Käthe Augenstein

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Käthe Augenstein (born December 20, 1899 in Kessenich as Katharina Christine Augenstein ; † December 29, 1981 in Bonn ) was a German photographer . Her work includes important portraits in the early 1930s in Berlin and from the late 1940s in the Rhineland .

Life

Käthe Augenstein was born in Kessenich in 1899 as the youngest of three daughters of Helene and Joseph Augenstein. She grew up in a middle-class family and received a higher education. Her parents encouraged her artistic interests at an early age. As a young girl she was interested in photography and got her own plate camera . During the First World War she worked in the postal surveillance service. She received her training as a photographer in a photo studio in Bonn. She was friends with the expressionist painter Hans Thuar , who influenced her later work aesthetically and introduced her to other artists.

In 1927, Augenstein moved to Berlin, where he attended the master class at the Lette Association's photography school until 1930 . She cultivated an intensive friendship with the expressionist painter Werner Scholz and frequented the art scene in West Berlin . As a press photographer she worked for Ullstein Verlag , which published her photos in newspapers such as Uhu , Tempo and the Berliner Illustrirten Zeitung . She also worked for the film company UFA and from 1929 worked for the Berlin photo agency Dephot . Your recordings from this time document the cultural life at the end of the Weimar Republic . Portraits of personalities such as the artists Max Liebermann , Renée Sintenis , Milly Steger and Otto Dix , the physicist Max Planck , the actor Hans Albers , the publisher Gustav Kiepenheuer and the writer Thomas Mann were created . There were also reports, for example from the court hearing in which the artists Wieland Herzfelde and George Grosz were accused of blasphemy in 1930 . In addition, she created picture stories from everyday life, for example from beach life at Wannsee .

After the Dephot photo agency went bankrupt in 1932, it initially continued to exist as the German Photo Association Degephot , but was banned by the National Socialist government in 1933. From then on, Augenstein worked for other press agencies. After the Aryanization of the Ullstein publishing house and the renaming to Deutscher Verlag , Harald Lechenperg took over as editor-in-chief of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung in 1937 and a little later gave Käthe Augenstein a permanent position in Elsbeth Heddenhausen's in-house photo studio . In the period that followed, Augenstein was commissioned with some photo trips. During the Second World War she took over the development of color negatives in the studio. When her Berlin apartment burned out at the end of the war, her camera equipment and entire photo archive were lost.

Augenstein returned to her home town of Bonn in 1945. She opened her first own photo studio there and was self-employed until 1972. Your post-war photos show, for example, workers rebuilding Cologne's Hohenzollern Bridge or the Bonn settlement. She also created politician portraits of personalities such as Helene Weber and Carlo Schmid . She also photographed the young abstract artist scene in the Rhineland.

Käthe Augenstein died in 1981. Her estate came into the Bonn City Archives. In 2011, she exhibited her works for the first time in a solo exhibition and published a book about the photographer.

Exhibitions

literature

  • Petra Rösgen: Women's lens. Women photographers 1940 to 1950 . Exhibition catalog House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn, Wienand, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-87909-752-6 .
  • Sabine Krell: Käthe Augenstein 1899–1981: Photographs . Edition Lempertz, Bonn 2011, ISBN 978-3-941557-95-6 .
  • Rolf Sachsse: The education to look away: Photography in the Nazi state . Philo Fine Arts, Dresden 2003, ISBN 3-364-00390-4 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Augenstein, Kathe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Augenstein, Katharina Christine
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Kessenich
DATE OF DEATH December 29, 1981
Place of death Bonn