In Pursuit of Beauty: Manasse and Erotic Photography in the Weimar and Nazi Eras

Perhaps some of the most enduring visual impressions of the National Socialists’ rise to power are photographs depicting the ransacking of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin in May 1933. The Institute, which opened its doors to the public in 1919, housed 35,000 images, a vast collection of books and various sexological and ethnographic objects. An image of members of the public, standing alongside a discarded heap of Hirschfeld’s books and documents, contrasts markedly with earlier photographs from the Weimar period showing street vendors with stalls well-stocked with erotica. These seemingly ‘binary’ portrayals reinforce the much rehearsed narrative of Weimar’s untimely end, foreclosing the possibility that erotica and its attendant freedoms, continued to exist. Conversely, this essay explores not only the ways in which erotic visual culture endured, but also how it marketed and reinvented itself. Illustrative of such endurance is the erotic photography of ‘Manassé Foto-Salon’ [Studio Manassé] (1922–1938), run by Olga Solarics (1896–1969) and her husband Adorja'n von Wlassics (1893–1946) in Vienna and Berlin. Their popular nude photographs adhered to, but pushed the avant-gardist technique of montage further throughout the 20s, to create trademark images that were at once seductive and absurd. During the 30s, they published under the name ‘WOG’ and emphasis appears to have shifted towards exclusive folios of pictorial nudes. Building on scholarship exploring cultural continuities under both Weimar and Nazi political regimes, focus on erotica helps further expose authoritarianism as an unstable network of practices to reveal some of the more unexpected parallels shared by both political systems.