Recycling Romanticism: National Socialist Ideology and the Alpine Landscape, Lecture of Sylvia Necker at the Centre for the Study of Political Ideologies, University of Nottingham

From 1933, the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s Bavarian mountain retreat, became a pictorial, and picturesque, focus of National Socialism. Hitler’s photographer of choice, Heinrich Hoffmann, was instrumental in transforming the Alpine scenery, and Hitler’s manner of inhabiting it, into a symbolically charged political topos. But this was not just hollow ‘propaganda’. We know from photographic evidence that Hitler and other Nazi elites who resided in the complex, such as Martin Bormann, purchased and displayed large numbers of 19th-century landscape paintings in their houses, thus framing or domesticating the landscape in terms of a distinctive pictorial and ideological tradition, invoking ideas of Heimat and Romantic yearning. This lecture joins up these different historical moments and explores the significance of analogies, re-cyclings and re-appropriations in the visual articulation of ideology.