Default ways of reading others come with a host of problems, often caused by a lack of adequate tools for obtaining analytical and interpretive access to the phenomenon of interest; in the case of Nazis, this has led to a flattening of National Socialist racial thinking into a blunt racial essentialism that, as Ann Stoler put it, ignores nuance and conflicts in historical debates about race that are then juxtaposed to later, presumably more sophisticated, racial epistemologies (Stoler 2016). Horror at historical atrocities has led to a glossing over of significant variation in scientific and cultural practices that are consequential for our understanding of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes substantively, and for our ability as cultural and comparative historical sociologists to make claims about the past, methodologically and causally.What Is It Like to Be a Nazi employs Nagel’s paper as metaphorical point of departure to study not consciousness, but to more attentively interrogate the scientific practices of those whose ways of thinking and existing in the world seem so alien to us, as well as the practices of contemporary social science purporting to understanding National Socialist science. My contribution to this project consists in homing in on one historical form of racial knowledge production and visualization, that of portrait photographic practice. By choosing portrait photographers, the larger category of “Nazi” is narrowed down to a professional group who generated visual propaganda for the National Socialist regime and sustained the dictatorship by way of artistic production.How did National Socialist photographers generate “race” in images? Through an analysis of photographic instruction manuals, reflections of the image makers on their craft and the photographs themselves, I theorize three processes by which National Socialist-period photographers created race in images: contemplation, freezing, and sculpting. Photography, far from being a transcriptional art, brimmed with agency and was in constant disagreement about the nature of perception, and the best way of capturing phenomena occurring in the world through novel technologies. While local circumstances of photographic production under National Socialist rule at first glance appear excessively specific and perhaps exceptional, they raise more universal questions about perception, vision and interpretation that remain at issue today (Browne 2010; Morning 2011; Morning 2014; Nelson 2008).
The Perpetual Other.
