Karl Eschenburg (photographer)

Karl Eschenburg (born May 20, 1900 in Rostock , † November 5, 1947 in Rostock-Warnemünde ) was a Rostock photographer.

biography

Eschenburg was the son of the ship's carpenter August Eschenburg. On July 9, 1915, he began a four-year training course as a shipbuilder at the Neptun shipyard , which he successfully completed after just three years. In 1918 he volunteered for service in the Navy and was deployed in the Warnemünde Seaplane Test Command. It was here that he first became acquainted with the technology of aerial photography, which was new at the time. After the end of the First World War and the dissolution of the military aviation facilities, the civil aviation era began in Warnemünde. Karl Eschenburg found a job with the Deutsche Luftreederei , whose office in Warnemünde he was in charge of and where he kept connections to airports in Berlin, Dortmund and on Rügen.

Karl Eschenburg's grave in the New Cemetery in Warnemünde

In 1922, Eschenburg began to study shipbuilding in Hamburg with a one-time scholarship from the Hanseatic City of Rostock of 200 Reichsmarks. After graduating in 1925, he became a shipbuilding engineer at the Arado aircraft factory in Warnemünde. In the same year he married the teacher Gertrud Jessel from Warnemünde. His company gave him a voucher for photographic equipment for the wedding, and this established his path to becoming a recognized photographer. The global economic crisis had also affected his employer, so that Eschenburg found it easy to turn his passion for photography into a profession. He worked as a freelance photographer for the “Rostocker Illustrierte” and the Hinstorff Verlag, among others . His work attracted attention at the first exhibition in Schwerin in 1934 and delighted the critics, lucrative orders followed. This enabled him to document the surrounding area with the car - initially a Hanomag 2/10 HP .

The autodidact Eschenburg succeeded in capturing his homeland Mecklenburg , especially Rostock and Warnemünde , with skillful objectivity, but also with an endearing touch for posterity. He was always looking for a special, slightly different motif, even if it was sometimes difficult to achieve this in the time of the plate cameras and heavy wooden tripods. Eschenburg was drafted into the Navy in 1939 and returned from the war with an incurable disease. He could not go back to work and died in 1947.

His large photo archive already provided material for some successful illustrated books and exhibitions published by his son Wolfhard Eschenburg. The photo archive has been owned by the University of Rostock since 2006 .

Hartwig Eschenburg was known as a church musician by his sons .

Works

• Warnemünde in old views , Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock 2000, ISBN 3-356-00874-9
• The old Mecklenburg , Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock 2001, ISBN 3-356-00900-1
• People in Mecklenburg , Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock 2002, ISBN 3-356-00956-7
• The Griese area , Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock 2003, ISBN 3-356-00998-2
• The old Rostock , Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock 2004, ISBN 3-356-01017-4
• Entry of technology , Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock 2005, ISBN 3-356-01090-5

literature

• Wolfhard Eschenburg: The photographers Eschenburg . In: Contributions to the history of Warnemünde , issue 9, 2008.

Web links

Commons : Karl Eschenburg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Karl Eschenburg in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature about Karl Eschenburg in the state bibliography MV
• Photo Eschenburg Archive of the University of Rostock