Picturing Hitler’s Racial Community: Visual Propaganda of the Nazi Organizations “Strength through Joy” and “German Labor Front”

A prominently stated goal of the Nazi regime was to re-form German society into a racially and socially unified Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community"). While historians have long dismissed this idea and its promulgation as merely propagandistic and largely ineffective, more recent scholarship has argued that it is important to take the Volksgemeinschaft more seriously as a powerful integratory force—and even a partially fulfilled social reality—in the Third Reich. Following this assumption, it is important to re-read Nazi visual propaganda on the Volksgemeinschaft, considering it as valid primary source material and attending to its multifaceted (and ambiguous) meanings and functions.

To that end, my paper will examine images published by the Nazi organization "German Labor Front" and its subsidiary "Strength through Joy," with a special focus on their magazine Arbeitertum (published from the early 1930s until 1944 and directed at German workers). I will discuss the numerous images of cheerful, healthy and content-looking Germans involved in community activities in sports, tourism and arts displayed in Arbeitertum, tracing how these were used to illustrate and thereby further support the building of the Volksgemeinschaft. I argue that these depictions, ostensibly presented as journalistic accounts of events organized by the "German Labor Front" and "Strength through Joy," could function as evidence for contemporaries that the Nazi promise of creating such a community had begun to be fulfilled. My paper also suggests that these images were not merely products of a propagandistic discourse, but had a formative impact—intentional or not—on that discourse. In this regard, I show how some of the images employed in the campaign for a happy German Volksgemeinschaft at times came to challenge and eventually even shape the ideological content of Nazism in regards to culture, gender and modernity.