Faschism’s Orientalism: Nazi Germany, Zionism, and the Photographic Representation of Palestine

The representation of Jews in Nazi Germany is normally associated with a distinct tradition of anti-Semitic icons of the Ostjude, which had been refined for decades. In contrast to Jewish self-representation that, since historians such as Heinrich Graetz and artists such as Ephraim Moses Lilien, were eager to add a distinct oriental genealogy to Jewish history, the Oriental Jew did not appear in the Nazi anti-Jewish iconography, so it seems. Moreover, as Jewish photography was dismissed as “entarted” and “verjudet” it was censored from the German eye. With this paper I want to show that what has been labelled a ‘Nazi German aesthetics’ was not as hermetically closed as has been assumed so far and that the German spectator was introduced to additional ways of seeing Jews. It was photojournalism that kept the channels of different perceptions open, especially with regular news from Palestine. I claim that the question of the Orient, the fear of its decline and the insights into the newly constructed ‘oriental’ lives of Jews are closely connected to the perception of Zionism in Nazi Germany. Zionism was seen as a factor that brought this decline about and thus threatened German desires of conquest and appropriation of the oriental landscape. My study will offer a new look on the history of the perception of Zionism in Nazi Germany in the form of the consideration of the hitherto neglected body of visual sources and their ways of showing the various appearances of Jews in the Nazi German spectacle.