ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author analyses the German photographic definitions of the cultural landscape in Eastern Europe during the two world wars. However, during the Nazi occupation the German research in the east was pursued in a more professional and academic way: by a larger number of scholars of different disciplines specializing in eastern Europe in the framework of their particular expertise. The exhibition 'Art Works and Monuments from Former Poland' inaugurated in October 1939, a few weeks after Hitler's invasion of Poland, in the Schelsisches Museum der Bildenden Kunste in Wroclaw, perfectly shows the role accorded to photography in the Nazi conquest of the East. As Bulhak's example shows, despite strong propaganda overtone, both large-scale German survey projects undertaken at the time of the two world wars had a universal character and were strongly embedded in the German landscape and photographic sensibilities.
