A good friend of the house of Wagner

BBC News reports ~ Photographs of Adolf Hitler - taken by a Nottinghamshire spy weeks before the start of World War II - have been made public for the first time. Charles Turner took the images at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany in July 1939. He was given unprecedented access to the Nazi leader, and toured the festival as part of his entourage.

The photographs have been released by Mr Turner's son David, 64, after he began researching his family history. Mr Turner, of West Bridgford, told the Nottingham Evening Post that his father had chatted to the German leader and other members of the Third Reich - including Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess - as the party toured the festival. They assumed Mr Turner - a guest of a member of Hitler's inner circle - was merely a fellow music fan.

Mr Turner said: "My father regarded these photos as an extraordinary souvenir of a remarkable and fortuitous event. "They are very, very important to me and my family and for all this period of time - my father died in 1977 - I have regarded the possession of these photos as an intimate family matter. "My father never spoke to me about it. Only he could answer why. That's not to say I didn't know what happened but as a child your perception and awareness of things are very different," he said.

He said he made the decision to release the images to the newspaper, which were taken on a Kodak Eastman folding camera, when he began to trace his family's roots. Charles Turner sent a detailed report of his meet back to London. His son has been told by the Home Office that the document is still classified and may never be released.

From BBC News. My header photo is not one of the spy photos, but comes from Winifred Wagner, A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth by Brigitte Hamann which I reviewed in my article The Phantom of the Opera, and which also supplies my headline quote. Elsewhere read how Hitler said Wagner - I don't get to hear anything else. And view more extraordinary photos from the Third Reich discovered via An Overgrown Path.
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A Karl Weigl photo album

Preparing articles about composers such as Elizabeth Maconchy, Elisabeth Lutyens and Karl Weigl is difficult bcause there are very few photographs of them available. After he read my Karl Weigl article today John McLaughlin Williams kindly obtained permission from the composer's grandson to make available the family photographs here. John explains: 'Weigl was a good athlete. I saw other pictures at his daughter-in-law's house that showed him to be quite muscular in the manner of a wrestler. The lovely portrait above is with his wife Vally.'














Now here is an exclusive picture of a very different kind.
Many thanks to Karl Weigl Jr for permission to reproduce these photographs. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

I am a camera in East Berlin

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed." (from Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, 1939)

The remarkable photo above was developed, carefully printed, and fixed in the 1970s, but has never before been published. It shows two of the feared East German Vopos (Volkspolizei) whose job it was to guard the Berlin Wall. The photograph was taken across death-strip from the West side of the Wall using a powerful telephoto lens. The original print was passed to me recently, and I scanned it to create the image above. The photographer tells me it has never been seen in public before.

For long periods both sides in the Cold War stand-off exchanged nothing more than shots from cameras across the Wall. But for short periods the shots came from guns. Estimates vary as to how many died trying to cross the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989. The official figure from the German Federal Prosecutor's office is 86 dead at the hands of the Vopos and others. The German Government supported website Chronik der Mauer puts the figure at 125. An even higher figure of 227 is given by Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13, an organisation linked to the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie museum, and known for its strongly anti-communist stance.

Fortunately Berlin is no longer divided, and for pictures of the city today see I am a camera - Berlin re-unified. A united Germany, including the former East Germany, is now one of the member states of the fast-growing European Union. This weekend the EU is marking its 50th anniversary with a celebration of its many achievements. These include creating the political climate that allows democracy to flourish in 27 member countries. Among these are Spain, Portugal, Greece and ten former Communist countries, none of which were truly free in the decades following the Second World War.

In 2005 the European Union and its member states paid out more than €43bn in 2005 in aid to developing countries. This is 0.32 per cent of GNP of the 25 member states, and is approaching double the per capita aid level paid out by the United States, which currently spends 0.2 per cent of GNP. The expanded EU is developing common foreign and defence policies, and these are starting to provide a much needed counter-weight to the global power of the US and China.

Europe loves a party, and we also love music. Centrepiece of the EU anniversary celebrations are an all-night bash in a rejuvenated Berlin,and a birthday party in Brussels where Zucchero, Axelle Red, Simply Red, Hooverphonic, Carla Bruni, The Scorpions, Helmut Lotti, Kim Wilde, Las Ketchup, Nadiya (left), Lou Bega and many others come together for an evening of rock at the Atomium. Across town, the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra will be performing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, while some of Europe's best jazzmen will be dotted around the city performing at ‘Jazz in Europe now!’. The Jacky Terrasson Trio, Aka Moon, the 18-year-old sensation Gabor Bolla and his quartet are just some of the top bands in Brussels.

In Portugal, more than 220 'bandas' will open their concerts throughout the country by playing the Europe Anthem all at the same time. In Germany, musicians from all 27 EU countries take to the road to play in 50 German cities. Were you born on 25 March? If so, you are invited to a special concert of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in Luxembourg. The EU is not new to supporting musical events. The Brxl Bravo Festival (Brussels, 2-4 March) and the European Border Breakers Award (EBBA) are just two recent examples. Most of the financial support comes from Culture 2007.

