Walter Hollnagel

Walter Otto Wilhelm Hollnagel (born April 2, 1895 in Alt Ruppin ; † May 8, 1983 in Hamburg ) was a German photographer in the service of the Deutsche Bundesbahn , until 1949 the Deutsche Reichsbahn .

Life

Walter Hollnagel was born as one of six children to a railway chief secretary and a housewife in Alt Ruppin, Brandenburg. From 1901 he attended the community school there, which prepared him for more practical professions at an early age. With his father's official transfers, the young Hollnagel spent his youth in Spandau, Calbe (Elbe), Börßum and finally in Magdeburg . Walter Hollnagel began training as a bricklayer there in 1909, which he completed in 1912. He then attended the still young Royal Prussian Building Trade School . In order to be able to finance this study, Hollnagel also worked in civil engineering. On April 7, 1915, he began his service as a technical office trainee at the Royal Railway Directorate in Bromberg (now Bydgoszcz in Poland ).

On May 15, 1915 he was drafted into the military and served as a soldier in a machine gun division. Shortly after the end of World War I, he resigned from military service on December 29, 1918. As a result of the war - Bromberg became Polish in 1920 - the company moved to Magdeburg. Here he immediately took up a job as a technical draftsman at the railway administration and in the same year he married Alice Paarmann, whom he had met in Bromberg. From this marriage three daughters were born. Two years later, Hollnagel was raised to the civil service status on October 1, but continued to work as a technical draftsman. The Reichsbahndirektion (RBD) Magdeburg set up a photo office in 1926. Walter Hollnagel, who has since been promoted to senior secretary, was entrusted with this task. In August 1931 he was transferred to Altona (today part of Hamburg), the largest Schleswig-Holstein city at the time, to work in the local photography office. This transfer was necessary because the Magdeburg Reichsbahndirektion was dissolved in 1931. The Reichsbahndirektion Altona appointed Hollnagel on September 1, 1934 as a technical Reichsbahn inspector. At the beginning of 1939, Walter Hollnagel divorced his wife Alice in order to marry Johanna Hagelstein , the Heidelberg merchant's daughter, on April 22nd .

In the course of the Gleichschaltung , Hollnagel became a member of the Reichsbund of German civil servants in 1934 and in 1942 of the National Socialist People's Welfare , a welfare organization of the NSDAP, but not of the NSDAP . Despite this impartiality, Julius Dorpmüller was delegated to the press service of the Reich Ministry of Transport under Julius Dorpmüller to work as a photo reporter at the theaters of war of the Reichsbahn. Travels took him to the Ukraine, Italy, Upper Silesia and the Eifel. In the spring of 1945 he returned to the Reichsbahndirektion Hamburg ; this was already renamed in 1937 in the course of the Greater Hamburg Law and the associated incorporation of Altona into Reichsbahndirektion Hamburg . On May 1, 1945, a week before the end of the war, Walter Hollnagel was promoted to senior technical inspector of the Reichsbahn.

Services

It stands to reason that the technical draftsman Walter Hollnagel had his first experience with a camera early on; the fact that he became a director's photographer is more a coincidence. The full-time photographer of the Reichsbahndirektion in Magdeburg dropped out and Hollnagel was supposed to represent him. Since Hollnagel also had a great personal interest in photography, he was able to recommend himself to his employer without any problems through appropriate references. Hollnagel was already engaged in photography in 1915, when modern photography technology was still in its infancy and the corresponding equipment was expensive, time-consuming and heavy. The fact that the skilled bricklayer's appointment as a photographer in the railroad service was the right one is proven by his career in the directorates.

The photo positions in these administrations were subordinate to the technical building construction departments, which meant that Walter Hollnagel found his main job in the office. The black and white prints had to be handcrafted and identified with the appropriate information in order to serve as illustrative material for the relevant construction departments. All changes in the Reichsbahn district were documented, be it new buildings or damage. It was part of Hollnagel's job to record modifications in the picture, which he did with great precision. His tools during the Magdeburg period initially included an 18-by-24 plate camera, which enabled sophisticated architectural photography without falling lines . Apparatuses of this kind required fixed mounting on suitable tripods, which was in keeping with Hollnagel's strictly pictorial style of photography. In addition to the technical recordings, one of Hollnagel's tasks was to capture celebrations in pictures and to keep portraits of the important Reichsbahn officials ready for possible publications.

Walter Hollnagel was only able to consolidate his spontaneous reporting style when the first 35mm camera was ready for series production. The “ Leica ” required for this was presented in 1925 at the spring fair in Leipzig . This also made it possible to record moving trains. In the mid-1920s, the Reichsbahnzentralamt made it possible for the official limits to be exceeded. It asked not only its own employees, but also all professional photographers to take part in the design of the Deutsche Reichsbahn calendar . This gave the director's photographer Hollnagel the opportunity to compete with railroad photographers like Carl Bellingrodt and Alfred Ulmer .

