Dhe most extraordinary photos of Bertolt Brecht that exist date from 1927. The series of 32 glass negatives and one print show the poet in a leather woman’s coat. Brecht, then 29, plays with the camera in front of a neutral background, sometimes using a cigar in a nonchalantly provocative manner. Some of the highly staged photos show him in side profile, as was known at the time from police photos. The young man apparently feels so comfortable in front of the camera that it makes sense to ask about his relationship with the photographer. His name: Konrad Ressler.
The Swabian, who was born in Donauwörth in 1875, had become the royal Bavarian court photographer in Brecht’s hometown of Augsburg. In addition to a monetary payment to the Wittelsbach family, the prerequisite for bearing this title was, above all, photographic quality. But this alone does not explain why Ressler had Brecht’s confidence. It was crucial that the Reßler and Brecht families were friends. The older Konrad must have been like an uncle to the younger Bert.
Possibly a fun shoot
For decades, nothing was known about the existence of the Mantel photos taken in Reßler’s Augsburg studio. Brecht presumably never used the pictures – an indication that it could have been a fun shoot. In the “Third Reich” Brecht was ostracized, after 1945 things were not much better in West Germany. In the mid-1980s, the younger of the two Ressler daughters contacted the Munich Photo Museum to see if there was any interest in her father’s estate. The museum only responded when it realized that Brecht’s photos were among them. There was a small exhibition with them in 1986.
The style of Brecht’s portraits is unusual for Ressler.
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Image: bpk / Munich City Museum, Photography Collection / Konrad Reßler
But it was only the writer and photo historian Hans-Michael Koetzle who really noticed what a treasure this is when he walked through the exhibition. In an interview, he says the photos are unusual for Reßler. It is known that a year before the photo session, Brecht had a portrait session with the painter Rudolf Schlichter, a representative of New Objectivity. “Presumably,” says Koetzle, “Brecht brought Schlichter’s aesthetic ideas to Reßler’s studio and directed them there.”
In 2015 it turned out that Reßler left behind much more: 42,000 glass plates. From the middle of the 19th century, glass was the common carrier material for photographic emulsions. The negatives were discovered in the attic of Ressler’s former home by the literary historian Dirk Heisserer, who organizes literary walks in Augsburg, following in the footsteps of Brecht, among other things. Hotter and Kurt Idrizovic, the owner of a well-stocked bookstore and busy cultural activist, who he brought on board, turned on the Augsburg city archive. That took over the pictures. They show the settled bourgeoisie from Augsburg and the region, how they dressed up for the photo shoot. Could Brecht, the son of a citizen, also be among them? Even in such spectacular photos as those with the coat? With a love?!