"Serving Racial Politics"

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"Photography was Reich Minister R. Walther Darré's perferred medium when it came to illustrating and disseminating his blood-and-soil ideology. Staged in front of the camera, its protagonists were athletic young peasants of both sexes who were specially trained at the Reich School Burg Neuhaus in Brunswick. Their bodies served as a projection surface for Darré's utopian notions of the 'Nordic Race' and peasantry as Germany's genetic future. The Viennese photographer Anna Koppitz, the widow of the Rudolf Koppitz, renowned in the same field as his wife, was mustered into the service of Reich Minister's project of translating Nazi ideologemes into pictures. Her works both followed in the vein of her husband's sophisticated studies of the human body and were modeled on the sports photography of that time in the stye of Leni Riefenstahl--a highly explosive mixture that was perfectly suited for the National Socialists' propaganda purposes"--Back cover