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.
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 errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet

In my post Downfall and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer I wrote about the mysterious Siegfried Lauterwasser archive of photographs of Nazi Germany, and told how Ryerson University in Canada had not responded to queries about the identity of the photographer.


All photographs on this post are from the remarkable Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection

I have have now had a most helpful communication from a lady in Fairhaven, Massachusetts which does confirm that the photographer of these chilling photos was actually Siegfried Lauterwasser, who was later personal photographer to Herbert von Karajan.

Here is the message which really illustrates the power of blogging, and the interconnectedness of the World Wide Web.

"I must confess to having visited “The Overgrown Path” link via the BBC People's War website —finding that we have some shared musical interests as well. I took advantage of my presence here in the States to call the Eastman House photo archivist, Joseph Struble, to get help with the Lauterwasser question you posed the other day. He is sorry he has not responded to your inquiry sooner as it typically takes him about 3 weeks to turnaround email inquiries (having worked at a local museum with a lone photo-archivist, I know they tend to be stretched very tightly but I have suggested to him that in the case of particularly long-distance inquiries, at least sending a brief note of acknowledgement, if not a full answer, is a good policy to adopt so the person writing at least knows their question made it through the ether! I learned this when I had several European clients during my career at SilverPlatter Information). This is what he told me:

The collection was a purchase from a Konrad L. Klein and it came with virtually no provenance as to photographer or time period, other than it was during the Nazi regime. Eastman House took it on due to the compelling subject matter. Andrew Eskind, the person who wrote the piece on the website indicating that the photographer was unknown, was in the process of researching the collection. At some time post-article, Andy ascertained that the photographer was indeed Lauterwasser and this is what Eastman has in its catalog—unfortunately, the website is not as current as the internal catalog. If you wish to know more detail, Joe said you can email Andy and inquire of him. He no longer works at Eastman House but stays in touch with them and Joe felt he would be receptive to the question. Joe, by the way, helped with some of the research by recognizing Leni Riefenstahl in the photos.

I have mentioned the broken link on the website although I have suspicions that this is handled separately by another division in the museum and will probably take time to fix up. I also hinted gently that the website could use a bit of updating to reduce the confusion. As a longtime librarian/archivist/database specialist, this sort of thing drives me nuts.

Hope you find this helpful.

Regards from
Fairhaven, MA"

So these remarkable, and intimate, pictures of leading Nazis were the work of Siegfried Lauterwasser. None of his biographies seem to mention this extraordinary, and important, body of work, as Andy Eskind so neatly puts it below "until literally the last year of his life, Lauterwasser had never revealed his youthful indescretion of taking some small photo assignments for NASDP (Nazi Party)."

Should the political connections of an artist influence our judgement of his work?


6 hours later - and this story gets more and more interesting. After posting the piece above I received this email from Andy Eskind who was responsible for the attribution of the archive to Siegfried Lauterwasser...

There's lots to tell about the Lauterwasser adventure. I did literally crack the attribution of the images at GEH by using the internet, and I'm happy to share the whole story. The real clincher is that the Lauterwasser family shared digital copies of strips of film which fit together with those at GEH like 'hand in glove'. This despite the fact that until literally the last year of his life, Lauterwasser had never revealed his youthful indescretion of taking some small photo assignments for NASDP. There is much more that could be done with the project - GEH material on the web site is far from fully (or even correctly) sorted out, but, alas, I was among post 9/11 layoffs at GEH when tourism plumeted, as did government and Kodak grants leaving GEH in a financial pinch from which it still hasn't fully recovered. I could go on and on, but at the moment am working on a grant application due May 1. I barely had time to glance at your postings - but this is definitely an interesting story. I did send Riefenstahl those 2 frames before she died in hopes she would identify the cinematographer next to her. Unfortunately never heard from her. Chris Horak and other cinema experts have been contradictory in their identifications of him. I, of course, had incorrectly jumped to the conclusion that she was in Nurenburg shooting what came to be Triumph of the Will. It turns out to have actually been the following year and the project she barely ever acknowledged working on until prints were discovered in Eastern film archives - details when I have more time.
(and later)
Yes, I guess it's ok to post. My only misgiving is I don't want to offend the Lauterwasser family who were very cooperative with me. I had raised the funds to visit them in Germany when my tenure at GEH was abruptly cut short. They have as much material from that era as is at GEH - it's not entirely clear why it was so arbitrarily divided in half - my hunches in the past haven't always turned out to be correct. When you used his later Karajan images, did you deal directly with Lauterwasser? By the way, the film strip sequences on geh.org were assembled before the family shared additional material with me. The new material in several cases proved that I had put things together which didn't really go together. Mistakes I never had a chance to correct.

