Eva Kemlein

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Eva Kemlein (born August 4, 1909 in Berlin-Charlottenburg ; † August 8, 2004 in Berlin ; born Eva Ernestine Graupe ) was a German photographer and photojournalist .

life and work

Berlin memorial plaque on Steinrückweg 7 house in Berlin-Wilmersdorf
Stumbling stone at the house, Rudolstädter Strasse 93, in Berlin-Wilmersdorf

Eva Kemlein was the daughter of Jewish parents. She attended the Princess Bismarck School . She found her way to photography through her professional training as a medical-technical assistant at the Letteschule in the late 1920s through medical photographs. On a trip to Italy in the early 1930s she met her future husband Herbert Kemlein. They married in 1933 and had to go into exile in Greece after Hitler came to power . They lived there on Eva Kemlein's photography. Herbert Kemlein wrote articles for German newspapers as a journalist . After the introduction of the Nuremberg Race Laws , Eva Kemlein was banned from working , and her husband also had problems selling his articles in German newspapers because of the mixed marriage . Eva Kemlein's father sent them money so that they could survive in Greece.

In 1937, the couple were suddenly expelled from Greece. All that remained was to return to Berlin. Herbert Kemlein divorced his Jewish wife in order to be able to work again, Eva Kemlein never forgave her husband for that. Eva Kemlein stayed alone with her mother in Berlin. Her father had since died and her two brothers were in exile abroad.

During this time, Eva Kemlein met the actor Werner Stein . Kemlein as a Jew and Werner Stein as an actor on the left went underground. They experienced the worst time in the years of the bombing war , when they lost their modest belongings. Eva Kemlein was only left with one Leica . She used it to take pictures during the war. B. in the Siemens factory, where she had an undiscovered job on the assembly line. Constantly looking for a new place to stay, without the possibility of going to a bunker during the air raids, they survived the war and experienced the liberation by the Red Army .

Together with her partner Werner Stein, she moved to the Berlin artists' colony in Steinrückweg 7 as early as May 1945. On the political left, Kemlein and Stein worked on building a new cultural life in the eastern part of the city. The Leica had also survived the war, and Eva Kemlein used it to document life in the rubble city in thousands of pictures. Her first pictures appeared at the end of May 1945 in the newly founded Berliner Zeitung , where she had a short-term job. She was denied recognition as a "racially persecuted" person by the West Berlin Senate on the grounds: "Your application for recognition as a racially persecuted person could not be granted because you work as a photo reporter for a Soviet German publisher in the Soviet sector."

View from the Berlin City Palace, 1950, photographed by Eva Kemlein

Her work initially concentrated on recordings of the destroyed Berlin, of the city palace that was demolished, of the rubble women (including Wolfgang Langhoff as “rubble man” with his wife), Berlin originals such as “Strohhut-Emil”, “Krücke”, “Uncle” Pelle ”etc. and especially the conditions in their apartment block, the Berlin artists' colony. Through her life partner, the actor Werner Stein, she then concentrated particularly on theater in East Berlin . At the beginning there were recordings of the ensemble of the Deutsches Theater , which she photographed while the employees cleared away the ruins of their theater. The personal friendship with the actor Ernst Busch , who was her neighbor in the artist colony, allowed her to participate in the establishment and development of the Berliner Ensemble . This is where the theater photographer Kemlein was born, who captured all the legendary productions by Bertolt Brecht and many others with her camera. She also took very private photos. B. by Hanns Eisler , Hedda Zinner with Fritz Erpenbeck and son John , Piscator, Ernst Busch privately and others involved in the theater.

Eva Kemlein preferred to call herself a "photojournalist" rather than a "theater photographer". Nevertheless, she remained loyal to theater photography until her death.

In the 1970s she began to shoot theater photos in West Berlin - here mainly photos of Peter Stein's productions at the Schaubühne and at other well-known theaters such as B. in the Theater des Westens , Schillertheater , Schlossparktheater etc.

Until recently, a few weeks before her death, she was a regular guest at the usual “photo rehearsals” with her camera. One of her most famous modern photographs shows the actor Martin Wuttke ; On the occasion of the staging of Brecht's parable The Resistant Ascent of Arturo Ui by Heiner Müller - it was to be his last directorial work - she shot the main actor in the pose of a living swastika .

She caused a sensation in 2000 with her photos of the Berlin City Palace , rediscovered in the archives of the Brandenburg preservationists in Wünsdorf and when the discussion began about the demolition of the Palace of the Republic of Berlin (she was decidedly against the demolition) and the plan to rebuild the one that had been blown up in 1950 Baus came up. Eva Kemlein had documented every single room in the palace in the days before the demolition. Your photos are therefore an important basis for the new construction of the palace.

In 1993 she sold over 300,000 negatives to the Berlin City Museum - including photos from post-war Berlin and photos from over 50 years of Berlin's theater history. She gave further photos and many historical books and other material to the archive of the Berlin Artists' Colony.

tomb

Eva Kemlein lived - as she emphasized: out of conviction  - in the Berlin artists' colony until her death . She died a few days after her 95th birthday in a Berlin hospital. She is buried in the cemetery of the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder communities in Berlin-Mitte. On August 25, 2014 , a Berlin memorial plaque was attached to her former home in Berlin-Wilmersdorf , Steinrückweg 7 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Eva Kemlein  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A life with the camera . In: Berliner Zeitung , January 20, 2005
personal data
SURNAME Kemlein, Eva
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Graupe, Eva Ernestine (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer
DATE OF BIRTH 4th August 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Charlottenburg (now: Berlin )
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 2004
Place of death Berlin