Julius Groß (photographer)

Julius Groß (born April 14, 1892 in Berlin ; † April 23, 1986 there ) was a Berlin photographer who, in addition to his professional activity, created one of the most comprehensive documentaries on the German youth movement .

Training and photographic activity

Julius Groß's parents were the Austrian Marie, née Harpf, and Alfred Medardus Groß , born in Transylvania in 1857 . The latter studied dentistry in Berlin, where he met Otto Lilienthal and designed his own aircraft. After a few years in Berlin, the family moved to Bad Wörishofen , where Julius Groß came into contact with Sebastian Kneipp and his alternative healing methods through his father . Groß completed his school education up to his Abitur in Berlin, where his mother had returned with him after Kneipp's death; the father, however, emigrated to Brazil. Around 1905, Groß joined the Alt- Wandervogel and in 1914 switched to Wandervogel eV In the same year, Groß, who had meanwhile started studying natural sciences, chemistry and geography in Berlin and had dropped out again, was obliged to serve due to the outbreak of war. Because of a diagnosed heart condition classified as "not fit for war use", he was assigned to the photography department of the Geographical Institute of the Technical University of Berlin . At the same time, he began to accompany the journeys of his local group of the Wandervogel with his own camera and in 1916 was one of the founders of the picture office for the Berlin and Brandenburg groups.

In 1919, Groß finished his training as a photographer in Berlin and, in parallel to his freelance work as a photographer, completed the master's course at the Berliner Lette-Verein in 1921 . Throughout his life, Groß remained photographically connected to the youth movement and documented numerous trips and events of various youth movement and life reform groups. At the same time, he took on commissioned work to earn money and took photos for political parties, associations, companies and private individuals until the 1980s. His advertising slogan was: "If something's going on where ... Call Big Photo!"

The archive of the German youth movement is now keeping Julius Groß's estate, including 160,000 photographs taken by Groß from a period from 1908 to shortly before his death in 1986.

Photographer of the youth movement

Among the photographs in the archive of the German youth movement, tens of thousands of photos document activities within the German youth movement and related groups. Until 1933, Groß accompanied, among other things, trips and events of the Wandervögel and Boy Scouts , the Kronach Association , the youth music movement , the youth association of the German National Handicrafts Association , the traveling journeymen, the eagles and falcons and the Association of German Wanderers . The people portrayed by Groß in this phase include, for example, Knud Ahlborn , Walter Fischer, Silvio Gesell , Enno Narten , Hugo Schomburg and Lucie Sckerl .

Even after 1933, when most of the youth associations either dissolved or were transferred to the Hitler Youth , Groß continued to operate in this area and made recordings of events of the National Socialist organization Kraft durch Freude and the National Socialist German Workers' Party , but also, for example, of church events.

With his photographs, Julius Groß shaped the image of young people, especially those of the interwar generation. His recordings convey the attitudes of many middle-class young people, who mainly in their free time from the confined city turned to a supposedly freer, nature-loving way of life. They are more conservative in their visual aesthetics and largely follow traditional visual conventions in terms of structure and lighting. The collection itself has a high historical value due to the coherence of its tradition, as it also enables insights into the economic and cultural life of Berlin over decades. In particular, a photographer's estate that is outstanding in terms of both quantity and quality, such as the Groß'sche, enables further conclusions to be drawn, for example, about a specific perspective on modernity that was generated from the life reform and youth movement.

In a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft , around 40,000 photos from the photographer's estate from the period 1908 to 1933 were digitized and scientifically developed. The images and the information can be called up via the online research database "Archive Information System Hessen".

Publications with Groß'schen photographs (selection)

• Heinrich E. Schomburg / Georg Koetschau (ed.): The Wandervogel book . Self-published, Oranienburg 1917.
• Friedrich Wilhelm Fulda (Ed.): Solstice. A booklet from the Wandervogel . Hofmeister, Leipzig 1919.
• Lucie Sckerl: Instructions for gymnastics lessons in schools . Teubner, Leipzig / Berlin 1925.
• Julius Groß: Summer party of the seminar for folk and youth music care. Memory in a sequence of photographs . Manuscript, not published, self-published, 1930.

literature

• Winfried Mogge: Pictures from Wandervogel's life. The bourgeois youth movement in photos by Julius Gross 1913-1933 . Hammer, Wuppertal 1985, ISBN 3-87294-271-9 .
• Sven Reiss: Photography in the "Wandervogel". On the private practice of bourgeois photography in the German Empire . Univ. Kiel, Phil. Fak., Master's thesis, 2012.
• Maria Daldrup / Marco Rasch: DFG project "Development and digitization of the photographer's estate Julius Groß (1908-1933)". Significant holdings in the archive of the German youth movement , in: Archivnachrichten aus Hessen 14/2, 2014 , pp. 67–70, ISSN  1865-2816 ; available as PDF (5.6 MB).

Web links

• Literature by and about Julius Groß in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tree owner and aviation pioneer: Alfred Medardus Groß was a restless ghost from childhood on. Online article in the Augsburger Allgemeine from December 27, 2011, last accessed on January 15, 2015
2. ^ Conference report on youth movement research in the archive of the German youth movement , 4. – 6. April 2014, Witzenhausen, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, June 4, 2014, accessed on June 4, 2014
3. ^ Arcinsys home page