Herbert Sonnenfeld

Herbert Sonnenfeld (born September 29, 1906 in Berlin-Neukölln , † 1972 in New York ) was a German photographer. In the 1930s he documented Jewish life in Berlin and the surrounding area.

Life

Herbert Sonnenfeld was the son of Josef and Charlotte Sonnenfeld, who ran a haberdashery shop on Hermannstrasse in Berlin . After graduating from school, he worked in an uncle's haberdashery for some time before becoming a security agent. In 1931 he married and moved with his wife Leni into an apartment on Joachimsthaler Strasse , where he set up a darkroom as an enthusiastic amateur photographer .

As a Jew , Herbert Sonnenfeld was dismissed soon after the National Socialists came to power . The Sonnenfeld couple tried to emigrate to Palestine , but were rejected as unskilled and too poor. Nevertheless, Herbert Sonnenfeld went on a trip to Palestine on his own in 1933 and documented the life of the Yishuv there . After only two weeks he returned to Berlin, now convinced that, according to his impressions, he would not be able to live "on primitive conditions" in Palestine anyway.

After this trip, his wife Leni, who often assisted him with the photography, offered her husband's photos to various Jewish newspapers. The reaction was positive and Herbert Sonnenfeld worked from then on as a press photographer for Jewish newspapers and organizations. Among other things, he documented events of the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden , took pictures of the Jewish Museum, which was located on Oranienburger Straße from 1933 to 1938 , of artists and art events, of charity campaigns, sporting events and of scenes in Hachschara camps. He also created pictures of people leaving the Anhalter Bahnhof on their way to emigration. The Jewish Museum Berlin owns around 3,000 negatives from the period 1933 to 1938 ; This made Sonnenfeld one of the most important photographers who documented aspects of Jewish life in Berlin during the Nazi era .

However, a certain one-sidedness of the recordings can be observed, because the newspapers for which Sonnenfeld provided pictures naturally tried to maintain and strengthen the courage to face life and the self-confidence of their readership in these times, so that they are less concerned with the isolation and disenfranchisement of the Jews in the Third Reich . but above all the positive sides of existence were emphasized. In addition to their documentary function, the images often also had a propaganda function.

Herbert Sonnenfeld's career as a press photographer began when Robert Weltsch , who was editor-in-chief of the Zionist Jüdischer Rundschau , bought the Palestine pictures . In the following he published his pictures in the Israelitisches Familienblatt , in the community sheet of the Jewish community in Berlin , in the Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung , in the shield and other papers. Like his colleagues Abraham Pisarek , Arno Kikoler etc., he was limited to Jewish clients. From 1936 Herbert Sonnenfeld also gave photography courses; Leni Sonnenfeld, initially only working as an assistant, began taking photos in a Jewish retirement home in 1934 and documented the activities in an Aliyah camp in Sweden in 1936 . The Sonnenfeld couple stayed with this job until November 1938. After the “ Reichskristallnacht ” only a few pictures by Herbert Sonnenfeld were published.

The news that the visas for entry into the USA , which the couple had been trying to obtain since the mid-1930s, arrived the day after the Germans invaded Poland.

When Herbert and Leni Sonnenfeld were able to emigrate to New York at the end of 1939, they only carried a small part of the pictures they had created in previous years. They had taken the train to Trieste and boarded a ship that was taking them to the United States. Herbert Sonnenfeld had a married brother in New York, and the couple received support from the American Jewish Congress , which provided an apartment and a photo studio. The Sonnenfelds continued their activity in New York; there, too, they stuck to their specialization in Jewish subjects. Herbert Sonnenfeld was the only photographer to accompany the Zionist Organization of America conference at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942 . A few months later he was called up for military service and sent to England . There he took photos in the Litchfield Barracks reception camp. Meanwhile, Leni Sonnenfeld pursued her own career as a photographer in New York. Among other things, she documented the Fort Ontario refugee center in Oswego in 1944. She later worked for papers such as the New York Times and Life Magazine , but also for numerous Jewish organizations, and traveled to numerous countries. Among other things, she created numerous pictures that show the early stages of the State of Israel.

Herbert Sonnenfeld was also interested in painting in his later years. After his death, Leni Sonnenfeld managed the archive of the photographic negatives that the couple had accumulated. Leni Sonnenfeld sold the Berlin recordings to the Jewish Museum Berlin, the rest remained in her possession in New York. Leni Sonnenfeld outlived her husband by many years and died in 2004 at the age of 96.

Whereabouts of the pictures

The Jewish department of the Berlin Museum bought part of Herbert Sonnenfeld's estate in 1988, supported by the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin , and two years later organized an exhibition entitled Herbert Sonnenfeld. A Jewish photographer in Berlin 1933–1938 . After the Jewish Museum Berlin opened in 2001, the collection was inventoried there and gradually digitized. From November 2012 the museum's own collections were put online; Herbert Sonnenfeld's photographs were among the first exhibits to be made available to the public in this way.

literature

• Maren Krüger: Herbert Sonnenfeld. A Jewish photographer in Berlin 1933–1938 . 2nd Edition. Nicolai, 1992, ISBN 978-3-87584-322-4 .
• Leni Sonnenfeld: Eyes of Memory. Photographs from the Archives of Herbert & Leni Sonnenfeld . Yale University Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-300-10605-3 .

Web links

• All photos of the Jewish Museum Berlin by Herbert Sonnenfeld

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Photo archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
2. ↑ According to German-language sources, he worked as a sales representative (according to the short biography ( memento of the original from December 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice . on berlin.de) or as an employee of an insurance company (according to Theresia Ziehe ) until he was dismissed as a Jew during the Nazi era . 
3. ^ ^{A b c} Theresia Ziehe: Photographic evidence of the time: On the history of the Herbert Sonnenfeld collection . jmberlin.de, September 29, 2014