The title of Walther's Geographical Character Pictures (1891) points towards an emerging discourse around the late 19th century in Germany which was based on the assumption that there is an organic link between a people and its landscape. Certain geographic phenomena would designate the character not only of the landscape but also of the people who lived in those places. This conjunction made it possible to imagine or to construct a German landscape with claim and characteristics to a German ethnicity.
This discourse was embedded in the logics of coloniality by producing different racial types that would be ascribed characteristics and civilizational status or development. How a landscape was worked, how agriculture was structured, the presence and use of technology, clothing, culinary habits and housing - all these were parameters that Germans and other imperial powers would employ looking at colonised parts of the world and producing narratives of inferiority.
This particular book by Walther guided the child in imperial Germany first through a series of romantic scenes placed in the German territory.
Romantic landscape painting was much involved in this production of the German national and imperial identity. Invoking emotional sensibilities concerning Nature through particular visual arrangements, romantic landscape painting aimed to evoke those sensibilities in the viewer. Appreciation of those landscapes but also the artworks in themselves came to signify not only moral sensibilities, national belonging and white superiority.
Around the same time, from about 1888 to the end of World War II, associations for Nature preservation and so-called “homeland” preservation emerged, with a strong force in the Rhine area. The Nature preservation movement promoted the idea that protecting natural monuments and providing healthy recreation areas would lead to the integration of Germans of all political persuasions and social classes into the “imagined Heimat community” (Lekan, 2004, p. 16). Nature preservation, the aesthetic appreciation of landscape and the construction of a national community as well as the construction of the colonial Other were intricately interlaced projects.
The second part of Walther's Geographical Charakter Images is a series of colonial vistas: several scenes of plantations, ethnographic pictures of indigenous people in North America and the North of Europe, a caravan of Arabic merchants, amongst others. The modern/colonial gaze is inseparably linked to the self-image of the imperial German Child. The object lesson picture book produces a view that proposes the German, white identity as morally superior to non-white identities, making those claims not only but to great extent through the representations of Nature as a specific local constructed as landscapes and value judgedments inscribed into those.
