Kurt Beck (photographer)

Kurt Beck with his camera

Kurt Beck (born December 21, 1909 in Bermsgrün , † April 23, 1983 in Erla ) was a German worker photographer , communist and local politician.

Life

Kurt Beck, a toolmaker who was born in the Ore Mountains , was a member of one of the most active Saxon local groups of the Association of Workers Photographers in Germany (VdAFD). Since 1923 Beck was active in the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD) and in the Federation of Working Farmers (chaired by Ernst Putz ), a smallholder association close to the KPD . In this milieu, photos were taken of the social situation of the small farmers in the Ore Mountains and the political work of the KPD in the countryside. Beck's best-known photos include the photos of the tenant struggle and the school strike in Bermsgrün, which were published in the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ).

Since 1933 Beck was active as a courier for the AIZ, which appeared in exile in Prague. As part of a network, Beck smuggled copies of the newspaper and communist publications across the German-Czechoslovak border and organized their sales in the region. During one of these trips, Beck was arrested in March 1934 and sentenced by the Dresden Higher Regional Court to more than two years' imprisonment in the Osterstein prison in Zwickau for “preparing for high treason ” .

After his release, Beck completed a course to become a technician and worked at the washing machine factory in Schwarzenberg . Police surveillance did not allow Beck to take any photography during this time. From the summer of 1942 Beck was a soldier in the Wehrmacht in Russia and later in the arms industry in the Sudeten German town of Steinschönau . After the end of the war Beck returned to the Ore Mountains. On behalf of the KPD he took over the founding of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NDPD) and was mayor of the Erla community for five years.

In the post-war years, Beck photographed political life and the collectivization of agriculture in the region as a freelancer for local newspapers .

plant

Because of the loss of many of his negatives, Kurt Beck began to make reproductions of his own and others' photographs in the 1970s. As a template he used photos from the possession of befriended photographers and publications in which the photos had appeared. The holdings of the Deutsche Fotothek , a department of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek - Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden ( SLUB ), contain 150 glass negatives and approx. 1400 miniature negatives by Kurt Beck from before 1945. These include reproductions of photos whose original negatives were lost during the war . These were made available in 2009 as part of a DFG project in cooperation with the Institute for Saxon History and Folklore . The basis for this was the creation and origin of the photographs taken by the photographer himself.

Web links

• Information on Kurt Beck in the Deutsche Fotothek
• Pictures by Kurt Beck in the Deutsche Fotothek

literature

• Korinna Lorz: The village in view. Worker photography in the Western Ore Mountains . In: “The conquest of the observing machines. Research, development and preservation of social documentary photography between 1920 and 1960 ”. (Writings on Saxon history and folklore, vol. 37) Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2012, pp. 67–112. ISBN 978-3-86583-616-8