Thomas Zeller | Gallery: Thomas Zeller on August Sander's Rhine Landscapes | Environmental History, 12.2

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THOMAS ZELLER ON AUGUST SANDER'S RHINE LANDSCAPES

THE GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHER August Sander (1876–1964) took this picture of the Rhine River, close to Bonn, in 1930.¹Sander revealed a Rhine bristling with human activity, and his photograph is an aesthetically powerful reminder of the idea of cultural landscape, which has been far more politically complicated in Europe than in the United States. In fact, the politics of the idea have hampered European environmental historians' ability to discuss human landscapes. Sander's work suggests ways in which historians can now embrace the European tradition of cultural landscape, and move beyond the twentieth-century politics which tainted that tradition for so long. Given the preeminence of cultural landscapes in American documentary photography, these politics of the aesthetics mattered, and still matter, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Neither a wild river nor a Romantic conduit for river cruises, August Sander's Rhine is a working Rhine.² The manifold human activities on and alongside the Rhine are his central narrative.³ Wing dams built into the stream on the left hand side calm its waters, slow its flow, and help to create a navigation channel, used by the Rhine barge in the lower right of the picture. The Nonnenwerth Island is in the midst of the river. It is the site of a Franciscan monastery that, in the nineteenth century, became a hotel whose guests included the American writer James Fenimore Cooper and the European composer Franz Liszt.⁴ Beyond the river's banks, humans have created fertile agricultural landscapes with sharply delineated fields, meadows, and pockets of trees. The Eifel Mountains dominate the background. Small and medium-sized clouds add to the sense of movement and activity that Sander's Rhine encapsulates.

August Sander: The Rhine Valley and the Nonnenwerth Island, 1930.

© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Cologne; Artists Rights Society, New York, 2007.

Sander is well known for his series of human portraits, published in 2002 as People of the Twentieth Century. In that work, he captured a totality of German faces, people from different classes, regions, and origins. Sander was interested in reading the physiognomy of the men and women he portrayed, looking for discernible differences that would reveal the conditions in which they lived.⁵ Sander chose a similar approach to landscape photography, which he pursued from the start of his career. This photograph is thus a portrait of a Rhine, its countenance analyzed as Sander would read a human face, its varied surface as revealing as a human expression.

Based on the physiognomic tradition in Continental European geography, Sander read landscapes as testimonies of human interaction with nature. A native Rhinelander, he familiarized himself with the geology and geography of the regions in which he grew up and worked. He chose to include, not exclude, routes of transportation such as roads, railways, and the predominantly engineered river landscapes of the 1930s. He depicted the agricultural landscape as the product of human labor, and the total landscape as a cultural product. In a radio address, Sander expressed his interest in the way "man leaves his imprint [on landscape].... In landscape, we can recognize the human spirit of an era, which we can capture with the help of a photographic apparatus. This is similar to architecture and industry and to all human works big and small."⁶

Sander presented the river as a place of human interaction with nature, but he was not a technophile by any means. His photographic renditions of storage dams and reservoirs do not strike celebratory poses, but are sober, almost reserved. They neither condemn nor extol the technological landscapes created by humans over the course of time. Rather, Sander aimed for a methodical contemplation, a detached understanding, and a thorough reading of landscapes as evidence of human activity.⁷

In the nineteenth century, German geographers coined the term "cultural landscape" for understanding these kinds of ensembles. The landscape tradition that they spawned aimed at comprehending the total interaction of humans and their environments.⁸ In the 1920s, several coffee-table books published in Germany took photographic stock of that interaction, with images ranging from meadows to harbors. A volume entitled Culture in the Mirror of Landscape aimed to bring the totality of landscape changes to its readers, from the Sahara's oasis to Irish meadows and Westphalian coal mines.

American photographers in the 1920s and 1930s embraced these ideas of landscape as well.⁹ In a presentation to the 1939 meeting of the American Historical Association, Roy E. Stryker, director of the Farm Security Administration photography project, and Paul H. Johnstone, a historian working for the Agriculture Department, recommended documentary photographs as sources for historians' research and echoed the belief that "every culture puts its stamp upon the terrain and creates its own landscape."¹⁰

With the advent of environmental history in the 1970s, American scholars drew on these German and American ideas, and freely embraced the idea of cultural landscape. U.S. environmental historians use the words "landscape" and "American landscape" liberally and even imprecisely, often as a substitute for the word nature. If one searches for "landscape" in the electronic table of contents for Environmental History, the query comes to a halt when the search engine shows more than a hundred hits for "landscape" among the published articles and book reviews. American scholars, it seems, can play with these ideas and their meanings at will.

In Germany, however, scholars have had no such freedom with the idea of cultural landscape. The "Blood and Soil" rhetoric of the National Socialists forever changed its meanings, making scholarship on cultural landscapes anathema after 1945. During the first few years of the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany, the Nazi government passed conservation laws addressing ecoforestry and landscape-friendly designs of roads and factories. Not love of nature, but concern for racial purity appeared to have been the driving force. For the hardiest proponents of the "Blood and Soil" approach, only a healthy landscape could bring forth and sustain a healthy race. Cleansing the racial body went along with weeding the landscape.