Regards, Andy


Two days later I received this email from Eastman House.
Dear Sir,
I do not have any information about the relationship of Siegfried Lauterwasser to the conductor Herbert von Karajan.
The article that Mr. Andrew Eskind wrote on the collection of 808 negatives (35 mm strips) for the museum's magazine "Image" (Volume 38, Nos. 1-2, Spring-Summer 1995) was published before his effort to find authorship of the material was accomplished. Mr. Eskind was very persistent with this and I think he would be happy to correspond with you concerning the process and the connection of these negatives to Sigfried Lauterwasser that was established. Perhaps you are already in contact with him, as I spoke to someone here in the US who was following up on your inquiry to us for you and I shared this with her. In any event, you have bumped up against one of the limitations of our offsite database access. We hope to provide acccess to all the updated information that has been added in the past several years since the Museum switched over to a new Data Management System (TMS) which has its own public interface (E-Museum). However, we cannot provide this at present. I'm glad you were able to make contact with us and I do wish I could have responded to you sooner, but believe it or not, there is quite a steady volume of e-mail inquiries which make their way to me and which I try to respond to in a timely manner along with some my other responsibilites here.
Best wishes,
Joe R. Struble
Assistant Archivist
Photo Collection


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
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 errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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
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 errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

My first classical record

What was the first classical record you bought? Mine was an LP of Karajan conducting Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony, the 'Pathetique', with the Berlin Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon 13892SLPM. I bought it in 1969 from a music shop in Reading where I was at University. The shop had listening booths with acoustic tiles, and it sold sheet music, musical instruments, and classical records.

The LP is playing as I write. I have just serviced my Thorens TD125 turntable with SME arm (a capacitor in the motor control circuit blew after 30 years). The LP sound through my Arcam Alpha 10 amplifier and B & W Nautilus 803 speakers is magnificent, when the planets are aligned beneficially vinyl can still deliver a musicality that surpasses CD. (Thankfully I have kept my LP collection, and the surfaces are immaculate apart from the inevitable pressing blemishes).

What overgrown path led me to buy that LP of the 'Pathetique'? Well, I can answer that question quite easily. Some years previously I had been taken by my parents, while on holiday, to hear Tchaikovsky 6th played by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in the Winter Gardens in Bournemouth. The conductor was a dynamic young Chinese maestro Choo Hoey. (Googling for Choo Hoey pulls up references to a conductor active in the Far East, could this be the same one? - I must have seeen him more than forty years ago).

Did that early hearing of Tchaikovsky 6 burn irreversible patterns into my neural networks a la Mozart Effect? Did the B minor key signature programme me towards an near obsession for Masses in minor keys in general, and Bach's masterpiece in particular? Was it that adiogio lamentoso last movement that inclined me towards the melancholic of the Four Temparaments? (Post coming up, time permitting, on a CD called the Four Temparaments - no not Carl Nielsen - it is an excellent new release from the innovative viol consort Phantasm, and it includes a setting for viols of the Byrd 4 Part Mass!)

Could it have been that brooding Siegfried Lauterwasser cover photograph of Karajan (this link gives an interesting perspective on Lauterwasser, who was HvK's 'court' photographer) that headed me towards a career that took me from the BBC, and then to EMI where I worked on some of Karajan's projects including his recording of Debussy's operatic masterpiece Pelleas et Melisande? That project summed up the Karajan conundrum completely, sublime music making and an odious personality. My favourite Karajan story is about when he was conducting at Bayreuth with Hans Knappertsbusch. There were just two lavatories at the end of a long corridor backstage. Karajan's personal secretary, it is said, put a notice on one, 'For the exclusive use of Herr Karajan'. An hour later a notice appeared on the other one written by Knappertsbusch, 'For all the other arseholes'.

I was also involved with others in the Karajan circle. When Walter Legge died in 1979 I created an exhiibition at short notice for the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall in London. Legge's wife Elizabeth Schwarzkopf (below) viewed the exhibition before a Philharmonia Orchestra memorial concert, and complained to me that I had described Legge in the display as an 'entrepreneur.' Now I have often been wrong in my choice of words, but in that instance I am convinced I was dead right.

But the path didn't just lead me to Karajan and his circle . My second LP was Bernard Haitink conducting the London Philharmonic in Holst's Planet Suite (A strange choice, the reading with its odd tempi has long since been deleted). Haitink resoundingly disproves the rule that you need an odious personality to be a great conductor. (And also Colin Davis - interesting he has no 'personal' web site, this is a quote from the article I've linked to.. I detest all that charisma stuff. It leads to unmusical things like the pursuit of power. The older I get, the more wary I am of power. It is a beastly ingredient in our society - he said that in 1990!).

I lunched once with Haitink in the staff refectory at Glyndebourne to seek approval for the cover design of his recording of the Brahms Double Concerto with Perlman and Rostropovich (approval was given without a hint of the vanity and petulance cultivated by Riccardo Muti and others). In those days conductors had cover approval in their contracts, nowadays they have to start their own record labels to make a recording. While driving down to Glyndebourne I had been listening to Previn's first (and by far the best) recording of Walton's First Symphony on RCA. I suggested that Haitink looked at the score, and he subsequently recorded it for EMI. It wasn't a great commercial success, it was a lesson in leaving A & R planning to the professionals. (But I do remember suggesting that Previn recorded the Korngold Violin Concerto and Symphony in F sharp in the 1980s, only to be told he wouldn't touch film music. It is amazing how principles adapt to economics). Haitink later did go on to record a fine cycle of the Vaughan Williams symphonies for EMI after I left. I am always puzzled as to why this fine conductor never plays or records Sibelius. With his achievements recording Bruckner I have always thought Haitink would be a natural Sibelian - give me one Sibelius symphony for every ten of Shostakovich!


The Vaughan William symphonies leads me on to another musical giant whose path briefly crossed mine, Sir Adrian Boult. But that will have to wait until another post.....

If you enjoyed this post you may enjoy Downfall - and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer