THOMAS ZELLER ON AUGUST SANDER'S RHINE LANDSCAPES

Environmental History, Apr 2007 by Zeller, Thomas

THE GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHER August Sander (1876-1964) took this picture of the Rhine River, close to Bonn, in 1930.1 Sander revealed a Rhine bristling with human activity, and his photograph is an aesthetically powerful reminder of the idea of cultural landscape, which has been far more politically complicated in Europe than in the United States. In fact, the politics of the idea have hampered European environmental historians' ability to discuss human landscapes. Sander's work suggests ways in which historians can now embrace the European tradition of cultural landscape, and move beyond the twentieth-century politics which tainted that tradition for so long. Given the preeminence of cultural landscapes in American documentary photography, these politics of the aesthetics mattered, and still matter, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Neither a wild river nor a Romantic conduit for river cruises, August Sander's Rhine is a working Rhine.2 The manifold human activities on and alongside the Rhine are his central narrative.3 Wing dams built into the stream on the left hand side calm its waters, slow its flow, and help to create a navigation channel, used by the Rhine barge in the lower right of the picture. The Nonnenwerth Island is in the midst of the river. It is the site of a Franciscan monastery that, in the nineteenth century, became a hotel whose guests included the American writer James Fenimore Cooper and the European composer Franz Liszt.4 Beyond the river's banks, humans have created fertile agricultural landscapes with sharply delineated fields, meadows, and pockets of trees. The Eifel Mountains dominate the background. Small and medium-sized clouds add to the sense of movement and activity that Sander's Rhine encapsulates.

Sander is well known for his series of human portraits, published in 2002 as People of the Twentieth Century. In that work, he captured a totality of German faces, people from different classes, regions, and origins. Sander was interested in reading the physiognomy of the men and women he portrayed, looking for discernible differences that would reveal the conditions in which they lived.5 Sander chose a similar approach to landscape photography, which he pursued from the start of his career. This photograph is thus a portrait of a Rhine, its countenance analyzed as Sander would read a human face, its varied surface as revealing as a human expression.

Based on the physiognomic tradition in Continental European geography, Sander read landscapes as testimonies of human interaction with nature. A native Rhinelander, he familiarized himself with the geology and geography of the regions in which he grew up and worked. He chose to include, not exclude, routes of transportation such as roads, railways, and the predominantly engineered river landscapes of the 19305. He depicted the agricultural landscape as the product of human labor, and the total landscape as a cultural product. In a radio address, Sander expressed his interest in the way "man leaves his imprint |on landscape]. ... In landscape, we can recognize the human spirit of an era, which we can capture with the help of a photographic apparatus. This is similar to architecture and industry and to all human works big and small."6

Sander presented the river as a place of human interaction with nature, but he was not a technophile by any means. His photographic renditions of storage dams and reservoirs do not strike celebratory poses, but are sober, almost reserved. They neither condemn nor extol the technological landscapes created by humans over the course of time. Rather, Sander aimed for a methodical contemplation, a detached understanding, and a thorough reading of landscapes as evidence of human activity.7

In the nineteenth century, German geographers coined the term "cultural landscape" for understanding these kinds of ensembles. The landscape tradition that they spawned aimed at comprehending the total interaction of humans and their environments.8 In the 19205, several coffee-table books published in Germany took photographic stock of that interaction, with images ranging from meadows to harbors. A volume entitled Culture in the Mirror of Landscape aimed to bring the totality of landscape changes to its readers, from the Sahara's oasis to Irish meadows and Westphalian coal mines.

American photographers in the 1920s and 1930s embraced these ideas of landscape as well.9 In a presentation to the 1939 meeting of the American Historical Association, Roy E. Stryker, director of the Farm Security Administration photography project, and Paul H. Johnstone, a historian working for the Agriculture Department, recommended documentary photographs as sources for historians' research and echoed the belief that "every culture puts its stamp upon the terrain and creates its own landscape."10

With the advent of environmental history in the 1970s, American scholars drew on these German and American ideas, and freely embraced the idea of cultural landscape. U.S. environmental historians use the words "landscape" and "American landscape" liberally and even imprecisely, often as a substitute for the word nature. If one searches for "landscape" in the electronic table of contents for Environmental History, the query comes to a halt when the search engine shows more than a hundred hits for "landscape" among the published articles and book reviews. American scholars, it seems, can play with these ideas and their meanings at will.