As recent research has shown, Nazi rhetoric did not, for the most part, lead to systematic action. Yet the bitter aftertaste of an essentialist landscape-culture connection lingered on for years, especially in German historiography. Until the 1980, for example, historians of German environmentalism identified concerns for landscape and aesthetic understandings of nature as romantic, anti-modern, and out of synch with the demands of a modern industrial society.¹¹ There are no established landscape studies in Germany akin to what exists in the United States or Britain. A German version of John Brinckerhoff Jackson would face suspicion of harboring sympathy for what was seen as a central tenet of Nazi ideology. Even though the Nazi leadership by and large held landscapes in relatively low regard, and the years of the dictatorship saw an intensified exploitation of natural resources, academics championing the landscape approach in the postwar period as a tool for historians were seen as ultraconservative at best.

Only recently have historians of Central Europe been more willing to engage with landscape. For a new generation, looking at and historically understanding landscape is by no means synonymous with embarking on a journey down a slippery slope toward Nazi ideology. While it is vital to realize that the Nazi ideology appropriated "landscape," this does not mean the concept has been invalidated. Looking at landscape changes contributes to an enriched understanding of environmental history that includes a contemporaneous aesthetic understanding of nature. The concept of landscape remains an ideal vessel for both material and aesthetic questions. Its earthen quality and its value as a cultural tool highlights these comprehensive, integrative qualities. Landscape forms the nexus between the material and the visual, between appropriation and appreciation.

A reconsideration of Sander's photograph is thus emblematic of the current willingness of European historians to study landscapes as historically contingent indicators of human change and to acknowledge the richness of the landscape concept. By using it, they can better understand how and why historical actors changed and valued their natural environments and how, more recently, they incorporated these landscape changes into their deliberations of modernity. It would appear that the brown whiff of landscape has subsided.

Finally, a small but significant detail from Sander's biography highlights the intricacies of the landscape approach. When he learned in 1934 that the Nazi regime had thrown his Communist son in prison and suppressed his work, the photographer literally sought refuge in the Rhenish landscape and went hiking. In other words, Sander's turn to landscape was as political as landscape itself.¹²

Thomas Zeller is the author of Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930–1970 (Berghahn Books, 2007) and has co-edited the volumes How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (with Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Mark Cioc, Ohio, 2005), Germany's Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History (with Thomas Lekan, Rutgers 2005), The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscape in the United States and Europe (with Christof Mauch, forthcoming 2007), and Rivers of History: Perspectives on Waterways in Europe and North America (with Christof Mauch, forthcoming 2007). He teaches at the University of Maryland, College Park.

NOTES

^1. The photograph is entitled "The Rhine Valley and the Nonnenwerth Island." August Sander: Landschaften (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1999), 14.

^2. The historical literature on the Rhine is considerable. A few examples include Lucien Febvre, Le Rhin: Histoire, Mythes et Réalités (1935; reprint, Paris: Perrin, 1997); Hans Boldt, ed., Der Rhein: Mythos und Realität eines europäischen Stromes (Cologne: Rheinland, 1988); Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-biography, 1815–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); and Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

^3. For analyses of landscape paintings by an art historian and an ecologist, see Henry Makowski and Bernhard Buderath, Die Natur dem Menschen untertan: Ökologie im Spiegel der Landschaftsmalerei (Munich: Kindler, 1983). An excellent overview is Martin Warnke's Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

^4.http://www.nonnenwerth.de/extdoc/Informationen/alle/Geschichtliches.php, accessed July 28, 2005.

^5. Susanne Lange and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, People of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002).

^6. The radio address is quoted in August Sander: Landschaften, 34.

^7. Sander's approach to landscape photography remains popular, with major exhibitions—most recently in 2004 in Washington, DC. August Sander: Photographs of the German Landscape (Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection, 2004).

^8. Richard Muir, Approaches to Landscape (Lanham, MD: Barnes & Noble, 1999); and David N.Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). For the renaissance of the landscape concept in more recent cultural geography, see Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); and Kenneth Robert Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain's Renaissance to America's New World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).

^9. Nikolaus Creutzburg, Kultur im Spiegel der Landschaft. Das Bild der Erde in seiner Gestaltung durch den Menschen. Ein Bilderatlas (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1930). Another example is the more nationalist Eugen Diesel, Das Land der Deutschen (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1931). For the United States, see Finis Dunaway, "On the Subtle Spectacle of Fallen Leaves," Environmental History 9 (2004): 730–34.

^10. Roy E. Stryker and Paul H. Johnstone, "Documentary Photographs," in The Cultural Approach to History, ed. Caroline F. Ware (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 324–30, 329.

^11. For an overview of this literature and for new approaches, see Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller, "Introduction: The Landscape of German Environmental History," in Germany's Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History, ed. Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 1–14; and Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, eds., How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005).

^12. Wolfgang Kemp, "Die Landschaftsphotographie August Sanders," August Sander. Rheinlandschaften. Photographien 1929–1946 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1981), 37–49, 46. Like many of his fellow Germans, Sander claimed to have lived in "inner emigration" during the Nazi years. Yet he expanded his portfolio of German society in the 1930s and 1940s by photographing Hitler Youth and Nazi officials as well as a Jewish woman before her emigration. August Sander: Citizens of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 242–48; August Sander: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2000), 88–93. For an extended discussion, see ibid., 101–39.

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