* I Am a Camera is the title of the play by Christopher Isherwood that became the hugely successful musical and film Cabaret (right). The play was based on Isherwood's Berlin novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). During his time in Berlin in the 1930s Isherwood lived in a tenement block in Schöneberg, which after the war was in the American Sector to the south of the Wall.

Now read about contemporary music from 1930s Berlin in Furtwängler and the forgotten new music.
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How photo archive was salvaged from a trash can

My two posts, Downfall and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer and The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet on the fascinating, and chilling, Siegfried Lauterwasser archive of photos has generated a lot of interest, not the least from a very supportive post on The Periscope which is the companion blog to the Euro-correspondent.com journalist network.

The whole Lauterwasser story hinges on the archive held at George Eastman House which is part of Ryerson University in Toronto. Although the archivist there, Jo Struble, has been helpful there have been problems with broken links on their web pages, and latterly performance problems on their server which mean some of the images are slow in loading.

Andy Eskind is the original researcher whose remarkable internet detective work while working at George Eastman House proved conclusively that the remarkable, and powerful, archive of Nazi photos was indeed the work of Siegrfried Lauterwasser; who later became conductor Herbert von Karajan's personal photographer, and whose images grace many CD and LP covers. Because of the various navigation glitches on the George Eastman House pages I asked Andy to give me a summary of the 'missing' parts of the Lauterwasser Collection story. Here it is.....


'Look this way and smile' - Karajan in his more normal position in front of the camera, again caught by Lauterwasser.

The key evidence is the one photograph which shows the front page of the newspaper Fränkischer Kürier which was successfully matched against microfilm of that newspaper in the archives at Marburg. It turned out to be September 1935 rather than the annual Parteitag Rally in Nurnberg of 1934 which I had erroneously written in the 1995 article in Image. It was the appearance of Riefenstahl in 2 frames which had led me astray. Otherwise, the Parteitag Rallies looked very similar from year to year in the mid-1930s. My mistake was failing to realize that Riefenstahl's presence wasn't necessarily on the occasion of making Triumph of the Will (1934); rather she was there working on the much less known follow-on project Hitler encouraged her to do the following year which resulted in Tag der Freiheit (1935) - which Riefenstahl herself avoided acknowledging (no mention in her lengthy autobiography) until a surviving print surfaced after the Cold War. This part of the story is best told by David Culbert's 1995 article in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. I simply wasn't aware of his work when I was writing in 1995. The full citation and illustrations of the key newspaper front page are easily viewed at this link.


A classic Lauterwasser DGG cover

The link to the attribution notes which explain in detail the Lauterwasser research which came later does indeed appear to be somehow broken. If I had a copy handy, I'd offer it to you and GEH for posting, but that goes back at least 2 computers for me, and my backup habits aren't up to quickly locating a copy. In brief, Lauterwasser would have been about 22 in 1935 when he did this work which technically isn't very proficient. Sadly, he never - even at the end of his life - revealed much about how he was engaged to cover the Borman outing to Unteruhldingen in May 1935, the Parteitag Rally that September, nor the subsequent small jobs over the next couple of years. What we do know is that he served in the German Army and survived the War - establishing a reputation as a successful photographer specializing in musicians. Returning home to a French Occupation zone, he apparently feared that possession of these pre-War negatives could get him in trouble. So he simply threw out roughly half of them. The match between the half he kept (which today are in the hands of his family), and the half he threw away (those now at GEH) doesn't superficially appear to have much rhyme or reason. Perhaps he did it in haste; perhaps he returned to such a clutter after VE day that they had been accidentally scrambled into 2 batches. Further study may or may not clarify this.



Another photo from the Lauterwasser Collection

What is very clear is that his neighbor, Mr. Ernst Zaumseil, unbeknownst to Lauterwasser, salvaged/rescued the negatives from the trash. Zaumseil subsequently gave the negatives to his American brother-in-law, Mr. Konrad Klein, who apparently hoped to market the images in the US. Klein self-published a book (which I've never seen) based on some of the images. His failed effort led to bankruptcy proceedings from which GEH purchased these assets. The strips of film arrived at GEH with absolutely no notes, markings, sleeves, order, or any clue beyond their self-evident image content. Only thru the subsequent outstanding intermediary efforts of Dr. Gunter Schoebel was this story reconstructed. Schoebel tracked down and interviewed Mr. Zaumseil living in a nursing home at age 92. It was also Schoebel who showed Lauterwasser the discarded images and relayed Lauterwasser's reactions at age 86 upon being reconnected with this long forgotten material. In some ways, the story of Schoebel's detective work, the research effort, etc is more interesting than the scattered photographic record. Afterall, the Parteitag Rallies were documented by 100s of photographers - both casual attendees, as well as professionals. There are 100s of thousands of negatives similar to these at US National Archives, in Germany, and elsewhere. Many are from more priviledged vantage points than those Lauterwasser enjoyed. Puzzles are always fun to work on just for the sake of solving puzzles. There are certainly more pieces which could be assembled, more work which could be done.
Hope this helps for now.
ahe


More from the Lauterwasser Collection

This is a fascinating, and exclusive, story. I am particularly grateful to Andy Eskind for providing additional material as I know he is very busy with a grant application in the US at the moment (I know the feeling Andy!). On An Overgrown Path will return to the more familiar ground of music postings tomorrow. But following this particular overgrown path, which started quite innocently with a photo caption in my post My first classical record, and has led from the UK to Canada, the US, and Germany totally validates the random wanderings that determine the content of this blog. Andy very wisely writes.."puzzles are always fun to work on just for the sake of solving puzzles", which I guess applies to Bach's Art of Fugue, and much else.

