A time photographed
Jupp Darchinger: the Fifties and early Sixties. By Klaus Honnef. Excerpt from the book 'Wirtschaftswunder'
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Food in cans also provided an infallible clue to the change in eating fashions in late modernism and a pointer to the gradual emancipation of women from the traditional drudgery of the kitchen. Out of the tin into the saucepan and onto the table, was the motto in an increasing number of families. Interminable preparations were abandoned, and longterm stockpiling was also not a problem with canned food. Fresh foods, as everyone knows, only keep for a few days, and refrigerators, which have done more than all the other technological achievements together to bring lasting change to our daily lives and habits because they make it possible to lay in plenty of stocks, were still owned by only very few households. Against the backdrop of the colorful tin-can culture in the delicatessens, the seasonal sales in the downtown department stores, which had exiled to the outlying districts the traditional retail businesses with personal customer service, became a battle ground for people fighting over special offers and cut-price clothes. It was not only the people on the dark side of the economic miracle who braved the crowds for the sake of a bargain.
The Americanisation of the Federal Republic proceeded imperceptibly but relentlessly. It happened first in the area of consumer behavior. Darchinger highlighted its visible signals from time to time at focal points of interest. The trademark of the globally operating Coca Cola company on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin in the immediate vicinity of the demarcation line. Or in the university canteens the typical glasses of the soft drinks firm whose products became the students' preferred choice. Even the neon lights of the big cities, which his photographs reproduce, imitated American models. Hollywood ousted the German film from its dominant position in German cinemas and expanded to the point where it had a virtual monopoly over German screens. And comics, pilloried by teachers as morally corrupting works of the devil, found their fans in the land of Wilhelm Busch and were read not only under the desk at school. American literature, too, in professional German translation, was published in large numbers of copies. Ernest Hemingway,William Faulkner, John Dos Passos and Thornton Wilder for the culturally highbrow, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald and Mickey Spillane for aficionados of the detective genre. The publishing house Rowohlt, with its affordable paperback editions, was an important driving force. Three of the four "whodunit" authors have meanwhile achieved the status of highcalibre men of letters in Germany.
For young Germans, Kennedy was the embodiment of the hope for change
The years of the postwar era and the economic miracle were drawing to a close when the youthful Senator John F. Kennedy issued a challenge in the American elections to the distinctly unappealing Richard "Tricky Dicky" Nixon, who was vice-president in the ossified government of world-war general Dwight D. Eisenhower.
To the generation of war children in the western world, he seemed to be the living embodiment of the change everyone longed for; the promise of a fundamental shift in the direction of Western politics and liberation from the superannuated moral corset of the postwar period. In June 1963, two years after the powers-that-be in the GDR had enclosed the east of Germany within a wall, he would visit the Federal Republic as the President of the USA. Darchinger photographed him on his arrival.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Food in cans also provided an infallible clue to the change in eating fashions in late modernism and a pointer to the gradual emancipation of women from the traditional drudgery of the kitchen. Out of the tin into the saucepan and onto the table, was the motto in an increasing number of families. Interminable preparations were abandoned, and longterm stockpiling was also not a problem with canned food. Fresh foods, as everyone knows, only keep for a few days, and refrigerators, which have done more than all the other technological achievements together to bring lasting change to our daily lives and habits because they make it possible to lay in plenty of stocks, were still owned by only very few households. Against the backdrop of the colorful tin-can culture in the delicatessens, the seasonal sales in the downtown department stores, which had exiled to the outlying districts the traditional retail businesses with personal customer service, became a battle ground for people fighting over special offers and cut-price clothes. It was not only the people on the dark side of the economic miracle who braved the crowds for the sake of a bargain.
The Americanisation of the Federal Republic proceeded imperceptibly but relentlessly. It happened first in the area of consumer behavior. Darchinger highlighted its visible signals from time to time at focal points of interest. The trademark of the globally operating Coca Cola company on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin in the immediate vicinity of the demarcation line. Or in the university canteens the typical glasses of the soft drinks firm whose products became the students' preferred choice. Even the neon lights of the big cities, which his photographs reproduce, imitated American models. Hollywood ousted the German film from its dominant position in German cinemas and expanded to the point where it had a virtual monopoly over German screens. And comics, pilloried by teachers as morally corrupting works of the devil, found their fans in the land of Wilhelm Busch and were read not only under the desk at school. American literature, too, in professional German translation, was published in large numbers of copies. Ernest Hemingway,William Faulkner, John Dos Passos and Thornton Wilder for the culturally highbrow, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald and Mickey Spillane for aficionados of the detective genre. The publishing house Rowohlt, with its affordable paperback editions, was an important driving force. Three of the four "whodunit" authors have meanwhile achieved the status of highcalibre men of letters in Germany.
For young Germans, Kennedy was the embodiment of the hope for change
The years of the postwar era and the economic miracle were drawing to a close when the youthful Senator John F. Kennedy issued a challenge in the American elections to the distinctly unappealing Richard "Tricky Dicky" Nixon, who was vice-president in the ossified government of world-war general Dwight D. Eisenhower.
To the generation of war children in the western world, he seemed to be the living embodiment of the change everyone longed for; the promise of a fundamental shift in the direction of Western politics and liberation from the superannuated moral corset of the postwar period. In June 1963, two years after the powers-that-be in the GDR had enclosed the east of Germany within a wall, he would visit the Federal Republic as the President of the USA. Darchinger photographed him on his arrival.
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Josef Heinrich Darchinger, Wirtschaftswunder
Hardcover, slipcase, 39.6 x 33 cm (15.6 x 13 in.), 290 pages
$ 600.00
$ 600.00
Rare color photographs of the German "economic miracle." Limited to 1,000 copies, each numbered and signed by J. H. Darchinger and containing the signed color photograph Reichstag, Berlin, 1958
At the federal press ball. Enjoying a joke in the almanac are federal chancellor Kiesinger, FDP chairman Scheel, foreign minister Brandt and the prime minister of Rhineland-Palatinate, Helmut Kohl, who is moving unstoppably into the limelight. Bonn 1967.
Photo (c) Josef Darchinger