Berlin - Die Weltstadt Im Licht

A beautifully printed and presented volume of recently rediscovered photographs of Weimar Berlin - the illuminated city by night. Taken between 1925 and 1932 by Martin Höhlig (1882 - 1948). Höhlig was a versatile Berlin based commercial photographer who built a career as an accomplished portrait photographer in the 1920s. An interest in architecture led him into architectural and urban photography and a key event in his development was the Berlin Im Licht week in October 1928 - a citywide festival of architectural illumination dominated by powerful commercial messages sponsored by AEG, Osram, Siemens, Bewag and Telefunken designed to tell the world how German industry was being transformed by electrical energy. Höhlig was engaged to record the event and published a series of albums that were issued as promotional items by all the sponsors which are the source of this selection of photos. The tonal balance and the framing of the images is perfect. In the Third Reich, Höhlig’s career went into decline - as an affiliate photographer to the Association for the History of Berlin his membership was terminated in 1937 when Jewish members were expelled. Whether by resignation or expulsion is not known. After the war Höhlig found it impossible to rebuild his practice and he took his own life in 1948.  His reputation as an outstanding recorder of interwar Berlin is now secure alongside others such as Sasha Stone, Marco von Bucovich, Willy Römer and Max Missmann. 

For the traumatised war veterans desperate for work and the war weary public enduring rampant inflation and economic instability, the dazzle and glitter of decadent hedonism in Weimar Berlin was at best a remote and undignified spectacle and at worst a crude insult to public propriety. It would inspire the sense of popular resentment that opened the doors to the Nazis. When this blaze of luminescence was finally extinguished in 1939, the Nazified nation was propelled into 6 years of brutal conflict and genocide.  Which adds another layer to the experience of viewing these photos. There’s the aesthetic pleasure from the inventive exuberance of the visual dynamics on show but there’s also the foreshadowing of the dark days ahead and the part that this version of Berlin played in the process.

ISBN: 9783 942115 865

Published by Bussert & Stadeler, 2019 

 

Never Closed

“Hey Magda, show us a smile”, they called through their stained and broken teeth, their hungry eyes followed her contours as she navigated the room.

She never did - too much on her mind.

Bridie and Petra gave smiles away by the yard but got little in return. They resented Magda for the way she wormed her way into Hank’s affections.

The diner was Hank’s and it was his idea to place Magda out front when the photographer guy turned up to take a picture for a postcard.

“Great for publicity”, Hank was assured, “Give em away for free, they get mailed all round the world.” “But most of my customers work right here in the railroad yard or the tannery.”

Magda hated the idea but knew better than to complain. Never liked the way she looked. And she could recall all the photos for visas, passports, immigration permits, police line-ups - each of which took something away that never returned.

Hank refused to pay extra to have the address of the Lunch Room overprinted on the card. Photography guy fussed and grumbled. Magda found a pose she was happy with, the shutter clicked and she went back to work.

 

Rails over the Ocean

It took 4,000 labourers 7 years to build a 120 mile railroad connecting mainland Florida with the city of Key West. The project was financed by Henry Flagler, fabulously wealthy founder of Standard Oil and cost more than $50 million.  Flagler was a master of manipulating markets and freezing out competitors and until the advent of Anti-Trust legislation, he and Rockefeller were well on the way to establishing undisputed control of the entire American market for oil and gas. On the plus side he was an attentive husband and in middle age accompanied his ailing spouse to Florida in search of a cure in warmer climes. At which point his interest in fossil fuels declined in favour of a new passion for developing resort hotels and transport infrastructure to expand the market for Florida tourism.  The system of “convict leasing” enabled local prisons to supply him with a regular source of (literally) captive labour for his projects.  In a weird parody of the Manifest Destiny, Flagler’s army of contractors relentlessly drove south, clearing wilderness, draining swamps, dredging channels, building roads and luxury hotels on a steady advance via St. Augustine and Palm Beach that ended in Miami.

The connection to Key West was planned to move freight that had travelled via the new Panama Canal northwards to customers across America but the anticipated traffic never materialised. The postcard view above shows a vast but relatively passive crowd gathered at Key West in January 1912 to greet the arrival of the first regular service on the new extension to the Florida East Coast Railway. In the 1920s there was a daily train from New York to Key West timed to connect with a ferry to Havana. Key West to Miami was a 4½ hour trip thanks to a 15 mph limit on all the oversea sections.  Maintenance was a constant drain on resources and the railroad was on the verge of insolvency when fate intervened in the form of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 that overwhelmed the railroad beyond repair. In a final indignity, surviving sections of the infrastructure were commandeered to support a new Overseas Highway that survives to the present day. It had lasted for 23 years. Flagler died in 1913, just over a year after the railroad was inaugurated. If Flagler had not declined the honour of renaming Key Biscayne, there would be no city of Miami today - only Flagler and Flagler Beach, Flagler Dolphins, Flagler Vice, Flagler Art Deco …

 

Alphabet Books - ABC du Père Castor

For an illustrator a pictorial alphabet book presents a number of challenges, not least of which is the shortage of words beginning with q, x and z. Today’s example follows a thematic approach based on wild animals - a popular approach that focuses on groupings such as Flora, Fauna, Aquatic Life, Astronomy, Travel etc.  Père Castor illustrated books for children first appeared in France in the 1930s, English language versions were published by George, Allen and Unwin after the war in a series of 8 as Père Castor’s Wild Animal Books. In each volume the lively illustrations are the work of Latvian born illustrator, Feodor Rojankovsky (1891-1970), known professionally as Rojan.  Born as a Russian citizen and educated in St. Petersburg, he was conscripted into the White Army in 1919 and ended up as a p-o-w in Poland, by 1922 he was officially stateless. He found his way to Paris in 1925 and established himself as a commercial illustrator with a speciality in expensively produced volumes of suavely visualised erotic encounters before finding a niche in the world of books for children.  The drawings he produced for the Père Castor series have a wonderful sense of spontaneity achieved by a rich tonal range of closely controlled mark making on lithographic plates. As the blurb on the back of one volume nicely puts it - the book is “gently ablaze with Rojan’s lithographs”.  After arriving in the US in 1941 he began an almost 30 year career as an illustrator for children’s books.

Rojan’s cover design is a minor compositional triumph I can’t recall seeing elsewhere. The group of animals on the front cover are drawn again on the back as if viewed from behind. Each creature has a page to itself with the only exceptions at the end of the alphabet (from w to z) to cope with the limitations imposed by the problematic number of 26 letters. The placing on the page and the lightness of touch are a delight throughout the book. Another alphabet book (Off By Train) can be seen by following this link. The last image is my collection of Père Castor Wild Animal books.

 

Beasts of Burden

Time for some postcards featuring unskilled manual labour - the jobs nobody wants to do unless economic necessity prevails. Curious that postcard producers should take an interest in such humble activity but their efforts resulted in many types and subsets.  Local colour was the polite term for singling out workers from the bottom of the economic ladder and printing multiple copies of their likenesses to be sold to visitors, travellers and tourists.  As the decades passed these images would become documentary evidence of lost ways of life but nothing could have been further from their minds.  Sales figures and turnover were paramount and if demand could be generated for such subjects the market would provide.  For the purchasers and the recipients back home they were mildly diverting examples of life’s rich pageant and a reminder of the road that led from indigence and idleness to penury. Plus the self satisfaction derived from observing those trapped by a fate that you have avoided. Miners and metal bashers served as respected exemplars of the dignity of labour - none of that applied to the street sweepers, porters, agricultural labourers and scavengers featured here.