Lecture and reading by Robert Mueller-Stahl

Regional series

At home, on the beach, playing sport, even on the run and after arriving in exile: during the period of National Socialist terror, Jews captured their everyday lives on camera and often kept their photos in albums they had designed themselves. The lightness and normality emphasised in the pictures are at odds with the knowledge of the hostility and disenfranchisement that the people depicted experienced as Jews. But this is precisely what gives them their significance.
Using a sensitive analysis of more than one hundred largely unknown collections, Robert Mueller-Stahl has investigated how private photography became a medium of self-determination for Jews. The photos not only defy the gaze of the perpetrator society, they also challenge today's ideas about Jewish life at the time. In the midst of persecution and extermination, they are testimonies to life.

Robert Mueller-Stahl is a historian specialising in German-Jewish history. As part of his doctorate, he organised the exhibition "Capturing life. Photo albums of Jewish families in the shadow of the Holocaust", which ran from June 2024 - May 2025 at the Schöneberg Museum in Berlin. His book "Das Leben festhalten. Deutsch-jüdische Privatfotografie in den 1930er Jahren" will be published by Wallstein Verlag in April.

To the publication:
Robert Mueller-Stahl: Capturing life. German-Jewish private photography in the 1930s, Göttingen 2026.
https://www.wallstein-verlag.de/9783835360525-das-leben-festhalten.html

Admission: 3,50€