Tag: bombing

Theater After

Originally uploaded by Dan Brekke

Here’s the same scene taken some time after the bombing. My dad bought three cameras at an Army post exchange–including a Leica and a twin-lens reflex camera–and took many scenes of Kassel in 1946.

At first seeing this picture in a stack of old photos, we supposed that my dad took it. But looking again now, the picture and others that almost exactly reproduce the perspectives seen in a series of prewar postcards seem to have been done commercially. At least that’s my guess, since they appear to printed on postcard stock (though without credits). In short then, the photographer or photographers who documented prewar Kassel returned to the scenes they had shot earlier for the “after” view.

This scene speaks for itself. I’ve put up a (still unorganized) colllection of similar views on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: world war ii

Theater Before

Originally uploaded by Dan Brekke

Part of a project I’m working on during my family trip. My dad was drafted late in World War II and sent to Germany as part of the occupation army. He was assigned to Kassel, a city on the River Fulda that had a prewar population of about a quarter-million and was the site of an important locomotive works and some other industries. The city was heavily bombed, with the deadliest and most damaging attack coming in the fall of 1943.

This is a “before” view of Kassel’s opera house (officially called the Prussian State Theatre, I think). According to one account, a program was being presented the night of October 22, 1943, when the air raid sirens went off, signaling the start of the 569-plane British fire bombing that devastated the city. (It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it, a nation putting on an opera for the home front while engaged not only in a calamitous war but also in a side project of systematic extermination of millions. All part of maintaining an illusion of normalcy, or humanity, I guess.)

This image is from a postcard that is an obvious duplication of an original by Echte Photography and published by the firm Bruno Hansmann–apparently taken in the mid-1930s.