Bizarre Vintage Photos of Nazis Posing with Men in Polar Bear Costumes

A number of vintage photos featuring Germans, including Nazis, posing with men dressed up as polar bears have been circulating around the internet lately. They’re silly, mysterious, slightly unnerving, and are just some of Jean-Marie Donat’s 10,000-strong collection, which she has been amassing over the last 30 years.

Named TeddyBär, the collection provides a weird snapshot of German history. While the bears themselves look bizarre, when you put the 200 or so images side-by-side, it’s the characters hugging them that begin to stand out: two Nazi soldiers grinning, an angelic-looking blonde child with a swastika on her vest. Soon the unchanging bears perversely become the one constant, as a parade of idiosyncratic figures from the 1920s through the 1970s come and go beside them.

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If TeddyBär shines a light on a strange and slightly sinister facet of German culture, Donat’s collection Blackface does the same for America and then some. Dating from the 1880s to the 1960s, the photo series depicts a variety of white men and women in blackface, some posing as publicity for traveling minstrel shows, others amateurs who have blacked-up for reasons unknown.

The two collections are being shown at Arles photography festival in France alongside a third of Donat’s, Predator, a series in which the photographer’s shadow can be seen in the frame, always wearing a hat. Coupled with the collection’s title, it’s playful and eerie in equal measure, as if the subjects of the photos are being surveyed and followed by a shadowy cadre of hat-wearing G-men—or maybe always the same guy.

I spoke to Donat about his finds, and got the impression of a man less intent on collecting historical oddities than using them to shed a new light on the past.

VICE: Hi, Jean-Marie. First off, tell me about TeddyBär.
Jean-Marie Donat: I’ve had my first photo from that collection for 30 years. The first was an exchange with a German collector; that was the beginning of the story. I’m an art director for a French publishing house, so I’ve always collected a lot of images. Not just photos—newspapers, paintings, and drawings. I really began the TeddyBär collection when I found the second photo. The first one was in my books for one year, two years, ten years. When I found the second photo, I remembered I had it.

What about the first photo stood out to you? Why did you trade for it?
It was the surrealism: a businessman, just after the Second World War, with an enormous bear in the street. I didn’t know the story behind it, the big polar bear. It was just surreal—the kind of image I like.

In the beginning I didn’t know it was a German image, until I found the second photo. It’s an incredible photo. You can see in my selection, the teddy bear with the German soldiers—that was the second photo. It’s incredible, Nazis with a teddy bear in a friendly pose. What was this?

I began to find the story behind this strange tradition. I know a friend, a German, who explained the backstory. At the beginning of the 1920s, two polar bears came to the Berlin Zoo. Many families go to the zoo to see the bears—they’re in fashion—and all of the children want photographs in front of the zoo with these guys in bear suits. It’s a huge success in Berlin. And after, throughout Germany for the next 60 years, there are lots of these teddy bears. In my collection I have 30 different bears.

How does Teddybär connect to your other collections, Blackface and Predator? Is there one big theme here?
I’m not a classic collector. For me what’s important is showing a story from history, and what you can learn about history when you see a number of the similar images. When you see one image of blackface for example, you think: OK, it’s blackface. It’s a man in show-business. After 300 or 500, you have a story.

In Blackface, what people are seeing is history: you’re seeing racism, segregation in America—it’s a report of the old time relations between black and white people.

What about Predator? What’s the story there?
That was a little different. Really that one’s my interpretation, a type of artist’s intervention. Actually a lot of collectors collect this type of photo, where a shadow is in the shot.

Really?
Yes, but for me what’s important is the hat in the shot. Because you end up thinking it’s the same person—the same man in every photo. You lose, after the fifth or sixth photo, the idea of the photographer. And the name of the series, Predator, suggests a type of suspense movie.

Film Noir?
Exactly. So in this series the story is my invention. When you see TeddyBär or Blackface, it’s the story of the world, not mine. It’s different.

Are you excited to show your photos at Arles photography festival?
This is the first time I’ve exposed my collections to the public. It’s the first time people will see these stories. But it’s also the first time I’ve seen my collections in a complete series. In my house, I have a box with the photos inside, so when I see them I see one photo, then another photo, then one more, you see? Seeing all the photos at the same time, for the first time, I feel like the idea of a story works, and that’s what’s important. It’s like journalism. I spoke to an American recently, who said American families throw away their family photo albums now. All these photos go in the garbage. Blackface, photos of the Ku Klux Klan… All of these photos of American history, gone.

Thank you.

Donat is exhibiting his work at the Arles photography festival in France, which runs until September 20. They will also be the subjects of three limited-edition books published at www.innocences.net.