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
