he had come to admire on his fin-de-siecle trip to Palestine, as integral to the land. Both Hedin’s and Rohrbach’s views suggested that the hope for “improvements” from the West, and more specifically from Germany, could be kept alive with the help of western Jews while also praising Palestine’s untouched desert wilderness.
Both men’s writings, however, leave doubts about the genuine nature of their embrace of Zionism and the inclusivity of their ideas. The Palestine that was at stake in 1925 was no product of German advances. Instead, it was the result of a British promise for a future Jewish state without immediate benefits for Germany. Germany and the Ottoman Empire had been forced to cut their ties entirely, and Germany had been dispossessed of all its options for colonial aspirations, whether peaceful or aggressive. The new Jewish-British “marriage” and the Jews’ lone “conquest” was shunned by anti-Jewish and colonial revisionist voices, who additionally poisoned the atmosphere with rumors that Jewish diplomats and high-ranking officials had sabotaged the German colonialist administration. An essay penned by Rohrbach in 1915 pointed the way toward a new understanding of Palestine, reflecting the ambivalent view of the oriental Jew. In his essay, Rohrbach pitied the masses of impoverished Jews in eastern Europe but also expressed fear of their influence. In light of anti-Jewish resentments, which increased with the arrival of Jews from eastern Europe, Zionism, according to Rohrbach, was on the verge of becoming a solution to the Jewish Question in Germany. Hedin and Rohrbach might have continued to share such views beyond World War I, considering that their initial embrace of Zionism seems to have been rooted mainly in strategic considerations.
Symptoms of the increasing exclusion of Jews as equal participants in the discourse on the role of Palestine and the simultaneous trajectory of an advance of radical right-wing thought can be also seen in the afterlife of Georg Landauer’s photobook. In 1927, Meyer and Jessen published a new edition of the same book. This cheaper Volksausgabe (people’s edition), called Das Heilige Land: 300 Bilder, appeared without Landauer’s afterword, an absence that a reviewer in the Judische Rundschau promptly criticized. Hedin’s introduction remained unchanged. Two years later, in 1929, Landauer’s name also disappeared from the book’s title page; Meyer and Jessen’s third edition, Palastina im Bilde: 300 Abbildungen, had become Sven Hedin’s Palestine. Landauer’s political objective of projecting an envisioned future onto the plains of Tel Aviv or Emek Yezre’el probably got lost along the way or remained visible only to readers who understood their Zionist encoding. The photographs of Zionist settlements in the book’s last part might have appeared like a strange supplement and not like Landauer seemed to have envisioned it, as the logical interim conclusion to the historical development of the Levant. Hedin’s prominent foreword, which initially promised to push the book’s sales figures and that had helped to promote a new imagery of Palestine, would eventually prove a welcome pretext for the erasure of Landauer’s name and his Zionist and humanist agenda.
The persistence of some texts and the disappearance of others demonstrates that the books were not only luxury products or valuable assets. To those who chose to view them with a colonial revisionist, a Zionist, or a liberal gaze and who knew the writers’ points of view, they also presented political platforms. Everybody involved in the production of the books—photographers, writers, and publishers—used fascination with the visual to promote their objectives. It is in their entirety, therefore, that the books must be read, not because the texts explain the photographs but because the photographs and texts contextualize each other.
Conclusion
In 1935, Georg Landauer published a new photo book on Palestine titled Palastina and published by the Judische Buchvereinigung in Berlin. Ten years after the publication of his first Palestine photo book, the land and its outlook had changed. More than before, Landauer’s new Palestine featured street photography and social realism with a clear focus on the Jewish experience. The country’s people and everyday life, including advertising for movies and concerts, took center stage. The book ended with a photograph of a sign for a settlement saying “Kiryiat Bialik” in Hebrew and “German Jews Settlement” in Hebrew and English. Though there was not much of a settlement to see yet, the sign promised the hope of a German Jewish future.
Georg Landauer had immigrated to Palestine one year earlier, in 1934, and his book seemed to be a call for German Jews to follow suit. In his new role as director of the Central Bureau for the Settlement of German Jews, Landauer was interested in demonstrating that new immigrants would be cared for. The existence of a photo book depicting Palestine’s beaches and open skies brought new meaning to the conflicted world of German Jewry, as German Jews were increasingly forced into secluded spaces. The book invited them to give up on the idea of integration and to understand that their visibility in Germany had been erased, as Landauer’s name had been from the cover of his first photo book.
Whereas the 1925 book had ardently propagated a vision of Palestine that was shared by various ethnic and national groups, the new book prioritized Jewish life in the land. Orientalist Palestinian fantasies turned into politicized realities, and the presence of the Jews largely shifted to Palestine, superimposing a new Jewish reality on the more complex vision of Landauer’s initial idea of Zionism. Landauer’s book, then, can be read as a reaction to the presences and absences of Jews that the books of 1925 had created. Those who had preferred an empty Orient were now confronted with one that was Jewish, populated, and modern.
With the rise of National Socialism, the affectionate German depiction of Palestine would give way to the presentation of an Orient that was lost to the hands of the Jews and British, who would “destroy” the Palestine of the longing beholder, replacing it with battlefields. The same Palestine that had been “untouched land” in 1925 became, to the German spectator, a playground of British imperialist “looting” and Jewish “racketeering.” Photography came to fuel such emotions on another modern platform, that of photojournalism. Photos and photo essays in Nazi German-illustrated newspapers presented Jews in Palestine as aggressive colonizers, such claims often supported by photographs of Arab captives as victims of Jewish and British rule. The place that had once unified Jews and Germans in a desire for semicolonial advances became a dividing line, galvanizing unease about a strong British Empire, envy of a successful Zionist colonial conquest, and fear of an allegedly unpredictable Jewish nationalism in the making. Palestine, to the German beholder, now attained the status of another country in the line of missed colonial opportunities.
The terra sancta of the Middle East was replaced with a new East inhabited by a “Slavic race” that invited revived German colonial ambitions. This new German colonialism dwelt on codes of racial distinction and spatial expansion of an “empty land” that had been simmering since the seventeenth century. What had once been presented as the opportunity to civilize indigenous “primitives” was translated into the necessity of subordinating, ruling, and, finally, destroying them. Advances of this kind were guided and propagated by people with firsthand experience in colonial expansion, such as Paul Rohrbach and Sven Hedin, and illustrated with the usual plethora of racist stereotypes.
The photo books of 1925 proved both a source of and a challenge to the roots of such worldviews. Jews were presented as progressive colonizers, backward “orientals,” partners of the British, or possible mediators for the Germans—or they did not appear in Palestine at all, either because they were “merged” with the Bedouins or because they were deemed eligible to “pass” as Germans. To be sure, even in 1925, Landauer had been the only one to unanimously embrace and endorse a visual vocabulary of a Zionist present and future. His 1935 book was a logical consequence of the founding stone laid for a new political presence 10 years earlier. The other books were more reluctant, suggesting various ways of reading the land and yet replaying the tropes of an orientalist tradition. But the trio of books in 1925 allowed for a contingency that, 10 years later, would be denied the spectator’s eye. They offered Jews a place in public discourse and a chance to draft, correct, or manifest a visual presence in German society that was more multifaceted than ever before or after.