Thomas Struck

Übersehen – Ein Berliner Koffer
Fotografien von Fide Struck 1928 – 1941

Bringing the Circumstantial into Focus

Friedrich (Fide) Struck (b. Hamburg, 1901; d. Hamburg, 1985) was a clerk, amateur photographer, and freelance photo reporter. His pictures bear witness to the flourishing and diverse amateur, street, and working-class photography scene of the late Weimar Republic and the prewar years. Inspired by the aesthetic of the New Objectivity and the New Vision, his motifs captivate the eye with unconventional perspectives, vanishing points, and contrasts as well as distinctive portraits. Under the Nazis, working-class photography, with its tinge of social critique, became a dangerous undertaking, and Struck turned his attention to apolitical subjects. From 1934 on, he photographed advertisements, his family, and people living on the margins of society. After the Second World War, he rarely took up his camera anymore.

In the summer of 1941, Fide Struck, who was in Berlin at the time, stored his glass and film negatives in a wooden case. It accompanied him to various locations in western Germany during the turmoil of the war and the postwar years. After his death, it traveled back to Berlin, and it was there that, in 2015, his son Thomas Struck opened it, less than two miles from the city’s Lützowplatz square, where it had been packed seventy-four years earlier. The case had survived the war, had been lost and found again, had been stowed away in basements and attics, and had finally returned to its origin.

Released on occasion of the exhibition at the Willy-Brandt-Haus, the book is the first to present a comprehensive selection from Fide Struck’s photographs from Berlin. In narrative contributions, Thomas Struck sketches the trove’s history. The sequences of pictures bring into focus an everyday life that is normally eclipsed by official perspectives on the period before the Second World War.