The Hahne-Niehoff Archive: History as a critical mirror

Photos from the Hahne-Niehoff archive provide insights into regional festivals and their folkloristic recording from the 1920s to the 1940s. They show the connection between folklore and the rise of National Socialism.

A float was decorated for the parade. At the back is a hand-painted sign with a swastika flag and the invitation: ‘Eat German fruit’. The photo from 1933 is one of a total of 39,000 images from the Hahne-Niehoff archive, which is stored at the HU’s INSTITUTE FOR EUROPEAN ETHNOLOGY. The Humboldt Laboratory in the Humboldt Forum shows objects from the archive and thus takes a critical look at the socio-political role of ethnology. After all, Hans Hahne and Heinz Julius Niehoff were by no means neutral observers, emphasises European ethnologist and historian Franka Schneider, who is co-curating the archive exhibition. On the contrary: with their research, they consciously promoted the rise of National Socialism.

The prehistorian and director of the State Institute of Prehistory in Halle, Hans Hahne, had a clear political stance that was characterised by racism and anti-Semitism. ‘We would say today that he was a völkisch scientist,’ says Franka Schneider. It was about the comprehensive photographic inventory of ‘German customs’. Together with his colleague Heinz Julius Niehoff, a photographer and documentary filmmaker, Hahne mainly documented festivals, traditional costumes and rural architecture between 1920 and 1945. The two mainly travelled the area around Halle, exposing more than 1,000 35mm films in the process. ‘They also pursued the political agenda of visually producing the “own” and thereby stabilising it,’ explains Franka Schneider. One of Hahne’s aims was to construct a supposed continuity between Germanic and German customs. ‘He was one of those who, as early as the beginning of the 1920s, popularised the völkisch ideas of ‘German ethnicity’ and ‘Nordic blood heritage’ and later harnessed them for National Socialism,’ she explains.

Hans Hahne himself gave speeches at the festivals and spread his nationalist views on site. How little he differentiated between his role as a scientist and his National Socialist views is also documented in photographs. In one photograph, his right arm can be seen thrusting into the picture from behind to give the Hitler salute.

The photos are presented together with recordings from the dialect collection of the Humboldt University Sound Archive, which comprises 733 recordings of German dialects. Both archives were created immediately after the First World War and are placed in relation to each other in the exhibition. From the perspective of the Hahne-Niehoff archive, visitors can understand the dialect collection more comprehensively and vice versa, explains Dr Gorch Pieken, curator of the HU show at the Humboldt Forum. Both archives aimed to contribute to the creation of a national identity and to culturally legitimise territorial claims outside the borders of the German Reich.

The examination of evidence from this period is also intended to encourage visitors to engage with the present. Gorch Pieken speaks of the Hahne-Niehoff Archive as ‘a distant mirror that uses concrete examples to show how the diversity of the Weimar Republic was contested by völkisch circles and suppressed by National Socialism’. Especially in connection with the research of the Cluster of Excellence ‘CONTESTATIONS OF THE LIBERAL SCRIPT (SCRIPTS)’, the look into the past is revealing. After all, SCRIPTS is also analysing current right-wing extremist challenges to democratic constitutional states in the exhibition.

Today’s viewers are faced with the challenge of finding a differentiated approach to historical photographs. After all, they are often still seen as objective media. However, there can be no such thing as objective documentation; reality is created and codified through the creation of archives. The exhibition shows how a critical approach to such documents can be found. Franka Schneider explains that visitors to the exhibition are invited to consider what cannot be seen in the photographs and has therefore not been archived. For example, images from the archive convey a romanticised view of agriculture. Poverty, disease and child labour cannot be seen in them.

Nevertheless, the photos and dialect recordings also provide insights into historical everyday cultures and the development of language. ‘The dialect recordings use terms that we no longer understand today, and the photographs show equipment and work that we no longer recognise,’ says Gorch Pieken, who also describes the archives as “evidence chambers of the human experience”. Because personal stories that are touching or moving are also documented.