Face to Face? An Ethical Encounter with Germany’s Dark Strangers in August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

August Sander’s portraits of marginalised subjects are often evoked as visual shorthand for his inclusive vision of the German nation. This article uses a portrait he made around 1930 showing two circus workers, an ‘Indian’ man and a white woman, to assess how Sander’s work deals with the cognitive and ethical difficulties posed to interwar Germany by its ‘dark strangers’.