Rudolf Guthmann

Rudolf Guthmann around 1960 in his darkroom

Rudolf Guthmann (actually Oskar Rudolph Preibisch-Guthmann ; born October 16, 1887 in Marklissa , Province of Silesia , since 1945 Leśna ; † February 7, 1972 in Garbsen-Havelse ) was a German amateur photographer .

Life

Rudolf Guthmann was born the son of a textile factory manager. He attended the municipal high school in Görlitz , where he graduated from high school at Easter 1907. Between 1907 and 1911 he studied architecture in Munich and Danzig. Guthmann was trained as a one-year volunteer in Erfurt from 1911 to 1912 and served as a non-commissioned officer in World War I, later as a lieutenant and regimental adjutant in an artillery regiment in France and Russia.

In 1912 Guthmann inherited the textile company CA Preibisch, headquartered in Reichenau (Saxony), together with his brothers Erich and Oskar. The last living son of the company founder , Carl Reinhard Preibisch, left them to his brothers-in-law because his marriage to Elisabeth Guthmann had remained childless. The inheritance was linked to the condition of using the name Preibisch, so that Rudolf has had the double name Preibisch-Guthmann since then. During this phase of personal economic stability, Preibisch-Guthmann married Elisabeth Lehmann in November 1924. But the recession of the interwar period did not leave the Guthmanns' textile company unaffected; the inflation hit the Saxon textile industry enormously, so that in 1934 the Preibisch legacy had to be sold.

The Preibisch-Guthmann family, which now also had two daughters, left their previous home in Reichenau and moved to Berlin-Steglitz , where their father held a management position in the Reich Office for the Textile Industry until the end of World War II . In 1943 the Berlin apartment was hit by a bomb during the Allied air raids on Berlin ; in order to save the remaining property, the property was transferred to Gießmannsdorf / Bunzlau district ( Gościszów, Nowogrodziec ) in Lower Silesia. In 1944 the Berlin apartment was completely destroyed, so that the Guthmanns were temporarily homeless. As a result of the Soviet invasion of Silesia , the family lost their possessions stored in Gießmannsdorf, including the camera equipment. With refugee status , the family came to western Germany, initially to Hesse. Rudolf unofficially dropped the name Preibisch. In 1953, at the age of 66, Guthmann moved to his daughter's family in Havelse (today Garbsen ) in Lower Saxony, northwest of Hanover. On behalf of the municipality of Havelse, he systematically photographed all the houses there and documented the rapid development of the place with its new buildings. When the municipality of Havelse became part of the unified municipality of Garbsen in 1967 and part of the newly created town of Garbsen in 1968, Guthmann extended his photographic work to the present-day districts of Altgarbsen and Auf der Horst . His photos therefore also document the emergence of the large housing estate on the Horst, which was recognized as a demonstrative building measure by the Federal Ministry for Urban Development and Housing. Another motif of Rudolf Guthmann was the nearby Marienwerder monastery . Guthmann sold his photos as picture postcards, partly self-published, partly through a local stationery dealer and thus secured a modest income . Rudolf Guthmann died at the age of 84 after a stroke.

Photographic work

Guthmann's passion for photography can be demonstrated for the first time during his military service in the First World War . The daughter's recordings reveal the existence of a stereoscopic recording showing Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg during a front inspection. Together with a large part of his early photographs, this picture was destroyed during the Second World War.

Guthmann's main work consists in the photographic inventory of the village of Havelse during its transition to urbanization . On behalf of the municipality of Havelse, the hobby photographer compiled a comprehensive collection that is now stored in bound form as a 19-volume “Chronicle of Havelse” in the Garbsen city archive. It contains more than 2,000 photographs from the years 1953 to 1967. In 2001, the photographer's daughter left additional material from her father's estate to the city archive, including around 600 6 × 6 cm negatives from 1967 to 1971, which the Photographer had no longer systematically classified in the "Chronicle of Havelse".

The photo documentation comprehensively records the townscape of the 1950s and 1960s and gives an insight into the process of change from village to city. From a regional historical perspective, these recordings are valuable, because the Havelse experienced a sharp increase in population during and after the Second World War . This process was accompanied by extensive urban planning activities, which can be traced through the photographs until 1972. Guthmann also accompanied the large housing estate Auf der Horst, which emerged from 1963 primarily in the area of ​​the then independent municipalities of Garbsen and Havelse. With the help of his recordings, it is possible to trace how streets and then buildings were built on the still untouched pasture areas in 1963, into which the first residents moved in as early as December 1964. At the end of Guthmann's photographic activity in 1971, Auf der Horst was almost completely finished.

reception

On behalf of the Garbsen City Archives, Dirk Dams produced current comparative shots for a large part of the Guthmann photographs in 2005 by reproducing the perspective and image detail as precisely as possible. The result was presented by the Garbsen City Archives in 2006 in the Havelse district. Under the patronage of StadtArchivVereins Garbsen eV, the book "Havelse in focus. Stories of houses and people" was created in 2007 from the old and new recordings and the memories of the inhabitants of Havels.

On the occasion of the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Auf der Horst settlement in 2015, the Garbsen City Archives used numerous Guthmann photographs for the exhibition "Reaching for the Stars. Fifty Years Auf der Horst". The greatly expanded catalog for the exhibition was published in September 2016 under the title "Reaching for the Stars. The Past and Present of the Garbsen District Auf der Horst".

literature

• Reiter, Raimond: Large collection of photographs on the city's history in the Garbsen city archive , in: Der Archivar, vol. 52 (1999), no. 1, p. 45f.
• Focus on the Havelse. Stories of houses and people. Published by the StadtArchivVerein Garbsen eV Garbsen 2007.

Web links

• Holdings "Sammlung Havelse I" of the Garbsen City Archives with more than 2,200 black and white positives at the German Digital Library (DDB)
• Holdings "Sammlung Havelse II" of the Garbsen City Archives with around 600 black and white negatives at the German Digital Library (DDB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Annual report for the school year 1906, Kersten, Wilhelm: Annual report of the municipal high school (reform school) in Görlitz for the year 1906 (program no. 264). Görlitz 1907, p. 34
2. ↑ Memories of the daughter, transcript, Garbsen city archive.
3. ↑ Engelmann, Ludwig: History of Reichenau. Second edition, Reichenau 1932, p. 249f. Full text at the Lower Silesian Digital Library (DBC).
4. ↑ In the 1926 residents' book for Reichenau , the owners of the CA Preibisch company are listed as follows: Erich Oskar Preibisch and Oskar Rudolph Preibisch-Guthmann, both of whom live in Reichenau. The 1938 population register contains neither the company CA Preibisch nor the house owner Preibisch-Guthmann.
5. ↑ Havelse in focus. Stories of houses and people. Published by StadtArchivVerein Garbsen eV Garbsen 2007, p. 17.
6. ↑ Havelse in focus. Stories of houses and people. Published by StadtArchivVerein Garbsen eV Garbsen 2007, p. 13f., P. 17f.
7. ↑ Reaching for the Stars. Past and present of the Garbsen district Auf der Horst. Published by Axel Priebs and Rose Scholl on behalf of the Hanover region and the city of Garbsen. Münster: LIT 2016. ISBN 978-3-643-13515-5 .