Yevgeny Ananyevich Chaldei

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Chaldej on a Russian postage stamp, 2017

Yevgeny Ananyevich Chaldei ( Russian Евгений Ананьевич Халдей ; different spelling Chaldej , born March 10-23 , 1917 in Jusowka, today Donetsk , Ukraine ; † October 6, 1997 in Moscow , Russia ) was a Soviet photographer . As a war correspondent , among other things, he accompanied the conquest of Berlin by the Soviet troops in April / May 1945 . His photo at the Berlin Reichstag on May 2, 1945 shows the hoisting of the Soviet flag on the Reichstag building and earned him worldwide fame.

Life

Childhood and youth

Yevgeny Chaldei came from a Jewish-Ukrainian family. When he was one year old, his mother was murdered in a pogrom in 1918. At the age of twelve he started photography with self-made tools and began training as a photo laboratory technician in 1933 in his hometown, which has since been renamed Stalino (today: Donetsk ). But he began his professional career in 1930 in a steel mill, where he photographed the best workers . In 1932 he drove through his home area with an "agitation brigade" and saw massive starvation as a result of the Stalinist forced collectivization . In 1936 he was employed as a photographer by the TASS news agency .

Second World War and Reichstag photo

The Second World War left scars on the family: In 1941 and 1942, Chaldei's father and three sisters were murdered by Germans in Stalino, which he only found out after the war. From June 1941 he himself accompanied various branches of the Soviet army at theaters of war as a photographer. By his own estimate, he covered about 30,000 kilometers in the 1,148 days he was en route in this war. After a few months in the strategically important and contested port of Murmansk , he was promoted from simple marine to lieutenant and was allowed to travel to Moscow in November 1941 to an exhibition of his paintings . From January 1942 he photographed the fighting on the Crimean peninsula , experienced the most terrible sides of the war there and learned of the mass murder of the civilians by the Germans in the city of Kerch . With the advancing Red Army, he experienced the liberation of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary and the capture of Vienna and Berlin. After the conquest of Berlin by the Soviet army, he looked for a suitable motif with high symbolic value. Whether he knew Joe Rosenthal's photo Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima , taken a few months earlier , is controversial. He received red tablecloths from the caretaker of the TASS agency and had three Soviet flags cut from them by a tailor friend of his. With three soldiers, whom he met in the entrance area of ​​the burning Reichstag, he climbed onto the roof of the building and photographed them hoisting the flag. (He had previously hoisted and photographed the other two flags at Tempelhof Airport and the Brandenburg Gate .) A series of 36 photographs was taken with the title At the Berlin Reichstag, May 2, 1945 . Then he traveled back to Moscow. It was not until the editor-in-chief that it occurred to me that the picture could not be published unprocessed: One of the soldiers was a looter . He appears to be wearing a watch on each wrist . Therefore, the watch on the soldier's right arm was retouched. In the Red Army, however, the wearing of wrist compasses (Adrianow model) was widespread, so that the interpretation as a looter was obvious from a distance, but not mandatory. In addition to this retouching , the clouds of smoke in the background of the picture were added later. In reality, several days had passed between the end of the fighting and the time the photograph was taken.

War diary

Between 1941 and 1943 he secretly kept a diary of his experiences. The secrecy was necessary because Soviet soldiers were forbidden to write down their subjective impressions of the war. This was to prevent details that contradicted the official war propaganda from being spread . For example, war photographers were prohibited from posting photos of wounded Soviet soldiers. His diary provides information on many of the terrible and unhelpful pages of the war. The diary remained unknown until his death in 1997.

