Fritz Eschen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fritz Eschen (born January 19, 1900 in Berlin ; † September 19, 1964 in Melk , Lower Austria ) was a German photographer.

biography

Fritz Eschen lived and worked in Berlin, where he photographed many situations and faces. His pictures became important historical documents. His parents were the businessman Leopold Eschen (d. 1914) and Therese Eschen (d. 1923).

Eschen went to school in Berlin from 1906 to 1918, most recently to the Königstädtisches Gymnasium , where he graduated from high school , however. In 1918 he was called up as a radio operator. Before Eschen came to photography , he completed a commercial apprenticeship from 1919 . He then gained professional experience at Pomosin-Werke GmbH and at Berliner Privattelefon GmbH, where he held a managerial position. However, he did not feel comfortable in this profession and therefore began working as a freelance photo journalist for agencies such as Associated Press , Defot and Neofot-Fotag in 1928 . Since he had never learned the craft of a photographer, he described himself as an “autodidact and amateur photographer”.

Around 1927/28 Eschen married the Jewish entrepreneur's daughter Rose Salomon, whose father was the owner of PRITEG. The son Peter (January 22, 1931 - December 1942) and his mother Rose (October 3, 1905 - December 1942) were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on December 9, 1941 , and then murdered there.

In contrast to some of his family members, Fritz Eschen, who came from a Jewish family, survived the Nazi era . His second marriage to the "Aryan" Lipsy (Gertrude) Thumm, which was signed in 1933, saved him from deportation, but not from arrest by the Gestapo and from forced labor for the Marcus Metallbau Berlin company. During the so-called factory action on February 27, 1943, Eschen was arrested, but was released again after relatives protested. The children Thomas (1935–1944) and Klaus (born 1939) were evacuated first to East Prussia and later to the Glatzer Bergland.

Although at the end of 1933 the exclusion from the Reich Association of the German Press meant that Eschen was banned from practicing his profession, but he still received occasional assignments. They came from American agencies, especially the AP, and the Deutsche Reichsbahn . The resulting works were often published under a pseudonym or under the name of the agency.

Shortly before the start of the war, in 1938, Eschen was able to teach photography to co- religionists who had to prepare for emigration .

After 1945

With the end of the war and the liberation, he was able to work as a freelance photo journalist again. Eschen photographed for almost all Berlin newspapers and magazines. In 1946 he was elected chairman of the cross-zone working group of photo reporters in the Association of the German Press . From 1952 to 1954 he was a picture editor at the Neue Zeitung . After this time, Fritz Eschen mainly published books that arose out of commissions and often through personal motivation. These publications contain a selection of the photographer's most typical and successful images.

Fritz Eschen died in September 1964 on a reporting trip. Eschen's son Klaus followed in his father's footsteps as a photo journalist before starting his professional career as a lawyer. His grave is in the forest cemetery Zehlendorf in Berlin.

Honors

Memorial plaque for ash trees on the Bundesplatz in Berlin

On October 11, 2015, a memorial plaque for ash trees was unveiled at Bundesplatz 1 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf .

photography

Fritz Eschen was known as a portrait photographer. In addition to commissioned work, he made recordings of people who interested him: industrialists, artists, politicians, actors, writers and scientists. Today he is better known for his genre recordings from the pre- and post-war years in Berlin.

The basis for his work was the preoccupation with the people to be portrayed before the actual portrait. Fritz Eschen takes a closer look at their work and activities. Since he visited people in places they were familiar with - at work, in the studio , in the office, at home or in places in their lives - the result rarely came from the typical portrait session. Rather, recordings were created that developed from conversational situations and captured typical gestures and facial expressions . With his photographs, Eschen conveyed a diverse picture of characters and personalities and also of the relationship between the photographer and the person being photographed. During this process he often produced more than 15 recordings, which differ in the gesture of the moment or in the change of situations.

The pictures after 1945 show both hope and hardship, departure and resignation of a society that sought to re-locate itself. In his photographs he keeps moments, moods and situations alive, which fade more and more in memory over time.

