About this item
Highlights
- It was no more than eight years after the surrender of the Nazi government when Josef Heinrich Darchinger set out on his photographic journey through the West of a divided Germany.
- Author(s): Klaus Honnef
- 292 Pages
- Photography, Individual Photographers
Description
About the Book
A crucial visual document of German history, Josef Darchinger's portfolio of postwar West Germany reveals an extraordinary era, caught between increasing affluence and continued penury, between bomb sites and new building, between German Gemütlichkeit and the new threat of the Cold War.Book Synopsis
It was no more than eight years after the surrender of the Nazi government when Josef Heinrich Darchinger set out on his photographic journey through the West of a divided Germany. The bombs of World War II had reduced the country's major cities to deserts of rubble. Yet his pictures show scarcely any signs of the downfall of a civilization. Not that the photographer was manipulating the evidence: he simply recorded what he saw. At the time, a New York travel agency was advertising the last opportunity to go and visit the remaining bomb sites. Darchinger's pictures, in color and black-and-white, show a country in a fever of reconstruction. The economic boom was so incredible that the whole world spoke of an "economic miracle." The people who achieved it, in contrast, look down-to-earth, unassuming, conscientious, and diligent. And increasingly, they look like strangers in the world they have created.
The photographs portray a country caught between the opposite poles of technological modernism and cultural restoration, between affluence and penury, between German Gemütlichkeit and the constant threat of the Cold War. They show the winners and losers of the "economic miracle," people from all social classes, at home, at work, in their very limited free time and as consumers. But they also show a country that looks, in retrospect, like a film from the middle of the last century.
For this revised edition, we have digitally remastered all photographies in a new, full-frame format that captivate with their highly pigmented colors and fine press varnish.
Review Quotes
"A critic once said that Darchinger could think with his eyes. The photographs in the book Wirtschaftswunder prove that he can also feel and speak with them."-- "Der Spiegel"