by Daniel H. Magilow at The Conversation: (A)ccusations – that fake-looking images are real, that real-looking ones are fake – have been a common feature in politics, particularly among extremists, especially since the early 20th century.
That’s when it first became technically possible to routinely print photographs in newspapers and magazines. During this era, a new form of media blossomed, as magazines began using photographs, rather than just drawings, for illustration purposes. These magazines were particularly popular during the Weimar Republic, a government in power in Germany from 1919 through 1933, before the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, most often known as the Nazi party.
During the 1920s, Germany experienced an unstable economy, parliamentary paralysis and an increasingly polarized society.
During this economically and politically tumultuous time in Germany, photo manipulation in popular news publications – particularly one run by the Nazis – was rampant.
The rise of the Nazis’ publication
I am a scholar of Germany, and as part of my research on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, I have been researching an idiosyncratic Nazi propaganda magazine called the Illustrated Observer – or, in German, the Illustrierter Beobachter.
The Nazis, who formed as a political party in 1920, started publishing this magazine in 1926. The magazine, published through 1945, provides valuable historical context for understanding today’s political mudslinging about fake and doctored photos. It also shows how, left unchecked, publishing fake information could potentially contribute to dire political consequences, such as a rise in fascism.
As the Illustrated Observer’s name suggests, it belonged to a genre of publications that Germans call Illustrierten, literally translating to “illustrateds” in English.
These magazines included serious news stories and photojournalism, but also short fictional stories, jokes, cartoons and crossword puzzles. And because of advances in printing technologies, they also included lots of photographs.
These glossy, stylishly illustrated tabloids were so popular in Germany that the most popular publication, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung – or Berlin Illustrated Newspaper – had a circulation of 1,844,130 copies each week by 1929.
The actual readership numbers surpassed this figure, as multiple people in homes, hotels and cafés in Germany would share copies of the newspaper.
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