On holiday, playing sports, even while fleeing and after arriving in exile: during the period of National Socialist terror, Jewish people documented their everyday lives through photography. They often preserved their pictures in self-designed albums and took them with them into emigration, even when their luggage was limited to just a few suitcases. The photographs and albums thus became carriers of personal histories between persecution and exile.
Private photography has long been overlooked in public memory. The striking lightness and normality of the images stand in contrast to what we know about the hostility and disenfranchisement experienced by those depicted as Jews. Yet, it is precisely this that makes them significant at a time when their entire world was being profoundly shaken. The photographs and albums offer a new perspective on Jewish history during this period.
Through a sensitive analysis of more than one hundred largely unknown collections, Robert Mueller-Stahl shows how private photography became a medium of self-determination for Jewish people. The camera and the album enabled them to see and remember themselves as they wished. The photographs not only resist the gaze of the perpetrator society; they also challenge contemporary ideas about Jewish life at the time.
Dr Robert Mueller-Stahl is a historian at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and the Domäne Dahlem Foundation. Based on his doctoral research, he curated the exhibitions “Capturing Life: Photo Albums of Jewish Families in the Shadow of the Holocaust” and “Between Worlds: Käte Frank’s Private Photo Collection, 1928–1948”, which were on view at the Schöneberg Museum until March 2025. Since 2025, he has been a freelance contributor to the Exilmuseum. His dissertation, "Capturing Life: German-Jewish Private Photography in the 1930s", was awarded the 2025 Humboldt Special Prize for Research on Judaism and Antisemitism by Humboldt University of Berlin.
Robert Mueller-Stahl: Capturing Life: German-Jewish Private Photography in the 1930s
Published by Wallstein Verlag in 2026
ISBN 978-3-8353-6052-5
