This article takes its cue from an essay by Gerhard Richter on Walter Benjamin and the fascist aestheticization of politics. It examines the portrait photography of Dutch photographer W.F. Van Heemskerck Düker, who was a true believer in the ideology of a Greater Germany. He published a number of illustrated books on the Dutch Heimat and worked together with German photographers Erna Lendvai-Dircksen and Erich Retzlaff. When considering what type of photography was best suited to capture the photographic aesthetics of the fascist nation, the article argues that within the paradigm of the Greater German Heimat we find not so much a form of anthropometric photography, as exemplified by the work of Hans F.K. Günther, as a genre of Heimat portraits that was better equipped to satisfy the need to unify two crucial structural oppositions in fascist ideology, namely mass versus individuality, and physical appearance versus inner soul.
This article considers the picturesque spectacle of knitting women dressed in attire, set against the background of the dunes in the Dutch province of Zeeland. Images of the knitting women at the beach were incorporated in the current visual repertory of the tourist press, including picture postcards. Taking its cue from a picture on knitters at the beach by the well-known modernist photographer Eva Besnyö, this article aims to show a pictorial tradition in which nationalist and tourist representations are linked to convey a Dutch Heimat idyll.
ARTICLE HISTORY
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