Walter Reuter

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Walter Reuter (born January 4, 1906 in Berlin ; † March 20, 2005 in Cuernavaca , Mexico ) was a German photographer for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung AIZ, participant in the Spanish Civil War and fled into exile in Mexico.

Life

Berlin years

Memorial plaque on the house at Seelingstrasse 21, in Berlin-Charlottenburg

Walter Reuter grew up in the working-class district of Berlin-Charlottenburg . At the age of 14 he began an apprenticeship as a chemigrapher and later also worked as an actor, dancer and photo reporter. The German youth movement had a great influence on his development and inspired him for the avant-garde art of the 1920s , literature, theater and expressive dance . He photographed Eberhard Koebel for the graphic artist and founder of the German (autonomous) young society from November 1, 1929 , who published Reuters photos in his magazines Das Lagerfeuer and Der Eisbrecher .

When he lost his job as a chemical graphist in 1929 because of his expression of solidarity with the victims of the Blutmai and was on a so-called black list , he taught himself to take photos and began to make photo reports for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung , for example in 1931 Der Mordsturm 33 , about the SA unit ( SA-Sturm 33 ) against which his friend, the young lawyer Hans Litten (who later perished in the Dachau concentration camp ), led the so-called Eden Trial and summoned Adolf Hitler as a witness. Because of these reports, Walter Reuter feared for his life and two weeks after the fire in the Reichstag in the spring of 1933, he and his Jewish friend Sulamith Siliava fled to Spain via Switzerland and France.

Spanish Civil War

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 , his wife Sulamith Reuter , b. Siliava, with their son Jasmin to Paris and Walter Reuter, fought for three months in the republican army as a soldier and then for the following years as a war correspondent in the service of the democratic government. He was wounded twice. His photos came to the world press via the New York picture agency Black Star and the press office of the Spanish Foreign Ministry, where they were often published without any names.

While Walter Reuter had already worked with the famous photo montage artist John Heartfield during his time at the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung , he now got to know almost all German fighters in Spain and foreign journalists, including Ernest Hemingway , Arthur Koestler and Robert Capa , with whom he worked negatives and exchanged photo material. When Capa's partner, the German photographer Gerda Taro , was fatally injured by a passing tank near Madrid , he was one of the last people to speak to her.

From Spain, after the collapse of the Spanish Republic, he managed to flee to France to live with his family. As a fighter in Spain, he was arrested several times by the French government and taken to various internment camps, finally in 1940 to Colomb-Béchar in the French Sahara, where he was used in the construction of the Trans-Saharan railway line through the desert. In 1942 he succeeded in an adventurous escape to Casablanca , where he, together with his wife and son , was able to emigrate to Mexico on the last Portuguese ship, the San Thomé , on March 20, 1942 . He received a visa for Mexico which generously issued visas to German anti-fascists who fought in Spain.

Exile in Mexico

The city of Puebla, 156 kilometers south-east of Mexico City at the foot of the Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes, was assigned to him as his whereabouts . After he couldn't find a job there, he left his pregnant wife Sulamith and his young son Jasmin and went to Mexico City as a photographer . After a difficult start with a borrowed camera, he became one of Mexico's leading photojournalists and is now considered to be the one who introduced modern photojournalism in Mexico. He provided photo reports for the most important Mexican magazines, such as Hoy (Today), Nosotros (We), Mañana (Tomorrow) and Siempre! (Always!) And picture documentation for the government. In Nosotros he published his first photo series Los Techos de México (The Roofs of Mexico). In addition to commissioned work, he devoted himself to his favorite subjects of dance and the indigenous population of Mexico. He also photographed German emigrants such as Anna Seghers and Gustav Regulator or Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco .

He began filming in 1946, four years after his arrival in Mexico. He directed and made the documentary: Historia de un rio (story of a river) about the origin of the Temazcal dam and worked for about ten years as a cameraman for the Mexican newsreel "Clasa y Cine Verdad", he made several socially critical documentaries and feature films including the episode film Raíces (Roots), which won the 1955 Critics' Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival .

In 1954 his wife Sulamith died. A few years later he married Ana, a Mexican of Indian descent. In a financial emergency, he had to sell his film camera and turned back to photography. He went on arduous journeys at an advanced age, e. B. in remote mountain regions of the state of Oaxaca to the tribe of the Triques , with whom he had a special friendship.

In 1999 Reuter received the Mexican Ariel de Oro film award for life's work.

