The Visualization of the Political in German Illustrated Mgazines 1905-1945

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Patrick Rössler
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 279486315

The significance of images in the process of communicating political issues is undisputed. Yet little is known of the use of visual images in the media in the first half of the twentieth century. The objective of this project is to empirically examine decades of continuity and change in the visual political communication and to characterize their political dimensions. The beginnings of a trend away from the primacy of the word, towards the intrinsic value of a photo or image emerge in the reporting of this age. These decades mark a completely new era in the history of images. The photographic image became the core element of mass produced and distributed media, especially illustrated magazines and film industry glossies. Yet the question it begs has not yet been answered by research, namely, to what extent and in which form political issues in the first half of the 20th century were shown in newspaper and magazine illustrations. The relevance of magazines for conveying visual political content cannot be underestimated, because in those years they had almost no competition. The planned project aims to research the beginnings and development of visual political communication of the day in a comprehensive survey for the years 1905 - 1945. The focus of the research is a comparison of political illustrations from five different historical periods, under two aspects: First, among different political systems of the constitutional monarchy of the late German empire, the democracy of the Weimar Republic, and the totalitarian dictatorship of the National Socialists; and second, between times of war and peace in the empire and dictatorship between WWI and WWII. The question is how political topics were illustrated in each of these periods and what role these topics played in visual communication in general. Building on the concept of visual framing, the research will provide a standardized analysis of the content from approximately 25,000 photos from three different magazines between the years 1905 to 1945. This analysis will take into account all photos in three issues of both spring and autumn of each year. Those images with political content - however it may be construed - will then be the object of a deeper codification, permitting not only descriptive statements about the use of pictures over the period of time, but also the determination of visual frames and assignment of numbers according to messages in the pictures in this historical period.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants