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In the late 1920s and early 1930s, professional anthropologists and prominent race scientists in Germany served as judges in a series of mail-in photographic competitions designed to identify the most representative examples of the so-called Nordic race. This essay examines the interactions between judges and audience in three of these contests. Race scientists and entrants collaborated to construct a vision of the Nordic race as primarily male and middle and upper class. More important, the contests served to configure the very categories of "science" and "lay public" for the new discipline of race science (Rassenkunde), setting them in an unequal relationship to each other. Race scientists portrayed their audience as the entire German people, or Volk , which they represented as desperately in need of racial knowledge that only experts in Rassenkunde could provide. Rather than breaking down divisions between race scientists and the public, the collaborative process of the contests served to construct those very categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of the two major museum exhibits in German physical anthropology in the early twentieth century reveals that the tone and goals of the discipline changed significantly from the pre- to post-World War I period. The Munich anthropological exhibit of 1912 remained cautious and anti-hierarchical in its presentation of race, while the Hamburg Rassenkunde exhibit of 1928 sought to educate the public in a eugenic and physiognomic "racial vision." The change was caused by methodological crises within the discipline and the desire to make the science of anthropology more relevant to national goals during and after World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]