Photos in the Deutsche Fotothek

Fritz Eschen's picture archive comprises around 90,000 medium-format photographs. These were bought in 1973 by the Berlin State Library (GDR) for the Deutsche Fotothek , which was subordinate to Berlin until 1983 and today belongs to the Saxon State Library - Dresden State and University Library .

The photos were archived by the author in contact and negative binders according to thematic criteria. The contact files in particular are indispensable for research today, as it was not yet possible to fully incorporate the extensive Eschen archive into the database. These binders help you to look at all of the photos for a motif and, in addition to the negative numbers, often also contain information on the date of the photo and publications.

So far, around 13,000 images have been documented in the image database. These include around 10,000 portraits. In 2006, as part of the expansion of the database, all of the contact sheets put together by Eschen for the portrait series were digitized and indexed. They enable a direct insight into Eschen's working method.

Works

  • Fritz Eschen: ... that's how I saw Potsdam . Berlin 1948.
  • Georg mesh ribbon  ; Fritz Eschen: Art education suggestions: a contribution to the practice of visual education in general schools
    • Volume 1: The first six school years . Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1955
    • Volume 2: 7th to 10th school year and year of career choice . Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1955
    • Volume 3: Constructive Design . Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1955
  • Fritz Eschen: Heads: Hundreds of portraits . Berlin: Ullstein, 1956
  • Fritz Eschen: Young old Berlin . Berlin 1956 (published in numerous revised editions by Stapp Verlag)
  • Fritz Eschen: Camera in my hand . 120 shots. Berlin-Grunewald 1959.
  • Fritz Eschen: Heads of research on the Rhine and Ruhr . Dortmund 1959.
  • Fritz Eschen: The last portrait. Death masks of famous personalities from past and present . Berlin 1967.

literature

  • Berlinische Galerie: 3 photographers. Fritz Eschen, FC Gundlach, Otto Borutta . Berlin 1985.
  • Fritz Eschen: Photographs. Berlin 1945–1950 . Berlin 1989 (with texts by Klaus Eschen and Janos Frecot). ISBN 3-87584-261-8
  • Press and Information Office of the Free University of Berlin (Ed.) Fritz Eschen: Early photos from the Free University . Berlin 1996. ISBN 3-930208-12-1
  • Janos Frecot: camera stories. Fritz Eschen 1930–1950 . Berlin 2001. ISBN 3-8030-3095-1
  • Rolf Engelbart: The Berlin photographer and picture journalist Fritz Eschen (1900–1964) . Master's thesis FU Berlin, unpublished, Berlin 2004.
  • Mathias Bertram and Jens Bove (eds.): Fritz Eschen. Berlin under the makeshift roof. Photographs 1945-1955 . Leipzig 2010.
  • Mathias Bertram (Ed.): Fritz Eschen. Heads of the Century: Photographs 1930-1964 . Leipzig 2011. ISBN 978-3-937146-86-7
  • Alfred Gottwaldt: A "photographer" of the railway . In: Eisenbahngeschichte 71 (2015), p. 27f.
  • Maximilian Westphal: Fritz Eschen. Portraits of a photo journalist . Berlinische Galerie, Berlin 2019. ISBN 978-3-940208-61-3

Web links

Commons : Fritz Eschen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Fritz Eschen: On our own behalf. In: Fritz Eschen: Camera in my hand . 120 shots. Berlin-Grunewald 1959, no p.
  2. ↑ Entry for Rosa Eschen and
    entry for Peter Eschen in the memorial book of the Federal Archives for the victims of the National Socialist persecution of Jews in Germany (1933-1945) .
  3. ↑ cf. Eschen Klaus: Foreword. In: Frecot: camera stories. Fritz Eschen 1930–1950 . Berlin 2001, p. 9
  4. ↑ Fritz Eschen - new photo book. June 29, 2010, accessed December 23, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Klaus Eschen: Liberation in ruins. In: Fritz Eschen. Photographs. Berlin 1945–1950 . Berlin 1989, p. 5 f.
personal data
SURNAME Eschen, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 19, 1964
Place of death Melk , Lower Austria