Spiegel Online recently ran a fascinating article about an East German schoolteacher who spent much of his life carrying a camera around with him. After Manfred Beier passed away, his sons stumbled on a treasure trove of photographs, about 60,000 in total, that depict Beier’s personal life, family and everyday life in the former East German republic. Spiegel’s Solveig Grothe writes:
They wanted to clean up the basement but found a treasure trove of photos instead. After Berlin teacher Manfred Beier died, his sons stumbled across 60,000 pictures. Their father, it turns out, created one of the best documentations of life in East Germany, and the first days of the West.
It’s amazing how little you can know about your own father: After the death of Berlin resident Manfred Beier in 2002, his sons Wolf and Nils began to sort out their inheritance and came across a treasure. They found dozens of wooden boxes stacked on shelves as well as numerous chests of drawers — similar to pharmacist cabinets and apparently custom-made. The drawers contained removable inserts, each of which had staggered rows of small drilled holes about three centimeters in diameter. Each of these holes held a roll of miniature film.
The brothers knew their father had taken a good deal of photographs throughout his life. But this? They could only estimate the number of pictures that their father had left behind: some 60,000, plus a series of home movies — a seemingly unmanageable collection. In his basement, though, they found 38 notebooks that served as the keys to the collection. The orderly, handwritten notes — on roughly 4,000 sheets of paper — helped the brothers keep an overview of all the film rolls as they rummaged through the basement. Manfred Beier had made a chronological list of every photo, complete with an archival numbering system. The notes detailed exactly how each picture came to be — the day, hour, and minute it was taken; the camera, aperture, and shutter speed used to take it; and the exact location of its subject.
It is a photographic diary of the long life of Manfred Beier, who was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1927, grew up at Strausberger Platz square and was drafted as a teenager into part of the last-ditchVolkssturm German army defense at the end of World War II. He worked for decades after the war in the East German school system and always carried at least one camera with him — even on his foraysinto the West, for as long as he was able to go there and once he was able to go there again. It’s a photographic diary of German history. And it is the most comprehensive and complete documentation ofeveryday life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, the former East Germany) — unique in its photographic and cultural-historical value, experts say…
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