Peter Walther

The devastating events of the First World War were captured in myriad photographs on all sides of the front. Since then, thousands of books of black-and-white photographs of the war have been published as all nations endeavour to comprehend the scale and the carnage of the “greatest catastrophe of the 20th century”. Far less familiar are the rare colour images of the First World War, taken at the time by a small group of photographers pioneering recently developed autochrome technology. To mark the centenary of the outbreak of war, this groundbreaking volume brings together all of these remarkable, fully hued pictures of the „war to end war“. Assembled from archives in Europe, the United States and Australia, more than 320 colour photos provide unprecedented access to the most important developments of the period – from the mobilization of 1914 to the victory celebrations in Paris, London and New York in 1919. The volume represents the work of each of the major autochrome pioneers of the period, including Paul Castelnau, Fernand Cuville, Jules Gervais-Courtellemont, Léon Gimpel, Hans Hildenbrand, Frank Hurley, Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud andCharles C. Zoller. Since the autochrome process required a relatively long exposure time, almost all of the photos depict carefully composed scenes, behind the rapid front-line action. We see poignant group portraits, soldiers preparing for battle, cities ravaged by military bombardment – daily human existence and the devastating consequences on the front. A century on, this unprecedented publication brings a startling human reality to one of the most momentous upheavals in history. The author: Peter Walther has edited various publications on literary, photographic, and contemporary historical themes, including books on Goethe, Fontane, Thomas Mann, and writers in the First World War, as well as several illustrated books with historical colour photographs. He has also curated several exhibitions. He is particularly interested in early colour photography techniques.

Reforming Lens Lewis W. Hine’s images of child labor and American working life Photographer, teacher, and sociologist Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940) shaped our consciousness of American working life in the early 20th century like no other. Combining his training as an educator with his humanist concerns, Hine was one of the earliest photographers to use the camera as a documentary tool, capturing in particular labor conditions, housing, and immigrants arriving on Ellis Island. His images, including those of children in cotton mills, factories, coal mines, and fields, became icons of photographic history that helped to transform labor laws in the United States. This book brings together a representative collection of Lewis W. Hine’s photography from all periods of his work. It spans his earliest forays into social-documentary work through to his more artistic and interpretative late photographs, including his phenomenal images of the construction of the Empire State Building and his symbiotic staging of human and machine as a comment on increasing industrialization. Alongside the near 350 photographs, the book includes an essay by the editor, introducing Hine’s life and pioneering work

In March 1930, after the collapse of the coalition that had ruled Germany since 1928, President Hindenburg asked Heinrich Bruning, bespectacled and scholarly leader of the Catholic Centre Party, to form a government. Some three years later, in January 1933, Hindenburg appointed as chancellor the demagogic, virulently anti-Semitic leader of the National Socialist party. Within weeks, Adolf Hitler has begun the process of dismantling the flawed democracy of the Weimar Republic and replacing it with a one-party totalitarian state. Darkness Falling depicts in compelling fashion the serial crises and mounting violence of a febrile era. Peter Walther examines the slow death of Weimar through the prism of nine colourful protagonists, including leading German politicians of right, left and centre, the clairvoyant and occultist, Erik Jan Hanussen and the formidable American journalist Dorothy Thompson. He profiles these heterogeneous characters in intriguing detail, pulling together the threads of their lives to chart the demise of German parliamentary democracy and the rise of National Socialist tyranny. Along the way we gain fascinating insights into the machinations in the corridors of power to keep the 'Bohemian corporal' from the chancellorship, and the venality of the Nazi elite and its fellow travellers from the demi-monde of early 1930s Berlin. Walther evokes the louche nightlife of the German capital - 'a playground for charlatans and prophets, madmen and crooks' - memorably and atmospherically. A masterly fusion of meticulously researched historical writing and vividly propulsive storytelling, Darkness Falling is a distinctive and enthralling account of Germany's slide from democracy to dictatorship.