After decades of separation, I am tremendously pleased to write that Dr. Alfred Huhnhäuser’s photograph albums are now once again in the same archive – the University of Stirling’s Special Collections – as his other papers!
And that concludes this series on the “Mysterious Box”, which turned out to be more remarkable, implausible, and serendipitous than I could have ever predicted when I first began to explore its contents.
© 2019 Kelsey Jackson Williams.
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.
Last week I was reading Jo Catling’s translation of the late W. G. Sebald’s A Place in the Country. In it Sebald writes that:
I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time . . . the echo of a pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from a window of the Herisau asylum . . . dates of birth with dates of death, happiness with misfortune, natural history and the history of our industries, that of Heimat with that of exile.
I am a Humean in my approach to coincidence, naturally inclined to shy away from webs like those which Sebald so seamlessly weaves across borders and centuries. Yet there are moments in which seemingly fragmented parts of experience can align and slide together with startling precision.
My search for the inhabitants of Rizzastraße 7 had led me to other years of the Koblenz city directories, in none of which did I meet with the Arzt (medical doctor) I had expected. Dr. Scherer the lawyer and Dr. Göcking the school inspector were joined by an ever-increasing cast of the Koblenz bourgeoisie: Philipp Hambach, the owner of a wood-working factory, Herr Witte the governmental buildings officer, Dr. Riffart, the district court judge, and more. If my doctor – as I was beginning to think of him – had ever lived at Rizzastraße 7, he was either absent from these directories or had pursued a different profession than I had first supposed.
It was, I thought, more likely to be the latter and so I prepared to work my way through a list of the building’s inhabitants, seeing if I could find any who had links to Davos, daughters named Heidi or Inge, or any other points of similarity to the mysterious family into whose life I had had such a strange and tantalising glimpse. The first name on my list was the resident, in 1930, of flat 3: Dr. Alfred Huhnhäuser, a school inspector. I was, at first, surprised to find a small Wikipedia entry then transfixed as I read that he “hatte die Tochter Heidi (* 1914) und Inge (* 1917)”. This was surely my man!
Moments later I discovered that in 2000 a thesis had been written on Dr. Huhnhäuser: Memoir and Memory: The Papers of a Pre-War German – Alfred Huhnhäuser, 1885-1950 by Caroline Martin. It made extensive use of the doctor’s papers which I realised were now in the archives of . . . my own institution, the University of Stirling! Heidi, it proved, had married a Scot and her husband’s nephew – who, in a further freak of coincidence, I had met socially some years before – had lectured at Stirling, donating the papers of his aunt’s family to the university in the 1990s. The photographs, it would seem, had become separated, detached from their context, and anonymous, until – by chance – they came to me. A phone call later and their future is, I hope, now secured as a new accession to Stirling’s existing Huhnhäuser archive.
And so, over the course of a morning I had gone from the mysterious world of the doctor, his wife, and his daughters, to a richly populated family saga in which Dr. Huhnhäuser, his wife Melms, Heidi, and Inge, picked their way through the dangerous shoals of the twentieth century. The doctor emerged as a complex figure, a highly literate and literary man, a scholar, an opera critic and amateur musician, and a Nazi administrator who played a key role in occupied Norway. But reading his autobiography, as edited and discussed in Martin’s 2000 thesis, it was impossible to cast him in the role of Nazi comic-book villain. Instead, his repeated claim to be apolitical and out of step with his time, balanced against his cautious but determined attempts to improve the plight of Norwegians under German rule, and his altogether ambivalent attitude towards 1930s Germany’s Aryan dream make him one of those grey and difficult figures who populate the annals of that generation: neither wholly good nor wholly bad, caught up in a tide of events, and somewhat bemusedly participating in a greater horror.
I also learned that I had not been entirely wrong in seeing some prolonged connection with a sanatorium on the family’s part. It was not, however, through the doctor’s work – which lay solidly in the realms of literature and education – but in the melancholy fate of Inge, who died just short of her nineteenth birthday in 1936, having suffered from tuberculosis for some years. The family’s time in Davos was because of her and, as Heidi’s husband recalled in an interview towards the end of his life, her sister had even gone to a school in Davos for several years so that she might be near Inge.
