MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, ESSAY


BERLIN - Not all culture is global yet. The photographer Gisele Freund mostly causes confusion in the United States. Among other reasons, she published unflattering pictures of Eva Peron in Life magazine in 1950, troubling the Argentine dictator and ruffling diplomatic relations, so the State Department officially declared her an“unwanted person.”America’s loss.

She wasn’t a great photojournalist, but she was a gifted pioneer.
Starting in 1935, when Andre Malraux enlisted her to document the First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, she left behind memorable portraits of Louis Aragon and Vita Sackville-West, Boris Pasternak and Stefan Zweig, Virginia Woolf
and James Joyce (the last two in color, when color film was still new).


More than half a century later, some of these portraits can look a little dated, but there’s Joyce relaxing with his grandson in a park, cane slung across chest like a military sash; and Malraux, wind-swept in collar-up overcoat with runty cigarette between lips. Freund actually read what her subjects wrote, she moved in their circles, and her best photographs convey both an intimacy and an
insider’s romance with a bygone world between the wars.

Her hometown is celebrating her now. She was born in Berlin in 1908, fled Germany in 1933, then had some shows and books published here during her later years that returned her to local attention. (She died in 2000.) Her portraits currently occupy the exhibition hall at the Willy Brandt Haus. The Ephraim-Palais has some of the lesser-known pictures she shot when she returned briefly to visit postwar Berlin in 1957 and 1962, as a kind of prodigal daughter. These are more interesting, in a way.


Freund was hoping to find lost landmarks of her childhood. Instead,
she discovered a place largely unfamiliar, and her photographs steer blessedly clear of melancholy and moralizing; they’re cool, matter of fact, not art but honest and true.


True to an exile’s experience. She and the writer Walter Benjamin became friends in Paris. Writing about his own Berlin childhood, Benjamin once recalled how living abroad had made it“clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth.”He added,“Several times in my inner life I had already experienced the process of inoculation as something salutary.”That’s roughly what Freund’s photographssuggest, too: her attempt to inoculate herself against the vicissitudes of time
through the lens of a camera.

In Frankfurt she had researched the roots of photography, a subject not yet widely taken seriously but very dear to Benjamin. He quotes Freund in his“Arcades Project.”“We can only imagine what it must
have meant to that epoch suddenly to see before it, in so lifelike a form, the celebrated figures of the stage, of the podium - in short, of public life,”Freund wrote about the earliest photographs.

The postwar Berlin photographs, mostly from 1957, are a thing apart. They show Berlin before the wall went up. That city was as different to her as Berlin is now to those who remember the wall.


Her photographs document the construction sites, the bombed squares and the old tenements with clothes hanging from clotheslines, the classic Berlin scene made popular at the turn of the century by Heinrich Zille.


Then there’s her photograph of the new Hansaviertel in the west, a postwar housing development that represented modern, capitalist Berlin. The picture has no clear vanishing point. It’s almost incoherent at a glance. Benjamin had written about how he hoped, through inoculation, that “the feeling of longing would no more
gain mastery over my spirit than a vaccine does over a healthy body.”He added,“I sought to limit its effect through insight into the irretrievability of the past.”


Bygone Berlin was irretrievable. Its future was a stranger to the past. That’s still largely the case. That was what the Hansaviertel represented. Freund’s photographs spoke to this city and to Europe at midcentury, and to her own condition.


They’re not really a thing apart. They’re her self-portrait.