A Jewish Photographer’s German Stars: The Photo Studio as Space of Encounter in Nazi Germany

• In Event: German-Jewish Women in Journalism and the Visual Arts, 1918–1938

Abstract

Jewish photography in Nazi Germany was coined by the creation of secluded spaces in which life continued to be documented behind closed doors. When the camera left these spaces, it was usually used to document outings and summer camps in a nature that offered distance and thereby anonymity and protection. Jewish studio photography largely disappeared; studio owners sold their businesses to new, “Aryan” owners at underpriced rates. Not so Martha Maas. The portrait photographer stayed, in fact, she only registered her studio in late 1935, at a time when most other Jewish-owned studios had closed. Trained in the 1910s at the famous Berlin Lette Society, a vocational school for girls and women, Maas would go on to make a prolific career as a portrait photographer in her native Aachen. In the early 1930s, she returned to Berlin to sustain herself and her non-Jewish husband with her photographs, first through contributions to different local illustrated magazines and newspapers and later by means of a photo studio. Until its closure in early 1939, the studio became a trusted space for Berlin-based music and film stars who had their portraits taken by her. Through her works, Maas contributed to staging the public image of her German sitters and thereby nurtured the star cult of Nazi Germany. This paper discusses the secluded space of a Jewish studio as a place creating public views and asks what we can learn by looking at her works through an intersectional lens that considers Maas’ identity as a German-Jewish woman artist in Nazi Germany. This perspective will also help to analyze the relationship between the Jewish photographer and a distinct group of German sitters who seemed to know of her background and tried to help her sustain herself by having first themselves and later also their relatives and even pets taken on photographs. The works of Martha Maas offer unique insights into the hidden ways of creating public views, crossing various borders while remaining hidden from plain sight, and passing as a participant in Nazi German celebrity culture through photography.

Author

• Rebekka Grossmann, Leiden University