After the war, Dr. Huhnhäuser was washed to and fro, from Norway, to England, and back to Germany, where he died in 1950. “Melms”, Else (Schulze) Huhnhäuser, lived into the sixties, and Heidi died as recently as 1992, a resident of her adopted Scotland for over fifty years. There is something poignant and sad about so suddenly learning the fates of all four, as if one had skipped to the end of the novel and learned, too soon, the conclusion to a story long in the telling. Soon, I’ll pass the Huhnhäusers’ photos on to the archive here at Stirling, where they can rejoin the doctor’s papers, but for a moment – and now with my eyes open – I’ll continue to record what I see. I’ve only just scratched the surface of the no-longer-so-mysterious box and, I confess, I find myself wanting to learn still more of the details of these lives, rescued so fortuitously and so serendipitously linked to my own.
© 2019 Kelsey Jackson Williams.
Today I have returned to the box of photograph albums (see my previous post). The first album I open is another snapshot of the family at Davos: photos of snow, laughing young people, and warm hostels.
There is a wonderful candour and freedom about the photographs here and elsewhere in this collection. When one thinks of the photographic practice of earlier generations, one thinks of stiffness, order, and decorum, but these could not be further from such a stuffy ideal. One series is of a group of young people – amongst them at least one of the daughters – flung down in poses of happy exhaustion midway through an alpine trek. There is something tremendously vibrant and happy about the half-turn of a shoulder and the hobnailed boots dug into the grassy sward.
But I am also attracted to another image, one of the few which depicts neither landscape nor people. It must, I suppose, be of the breakfast room in someone’s hostel. Flowers (and ashtrays) are neatly set out, the chairs are drawn up, the newspapers folded in their rack, and there is a mid-afternoon hush, a still pause as the room awaits its next use. It is, in its own way, an exquisite photograph.
Nor can we forget the doctor, who reappears in walking gear amongst the mountainous landscape: happy, crook-necked, and oddly fragile alone in the snow.
The next album is different in shape from those I’ve looked at so far. It is smaller, bound in sturdy buckram, and as soon as I open it I see it dates from decades earlier. The clothing suggests about 1910, give or take a few years, and though I can’t be sure, I think this might be the doctor and his wife’s honeymoon.
They are much younger, smiling broadly, and seem to be somewhere in the country, by a lake or maybe the sea.
Most striking of all is the final photograph in the album, followed only by blank pages. The doctor’s wife lies on a bed, or perhaps a chaise longue, staring back at the camera. Returning her gaze feels almost too much, the emotions contained within it were surely meant for the photographer alone, and to peer into the depths of her eyes is a strange and uncomfortable act of transgression.
I shut the book, a little hurriedly, and turn to another, this one bound with once-green, now brown, silk tassels and with a postcard of the Koblenz Schloß pasted onto its front cover. Below the postcard is an inscription: Unserer lieben Omi zu ihrem 70. Geburtstage | als Erinnerung an am Besuch in Koblenz | Inge und Heidi. 1928 (“for our dear Grandma on her 70th birthday as a reminder of visiting Koblenz”). Could Inge and Heidi be the daughters, I wonder?
The first few pages contain pasted-in picture postcards of Koblenz, but soon we move on to photographs of the family. Yes, Inge and Heidi must be the daughters for they appear again and again in these pages. There are also pictures of the interior of their house – Rizzastraße 7, I learn – replete with the bourgeois comforts of the early century. I am captivated by a distant prospect of book-lined shelves which can just be seen over the shoulder of one of the girls, posing soberly in front of a grand piano. Is it the doctor’s study, I wonder?
The little book for their grandmother gives me an idea and a few Google searches later I see that Rizzastraße 7 still survives, albeit now with far more plate glass than in 1928, and houses lawyer’s offices, a used bookstore, and other businesses. It also shows up on a list of historic buildings in southern Koblenz, which notes its construction in 1911 by the architect Fritz Thalwitzer.
At this point I think: surely I can find out who they are from this? Surely there is an address book of 1920s or 1930s Koblenz which will tell me the residents of Rizzastraße 7? And so I find myself on the website of the Rheinland-Pfalz digital library. There are fifty-odd address books for Koblenz, as early as 1794, as late as 1940. I know with certainty that my mysterious family were living at Rizzastrasse 7 in 1928 so with a faint catch in my breath – for I love this sort of detective work with all my heart – I turn to the 1927-28 edition of the Einwohnerbuch der Stadt Koblenz des Landkreises Koblenz und Umgebung (Directory of Inhabitants of the City and District of Koblenz and Environs).
