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 

 

London After Dark in Postcards

Until recently London was emphatically not a 24 hour city in the way that Paris and New York are. But, due to its northerly latitude there was no shortage of darkness to portray on postcard views of the city. Whistler and Monet may have found visual poetry in the mysterious crepuscular gloom of the fog-bound metropolis but this did not readily translate to the postcard although that hasn’t stopped some from trying. The best results were some rather sombre nocturnes. London was never the most glamorous of cities, even under cover of darkness a starchy sobriety prevailed. The night life was often seedy and prudish. Perhaps the only city where discomfort was an aphrodisiac. Timidly transgressive when compared with Rome or Berlin - cities where human depravity was catered to without inhibition or apology. London’s High Court Judges, Peers of the Realm, stalwarts of the armed forces and senior clergymen may have earned a reputation for dissolute behaviour but they took care never to remove their socks. At a time when Parisian “maisons closés” offered elaborately decorated exotic fantasies to their clients, their counterparts across the Channel were resolutely joyless establishments for functional transactional couplings. So I’m told. All this talk may have raised expectations that something salacious is to follow. Sadly, nothing more than a parade of rain swept streets, neon lit advertising and all but impenetrable fog.

Coney Island After Dark

When the sun sets over New York’s peninsular playground the lights come on and the fairground rides and attractions are transformed by spectacular displays of luminescence. Darkness conceals the blistered and faded paintwork while the patrons adapt to life in the shadows. Fairground folk, carnival freaks, counterfeiters, pickpockets and cardsharps take full advantage of the nocturnal opportunities for mischief and mayhem as the crowds stream into Luna Park, the Palace of Joy and Dreamland. Postcard photographers recorded the scene by day and employed retouching artists to add all the elements to turn day into night. Thousands of pulsating light-bulbs following the contours of the Cyclone and other amusement rides, painstakingly added by hand. There’s a steady traffic flow along Surf Avenue, streetcars like glow-worms, taxi-cabs and jalopies jostling for space and sidewalks packed with punters in search of excitement.

Postcard of the Day No. 94 – Tunbridge Wells Pantiles

Royal Tunbridge Wells to be absolutely correct. It’s one of those place names that’s synonymous with bourgeois respectability. A bastion of propriety in a world of depravity. Spiritual home of the Daily Telegraph reader and, when these postcards were on sale, a popular spa resort with an Opera House. At the centre of town is this Georgian colonnade and pedestrianised shopping street, named the Pantiles. Much photographed, often from the very same spot, it offered fashionable shops, galleries and restaurants, and an elegant space for gentle perambulation. It survives more or less intact, without much evidence of its former gentility, and can be visited on Streetview thus avoiding the need to travel to Kent. The five cards that share a single viewpoint also share a cast of characters – woman with small child/pram, a young man hungry for attention and various canine companions. The night scene is deeply unconvincing – a clumsy exercise in over-painting in which every window glows with an identical lurid shade. Only a local could confirm whether the residents of Tunbridge Wells continue to conduct themselves with such ostentatious dignity as they do in these scenes.

Postcard of the Night No. 13 – Buffalo, Main Street at Night

We stay in the city of Buffalo for a nocturnal visit. Main Street at Night owes as much to the imagination of the artist as it does to the original photographer. Huddled pedestrians scuttle through the traffic as an incandescent streetcar advances through the gloom. An illuminated clock promoting watches beams its message from on high. More modest signs project over the pavement, including a perennial favourite – the sign that advertises “Signs”. In the other cards, the Electric Building lives up to its name with every window ablaze with light while a high-intensity searchlight radiates into the clouds. Finally the Statler Hotel appears in real danger of toppling over into Swan Street - the unremarkable surroundings de-glamourize the image.

Postcard of the Night No. 12 – Barbary Coast by Night, San Francisco

Barbary Coast was the red light district of San Francisco. It sprang into existence in 1849 with the California Gold Rush and for 60 years or more its nightclubs and brothels, bars and gambling dens catered to the needs of an itinerant population of workingmen in search of distraction. Our postcard from the first decade of the 20th. century shows a pilgrimage of lost souls, their haunted faces turned toward the camera – an unwanted intrusion into the pursuit of pleasure. Some furtive, some remorseful and some defiant, they shuffle through the gloom to be separated from their hard-earned dollar bills in return for copious quantities of intoxicants and sexual favours. The agencies of law and order had minimal traction in the district and organised criminal gangs threatened the security of the entire city. Conflict raged with regular arson assaults on the city leading to vigilante justice and public lynchings. It couldn’t last forever – the 1906 earthquake provided the opportunity to rebuild and gentrify the district. The guardians of public morals kept up the pressure on the civic authorities and a few years later a new hostility emerged with a ban on dancing and illuminated signs, restrictions on the sale of alcohol and the expulsion of brothels.

Postcard of the Night No. 11 – Broadway on a Rainy Night St. Louis

Night time photography may have been difficult in the early 1900s but postcard producers were happy to try. Perhaps they thought the market would be attracted by the moody glamour of crepuscular imagery. In the rain the night streets were transformed by reflected light from puddled sidewalks and gleaming asphalt. Here on Broadway an umbrella dance is underway while silhouetted figures shuffle into an uncertain future or escape from a dark past. The visual clichés of Film Noir are on display – a sinister shadow in every doorway, human decency cast aside under cover of darkness. Three more examples of nocturnal precipitation from Salt Lake City, Denver and Portland ME complete this selection.