This evening I’ve been sorting through the remaining photo albums in advance of handing Dr. Huhnhäuser’s collection over to the university. There are so many volumes I haven’t even mentioned here and so many wonderful photos, like the Christmas family group above or the interior shot below, that I haven’t touched on.
Of the remaining albums, two struck me with greater force than the others. One early album from 1915 is full to bursting with photos of Heidi as a baby. Perhaps it’s because I’m soon to become a father myself, but I found something entrancing in the love and intimacy of these photos and in Dr. Huhnhäuser’s delighted awkwardness.
The other is unique amongst the albums by virtue of itself being carefully housed in a smaller cardboard container marked “Slettestrand”. Slettestrand, if you don’t know it (and few English speakers would have occasion to do so) is a small village and something of a tourist spot on the northwest coast of den Nørrejyske Ø, the island which makes up the farthest northern portion of Denmark. Separated from the mainland by a massive storm in 1825 which brought the sea thundering across the Agger Tange, its coast is an empty space of dunes and sky. Nothing but ocean lies between it and Aberdeenshire.
The album dates from 1941, by which time Germany had already occupied Denmark and Melms, the doctor’s wife, was working there as a translator. Both husband and wife seem to have had many friends in Denmark, but the photos of this wartime beach holiday are ghostly with absence. Instead, a vast welter of gathering clouds oppresses each photograph and dwarfs the few wanderers amongst the beach huts at Slettestrand.
It is difficult not to read some degree of artistic or intellectual intention into these photographs, so different from the holiday snaps of the thirties. More likely, though, I am reading meaning into what is simply the bricolage of four lives, lived, mostly happily, in a time both tantalisingly close and unimaginable distant from my own.
© 2019 Kelsey Jackson Williams.
Kelsey Jackson Williams 
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