After the war

Chaldei's Reichstag photo becomes an icon: GDR postage stamp from 1975

After the German capitulation, he accompanied the Potsdam Conference , the Moscow Victory Parade of 1945 , the Nuremberg Trials and the Paris Peace Conference (1946) as a photo reporter. His Jewish origin was his undoing in the post-war years in the context of the “struggle against rootless cosmopolitans ”: he was dismissed from the TASS and was no longer allowed to work for the party newspaper Pravda . He had to make do with odd jobs and lived a life of poverty until the death of Josef Stalin (1953). After Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956, he was reinstated by Pravda and released again in 1972. Despite his world-famous photos, he was largely forgotten for years. The late appreciation of his work was mainly due to Ernst Volland , who first met Chaldej in Moscow in 1991 and later in Berlin. In 1995 Chaldej was invited to the Visa Festival in Perpignan and celebrated. On this occasion he got to know Joe Rosenthal personally.

Yevgeny Chaldei died of a stroke in 1997 in Moscow.

His diary was only found and published in an inventory of his estate in 2000 after his death. It was published in German by Ernst Volland in 2011, supplemented by a number of photographs under the title Jewgeni Chaldej: War Diary. Written and photographic diary .

Exhibitions

literature

  • Heinz Krimmer , Ernst Volland (ed.): The significant moment. Yevgeny Chaldej - A retrospective. Neuer Europa Verlag, Leipzig 2008. ISBN 978-3-86695-121-1 .
  • Heinz Krimmer, Ernst Volland: From Moscow to Berlin. Images by Russian photographer Yevgeny Chaldej. Parthas Verlag, Berlin 2002. ISBN 978-3-932529-67-2 .
  • Ernst Volland: The banner of victory. Berlin Story Verlag, Berlin 2008. ISBN 978-3-929829-91-4 .
  • Heinz Krimmer: Yevgeny Chaldej. The Red Fleet photographer. In: Mare . Journal of the Seas. No. 70, October / November 2008. ISSN  1432-928X , pp. 38-51.
  • Heinz Krimmer, Ernst Volland (ed.): Jewgeni Chaldej: War diary . Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-360-02113-7 .
  • Alexander and Alice Nakhimovsky: "Witness to History - The photographs of Yevgeny Khaldei", Aperture books, New York 1997, ISBN 0-89381-738-4

Web links

Commons : Yevgeny Chaldei  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Heinz Krimmer: Evgeni Chaldej. The Red Fleet photographer. In: Mare. No. 70, October / November 2008. p. 51.
  2. ↑ Peter Jahn: Show the flag. The photographer Yevgeny Chaldej. In: Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Magazin 11, spring 2008, accessed on June 28, 2011
  3. ↑ a b c Solveigh Grote: War photographer Chaldej. Soldier on all fronts. In: One day Zeitgeschichten on mirror online , March 7, 2011, accessed on June 28, 2011.
  4. ^ War Propaganda: Diffuse Icons of Victory. At handelsblatt.com, accessed on May 16, 2012.
  5. ↑ Martin Mehlhorn: "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima". History of the creation of an icon and its significance for the American culture of remembrance from 1945-2006. 2011, p. 14, online version
  6. ↑ : Alexander and Alice Nakhimovsky: Witness to History - The photographs of Yevgeny Khaldei. Aperture books, New York 1997, pp. 10-11.
  7. ↑ Comparative illustration of retouching and original . The flag on the Reichstag. Part 3. The manipulated photo. Ernst Volland, accessed on May 29, 2011.
  8. ^ Taz article by Klaus Bittermann : From Moscow to Berlin. Taz from 18./19. June 2011.
  9. ^ Heinz Krimmer: Jewgeni Chaldej. The Red Fleet photographer. In: Mare. No. 70, October / November 2008. p. 48.
  10. ^ Taz article by Klaus Bittermann: From Moscow to Berlin, Taz from 18./19. June 2011
  11. ^ Yevgeny Chaldej: War Diary. Edited by Ernst Volland and Heinz Krimmer. Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 2011. ISBN 978-3-360-02113-7 .
personal data
SURNAME Chaldei, Yevgeny Ananyevich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chaldej, Evgeni Ananyevich; Халдей, Евгений Ананьевич (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION soviet photographer
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Jusowka , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH October 6, 1997
Place of death Moscow , Russia