Estate and image rights

Walter Reuter's photographic estate alone from the Mexican period comprises around 120,000 negatives and intermediate negatives and represents a comprehensive photographic document on the history of Mexico and its indigenous population in the second half of the 20th century. The estate is currently being funded by the Fondo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes (National Fund for Culture and the Arts) of the Mexican government.

His work for the left picture press of the last four years of the Weimar Republic , for the youth movement and on the Spanish Civil War has only been partially researched and developed. Since Walter Reuter's own photo archives from 1930 to 1942 were destroyed or lost five times - partly out of fear of persecution by the Nazi regime , partly on the stations of the escape to Mexico - negatives and prints must be considered lost, unless they are something of it is still discovered in Spanish archives.

In 1989/90 some negatives from Walter Reuter from the time of the Spanish Civil War were discovered in the Central SED Archive, today SAPMO . The exhibition catalog of a Walter Reuter exhibition in Berlin in 1990 reports on this.

Awards

Works

Filmography

Short films

  • 1953 Historia de un Rio (History of a River), director and camera
  • 1953 Tierra de Chicle (Land of Rubber), camera
  • 1957 La Viuda (The Widow), camera
  • 1957 El Hombre de la Isla (The Man of the Island), screenplay, director and camera
  • 1957 Tierra de Esperanza (Land of Hope), screenplay, director and camera
  • 1957 El Botas , camera
  • 1957 La Brecha (The Breach), camera

Feature films

  • 1953 Raíces (roots), camera
  • 1957 El Tigre de los Mayas (The Mayan Tiger), camera
  • 1958 Norte (The North), camera
  • 1958 La Gran Caida / The Big Drop , camera
  • 1958 El Brazo Fuerte (The Strong Arm), camera
  • 1958 / First performance in 1960 Los pequeños Gigantes (The Little Giants), camera
  • 1966 La Güera Xóchitl (The blonde Xóchitl), camera

Exhibitions

  • 1983 Ollin Yolitzli Gallery, Mexico City
  • 1983 Museo Cuauhnahuac in the Palace of Cortez
  • 1986 Walter Reuter y la danza (Walter Reuter and the Dance), Museo de Arte Moderno , Mexico City
  • 1989 Photo gallery of the Casa del Lago in Chapultepec Park , Mexico City
  • 1990 Walter Reuter - Berlin – Madrid – Mexico: 60 years of photography and film 1930-1990 , Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst eV , Berlin
  • 1991 Walter Reuter - Berlin – Madrid – Mexico: 60 years of photography and film 1930-1990 , Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung , Bad Godesberg
  • 2004 Walter Reuter: sus inicios com fotoreportero en México, 1943-1955 (Walter Reuter: his beginnings as a photo reporter in Mexico, 1943-1955), Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City
  • 2005 Las Mujeres en la obra de Walter Reuter (The women in the work of Walter Reuter), Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City
  • 2005 Exposicion sobre la Guerra Civil española de Walter Reuter (Exhibition on the Spanish Civil War by Walter Reuter), Festival Internacional Cervantino, Centro de las Artes de Guanajuato
  • 2006 Walter Reuter - German photographer and filmmaker in Mexico , Villa Oppenheim, Berlin-Charlottenburg
  • 2006 Walter Reuter, filmmaker and photographer in exile. 1906 to 2005 , Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage , Berlin

media

Documentaries about Walter Reuter

literature

  • Exhibition catalog: Walter Reuter y la danza . Museo de Arte Moderno, Bosque de Chapultepec , México, DF, 1986 (Text: Jas Reuter)
  • Dorothea Cremer, Stefanie Ketzscher, Diethart Kerbs: Walter Reuter - Berlin – Madrid – Mexico: 60 years of photography and film 1930-1990. Ed .: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst eV, Argon Verlag, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-87024-171-3 .
  • Diethart Kerbs: Lifelines. German biographies from the 20th century. With an afterword by Arno Klönne . Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89861-799-4 .
  • John Mraz, Jaime Vélez, Michel Lefebvre, Luis Rius: Walter Reuter: El viento limpia el alma. Lunwerg, Barcelona 2009, ISBN 978-84-9785-580-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biography of Walter Reuter in: German Embassy Mexico City ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mexiko.diplo.de
personal data
SURNAME Reuter, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer and resistance fighter, Spain fighter and connoisseur of Mexico
DATE OF BIRTH 4th January 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 20, 2005
Place of death Cuernavaca , Mexico