But all is not so straightforward. I should have realised that the imposing building would be divided into multiple flats. The lawyer Dr. Hubert Scherer is in flat 3, the engineer Heinrich Hambach is in flat 1, the school inspector Dr. Wilhelm Göcking is in flat 2, and the building officer Waldemar Hinsmann is also present (in the basement, I think). Have I missed something? Is the doctor no doctor after all?
© 2019 Kelsey Jackson Williams.
Several years ago, I moved into an office being vacated by a professor close to retirement. Our areas of interest were a few hundred years apart, but still close enough that he kindly gave me various books and runs of journals for which he no longer had any use. Along with these he also gave me a battered cardboard box. It had been given to him, he said, by another retiring professor some years before but he knew nothing of its previous history. Within it were perhaps two dozen photograph albums, dating, it would seem, from the first half of the twentieth century.
Not long after I received this strange bequest, I moved house, then moved house again, and it was only this weekend, as the Historian and I were emptying some boxes left over from our last move, that it came once more to light. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts about the mysterious box and its contents, beginning today with the first two albums I picked – more or at less at random – from the top of the pile.
Both are long rectangular albums, secured with cord and the first one I open is bound in printed paper with a sort of tan and purple primitivist motif – something from the thirties, I imagine, as I gently remove it from the box. My guess is broadly confirmed by the neat inscription in silver ink on the first page: Schweizerreise vom 9.-28. August 1928. Somebody, a German speaker, on holiday in Switzerland. The pressed flowers are entrancing, but I tear myself away from them and begin to leaf through the pages.
The protagonists soon make themselves known: a husband and wife, and their two daughters, young teenagers. The photos are often not very well exposed – I imagine the brilliant Alpine light defeating amateur photographic attempts – but have an air of happiness and intimacy about them.
The family are busy, hiking to Reichenbach Falls and descending by metal walkways into the depths of the nearby Aare Gorge. Intermixed with these snaps are picture postcards of sites in the region: the Wetterhorn, Kurhaus Rosenlaui, Interlaken, and more.
One picture towards the end strikes me especially. It is captioned Im Zuge von Bern nach Basel (on the train from Bern to Basel) and shows the Husband and the more serious of the two Daughters sitting in their compartment, both reading the newspaper. Something about the intent concentration of the Daughter, her eyes downcast towards the page, reminds me of old photographs of my own Russian-German grandmother.
The final photograph shows the Wife and Daughters standing in the porch of a rather grand apartment building and is captioned Wieder in Koblenz. Our protagonists would seem to hail from Koblenz in the Rhineland. Loose with this album is an older photograph – nineteenth century – of a husband and wife. I think they look a little like the Husband, but the photographer’s studio is in Neubrandenburg, far in the northeast. Perhaps the family had not always been in Koblenz?
The next album is the same shape, but with a different paper binding, this one imitating the texture of woven cloth. A label in the back proclaims its origins in the shop of August Kreutzer, Löhrstrasse 82, Koblenz – more evidence for our protagonists’ residence. Five years have passed: the first group of photos here are dated “Waldeck 1933”. The family are here as well, the daughters now young women, but most of the photos are of a large group of young people, evidently having a ball at “Haus Waldeck”. My eye for faces is poor, but I think I see the daughters amongst them.
The latter half of the album is in a different key. It is headed “Davos 1933.-35.” and its enigmatic opening page contains two pressed flowers, two cut out photographs of younger men, and, in the centre, a portrait of the Husband.
He is sitting at a desk, books behind him, and wears a white hospital coat beneath which his immaculate tie and stiff collar can just be seen. Was he a doctor at the Magic Mountain?
The following pages are full of smiling men and women on excursions in the snow, but also of scenes from a sanatorium: doctors on their rounds down the aisles and someone – is it one of the daughters? – lying in bed.
Over her stands one of the young men from the half title page, her husband, I suppose. They are smiling, but I wonder if I fully understand what I am seeing.
Other things have changed as well since the family’s trip to Switzerland five years before. A postcard pasted in amongst the snaps shows a building, perhaps the sanatorium, and flying over it the Swiss cross and the Nazi swastika. Already I seem to know surprisingly much and yet still tantalisingly little about these people. What will become of them? Who were they? And how did these time capsules of their memories and emotions, frozen in the exposure of film, reach me, nearly a hundred years later?
© 2019 Kelsey Jackson Williams.
