Publication details
Reactionary Idyll? Central European Homeland-Photography in a Transnational Context
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | So-called homeland-photography was a widespread phenomenon across 1930s Central Europe. Yet even though it also had a strong base in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, homeland-photography has almost exclusively been assessed in the context of Austrian Heimatphotographie, characterised by sublime natural landscapes and romanticised views of folk culture – expressions of belief in an idealised ‘homeland’. At once tied to and reacting against modernity, an important function of Heimatphotographie was to affirm the existence of an Austrian nation, especially during the reactionary Dollfuß/Schuschnigg era (1933-1938). As a consequence, interpretations of homeland-photography have dominantly been associated with a regressive conservatism, in which a fabricated belief in the ‘homeland’ steadily progresses towards the ‘blood and soil’ ideology of Nationalist Socialism. However, this development is hardly representative of the wider phenomenon of homeland-photography in Central Europe. In order to shed more light on its complexities, my paper assesses works by photographers in Czechoslovakia, including Karol Plicka and Jaromír Funke, and compares them to Austrian examples by Rudolf Koppitz and Trude Fleischmann, among others. How and to what end did these photographers transmit belief in the ‘homeland’? While their images fall within formal definitions of homeland-photography, the ideological notions of the ‘homeland’ they were tied to went far beyond the fascist ideology the movement has been associated with. Taking this into account, my paper reconsiders photographic interpretations of the ‘homeland’ as a particular tendency of vernacular modernism, whose ideological framing was far more complex than its association with reactionary political thought would allow for. |
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