Update 3rd May - in another fascinating development the blog Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey has pointed out that the Lauterwasser family photo business is still trading in Unterlingen, Germany. You can visit their web site through this link. They have a page on Siegfried Lauterwasser with lots of Karajan images, (plus a page of mildly erotic stuff which is a new direcion on the overgrown path) but unsurprisingly there's nothing from the George Eastman House archive.
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Downfall - and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer

Bruno Ganz in the cinema as Hitler.

Following on from The Chorus we went to see Downfall last week. Director Oliver Hirschbieger has made a stunning film, but the accolades must go to Bruno Ganz's extraordinarily powerful performance as Hitler. In my book his performance is up there alongside Dirk Bogarde's Aschenbach in Visconti's Death in Venice for immersing himself so totally, and so convincingly, in the role. Yes, I understand the reservations about the film 'humanising' the Nazi leaders, and the 'white-washing' of the role of Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, on whose memoir the film is partly based. But just as Shakespeare's plays provide a valid 'drama-documentary' view of English history, so equally Downfall gives us a dramatised (and arguably sanitised) view of the last days of Hitler. The film lasts for more than two and a half hours (and thankfully uses music very sparingly, there is no Wagner of Bruckner at all, despite the fact that the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony was played on Berlin Radio after the announcement of Hitler's death). I have never seen an audience (of all ages) so engrossed throughout a film, or more silent at the end. We need documentary facts, but we also need dramatisations to bring history to life.

Downfall reminded me of one of life's little mysteries. When I was writing my recent post My first classical record I started researching Siegfried Lauterwasser, the 'official' photographer to the conductor Herbert von Karajan - an example of his work is seen below. I worked at EMI in the 1970s when Karajan was one of our artists and I was fascinated by the 'court' that surrounded him and was intrigued by their background. It is documented that Karajan joined the Nazi Party on April 8th 1933 in Salzburg, two months after Hitler came to power. He was cleared by an Austrian Governement denazification tribunal in February 1946 which concluded that Karajan was not involved in any illegal activity between 1933 and 1938. A transcript of the tribunal is given in Richard Osborne's Karajan - A Life in Music (Chatto & Windus ISBN 1956197638, the following exchange is taken from that transcript:

Dr Zellweker, Deputy Chairman of Tribunal: 'Surely you must have had some thoughts about (politics), and then there you were in 1935 joining the Party.'

Karajan: I'm prepared to admit that it was an error, but we artists live in another world, a self-contained one. Otherwise it would be impossible to play music properly, and music is the highest and only thing for me.'


A Google search on Siegfried Lautterwasser returns a web site at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film. It appears this archive is part of Ryerson University in Toronto. It contains the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection of photos. These are all available online, and they are quite an eye opener. Open the links for coverage of Martin Borman's Visit to Unteruhldingen - May 4-6, 1935 (Boorman was Hitler's number two, and a racist who was outstanding among some finely developed examples of the species), the Nuremberg Rally - September 1935, and much more. The photos have a captivating, haunting and chilling quality. Forget their repugnant subjects, these are compelling images.


Hitler in real life, as captured in the Siegried Lauterwasser Collection

But here is the mystery. Who actually took these photos? They are on the web site as the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection, and the Lautterwasser in question must be the same one as Karajan's photographer as his dates are identical. There are 'Research and attribution' notes on the site, but these are as clear as mud about the origin of the photos, and talk vaguely of 'an unknown Nazi photographer'. So presumably Lautterwasser didn't take them. If not, why are they labelled as his collection? What is the link between him and the photos? The mystery deepens as a key link on the 'Research and attribution' notes is broken. I've sent several emails to both Ryerson University and George Eastman House about the collection, and have not yet received a reply. (For an update on this post, and for confirmation that the pictures are indeed the work of Lauterwasser see my post The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet - Pliable 19/04/2005).

So what is the link (if any) between Siegried Lauterwasser and these extraordinary photos? Or is the whole thing an elaborate (and bad taste) hoax? Anyone who can shed any light on this fascinating mystery plesae post the explanation using the comments icon below.

Update -For confirmation that the pictures are indeed the work of Lauterwasser see my post The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet - Pliable 19/04/2005).

Further update - just as some other sites have picked up on this post the server hosting the photo archive in Canada at George Eastman House/Ryerson University has started intermittent performance/connectivity problems (nice to think its the traffic we've generated!). If you aren't getting the images on my post, or can't link across to the Siegfied Lauterwasser Collection site please keep trying, it is well worth it when you finally connect - Pliable 27/04/2005)

29th April - a further update with fascinating information on the discovery and attribution of the Lauterwasser archive – see How photo archive was salvaged from a trash can


Another image from the mysterious Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection
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