Photographs from the Hahne-Niehoff Archive provide insights into regional festivals and how ethnologists recorded them in the 1920s to 1940s. It shows the connection between ethnology and the rise of National Socialism.

At the rear of a vehicle decorated for a festival procession a hand-painted placard with a swastika flag proclaims “Eat German Fruit!” The 1933 photo is one of 39,000 in the Hahne-Niehoff-Archive that are held at the HU’s Department of European Ethnology. The Humboldt Lab at the Humboldt Forum is exhibiting material from the archive and taking a critical look at the sociopolitical role of ethnology. Hans Hahne and Heinz Julius Niehoff were anything but neutral observers, says European ethnologist and historian Franka Schneider, co-curator of the archive exhibition. Their research deliberately promoted the rise of National Socialism.

“He Was a Nationally Oriented Academic”

Hans Hahne, a prehistorian and director of the State Institute of Prehistory in Halle, had a clear political outlook characterized by racism and anti-Semitism. “Today,” Schneider says, “we would say he was a nationally oriented academic.” He aimed to compile a comprehensive photographic inventory of “German customs.” Between 1920 and 1945 Hahne and his collaborator Heinz Julius Niehoff, a photographer and documentary filmmaker, mainly documented festivals, costumes and rural architecture, mostly in the area around Halle, and shot more than 1,000 small format films. “In the process,” Schneider explains, “they pursued a political agenda of visually producing and thereby stabilizing what was ‘specifically German’.” One of Hahne’s aims was to construct a purported continuity between Germanic and German customs. “He was one of those who popularized nationalist ideas of ‘German ethnicity’ and common ‘Nordic bloodlines’ from the early 1920s on, later developing them for use by National Socialism,” she notes.

Hans Hahne, a prehistorian and director of the State Institute of Prehistory in Halle, had a clear political outlook characterized by racism and anti-Semitism. “Today,” Schneider says, “we would say he was a nationally oriented academic.” He aimed to compile a comprehensive photographic inventory of “German customs.” Between 1920 and 1945 Hahne and his collaborator Heinz Julius Niehoff, a photographer and documentary filmmaker, mainly documented festivals, costumes and rural architecture, mostly in the area around Halle, and shot more than 1,000 small format films. “In the process,” Schneider explains, “they pursued a political agenda of visually producing and thereby stabilizing what was ‘specifically German’.” One of Hahne’s aims was to construct a purported continuity between Germanic and German customs. “He was one of those who popularized nationalist ideas of ‘German ethnicity’ and common ‘Nordic bloodlines’ from the early 1920s on, later developing them for use by National Socialism,” she notes.

The photos are on show together with recordings from the dialect collection of the Humboldt-Universität’s Sound Archives, which include 773 recordings of German dialects. Both archives were compiled immediately after World War I and are shown in correlation. From the Hahne-Niehoff Archive perspective visitors can more comprehensively understand the collection of dialect recordings and vice-versa, says Dr. Gorch Pieken, curator of the Humboldt-Universität’s exhibition at the Humboldt Forum. Both archives seek to contribute toward creating a national identity and to culturally legitimize territorial claims beyond the borders of the German Reich.

Insights into Historical Everyday Cultures

Dealing with these testimonies to those days is intended to encourage visitors to contend with the present. Gorch Pieken refers to the Hahne-Niehoff Archive as “a far-off mirror that by means of specific examples shows how the diversity of the Weimar Republic was contested by nationalist circles and displaced by National Socialism.” Looking at the past, he says, is especially instructive in connection with the research undertaken by the Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS) cluster of excellence. In the exhibition SCRIPTS investigates current extreme right-wing contestations of states with democratic constitutions.

Historical photos pose a challenge for people today to find a differentiated approach to them. Not infrequently they are still regarded as being objective media. But there is no such thing as objective documentation. Setting up archives creates and establishes reality. The exhibition shows how to find a critical approach to documents of this kind. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to consider what is not to be seen in the photographs and has thus not been archived, Franka Schneider explains. Photos from the archive convey a romanticized view of agriculture, for example. Poverty, illness and child labor are not to be seen in them.

The photos and dialect recordings nonetheless provide insights into historical everyday cultures and how language develops. “In the dialect recordings concepts are used that we no longer understand and in the photographs equipment and work can be seen with which we are no longer familiar,” says Gorch Pieken, who also describes the archives as “storerooms of living human possibility.” Personal stories that are touching or give cause for concern are also documented.