Alongside Berlin, Hamburg was the focal point of traffic development. The city is not only one of the largest European rail transport centers, but also delivers among other things. a. also with its harbor special impressions for a committed photographer. Walter Hollnagel was able to capture the stormy developments of the "Flying Hamburgers" , the rail zeppelin and some other innovations on the Reichsbahn tracks . He also documented the construction of the Reichsautobahn in the administrative district with the new aerodynamic buses driving on it. In the 1930s, people mainly traveled by train and so it is not surprising that Walter Hollnagel was also there when celebrities visited the Hanseatic city . Whether in the local press, with the manufacturers of the Reichsbahn calendar or with the specialist audience, the Hollnagel name was soon known everywhere.

Hollnagel made the first color film recordings in 1938 with the new Agfacolor 35mm color slide film, including the recordings of the SVT "Cologne", the newest railcar on the Reichsbahn tracks. Walter Hollnagel was quite open to the innovations of modern photography, but remained true to black and white photography until the end of his life. Regardless of the film material used, typical Hollnagel behavior can be determined. Whenever possible, he tried to take the photos from an elevated position in order to get the desired overview.

The delegation as a photo reporter to the Reich Ministry of Transport represents a remarkable stage in Hollnagel's professional career. He was thus one of the small group of directorate photographers who documented the everyday war life of the railroad operations in occupied foreign countries. Like all reporters, he had a clear order: For propaganda purposes, the foreign deployment of the Reichsbahn should only be presented positively, the dark side of the war had to be ignored. Hollnagel's estate does not contain any photos of hospital trains , wounded or dead, but rather, in addition to his official assignment, he concentrated on subjects that dealt with the country and its people. In May 1945 he returned from his last assignment in Upper Silesia via Berlin to Hamburg.

Like everyone else in the civil service, Walter Hollnagel had to undergo an examination in the course of denazification after the war , especially since he worked in the media sector and was therefore banned from his profession per se. In the spring of 1946 he was allowed to undertake his first inspection trips with the British occupiers for the Hamburg Railway Directorate. Occasionally he disregarded the imposed photography ban and documented the post-war period in destroyed Hamburg in memorable images.

The head office of the still young Federal Railroad requested Walter Hollnagel and a few other director's photographers for their press service in December 1951 in order to have effective promotional photos available in the following year.

In December 1953, Hollnagel wanted to be transferred to civil engineering because of his technical training and the corresponding salary. His superior reacted negatively, citing the photographer's many years of experience and age as the reason. Hollnagel's career path for the next six years until retirement was thus set.

After the transition into retirement in April 1960, Walter Hollnagel remained connected to his former employer. His type of recordings was still in demand, so that in 1962 he was still on the road with official legitimacy and accompanied the construction of the Vogelfluglinie through to completion. He then worked increasingly for the local press and became the first chairman of the Hamburg Photo Group of the Federal Railroad Social Welfare Office. His last railway photographs were taken in Hamburg-Altona station on the occasion of the City S-Bahn opening on April 21, 1979.

Walter Hollnagel died in Hamburg at the old age of 88.

Image archive

The documentary value of Walter Hollnagel's photos only becomes clear as the images age. For a long time it was assumed that the devastating attacks on Hamburg completely destroyed the pictures that had been taken up to that point. Hollnagel had moved his private archive to relatives in southern Germany after the first bombs were dropped in the city. There it remained untouched until well after his death.

Today his recordings are u. a. in the archive of the Altona Museum and in the image archive of the Railway Foundation .

literature

• Udo Kandler : Through Hamburg with Walter Hollnagel . EK-Verlag , Freiburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-88255-309-3
• Udo Kandler, Joachimügel : Walter Hollnagel, Railway Rarities - From the Twenties to 1945 . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-88255-306-2
• Udo Kandler, Joachimügel: Walter Hollnagel, Railway Rarities - From Zero Hour to the Economic Miracle . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-88255-307-9
• Udo Kandler, Joachimügel: Walter Hollnagel, Railway Rarities - With Walter Hollnagel through the fifties . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-88255-308-6
• Gert-E. Thalau : Railway Directorate Altona / Hamburg 1884-1993 , Verlag Bernd Neddermeyer , Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-941712-01-0
• ModellEisenBahner Special No. 9/2008. ISSN  0026-7422
• Udo Kandler: Walter Hollnagel - Reichsbahn behind the Eastern Front . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8446-6201-6

Web links

• Railway Foundation