Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Ann und Jürgen Wilde Stiftung AJW 459 / Margarita Platis
there’s a lot more to come from aenne biermann
announced Das Magazin in 1931 in avant-garde lower-case font:
here is a photographer who shows the most ordinary things in a completely new light –
with her delicate touch the hugely popular “new objectivity” movement is nothing to be afraid of –
Stadtarchiv Goch 🔍 Hover over the image to enlarge
Who would have thought that Aenne Biermann would turn out to be a renowned photographer?
She was born in 1898 into a wealthy, upper middle-class family. The shoe manufacturers Alphons and Julie Biermann had three sons, Ernst, Fritz, and Otto, and then a daughter, whom they named Anna Sibilla. Unlike her brothers, Anna Sibilla did not go into higher education. There were no plans for her to study or to train for a profession. However, her parents recognized and encouraged her musical talent, especially her piano skills.
Museum für Angewandte Kunst Gera, Dauerleihgabe Familie Schoder
From Goch to Gera
On 19 Januar 1920 the Sternefeld family celebrated a double wedding. Ernst Sternefeld married Hildegard Noelle, and Anna married Herbert Joseph Biermann, who was eight years her senior. She moved to live with him in the city of Gera.
Stadtarchiv Gera, A 2968
There Herbert ran a large and esteemed textile store with his brother, Erich.
From Anna Sibilla to Aenne…
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde AJW 444 / Margarita Platis
In Gera Anna Sibilla referred to herself as “Aenne”. After the birth of her children – a daughter, Helga (1920-1987) and a son, Gerd (1923-2017) – she bought a camera. Like so many young parents, she wanted to create a photographic record of her children growing up.
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde AJW 427
…from snapshots for the family album to credible art photography
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde AJW 1291
Soon she was not only taking photos for the family album but also began to engage with photography in earnest.
It all started with her taking pictures of rocks. Geologist Rudolf Hundt, a family friend, asked her to photograph rock samples. “This task required me to pay more attention to the technical criteria for producing high-quality images,” recalled Aenne Biermann.
Walter Müller-Wulckow: Die deutsche Wohnung der Gegenwart. Königstein 1930, S. 123
She too collected rocks. Part of her collection was on display in the glass cabinet in the wall unit. The modern room was designed by architect Thilo Schoder, a friend of the Biermanns.
This is how the self-taught photographer described her methods.
She photographed objects, landscapes, and plants and experimented with unusual compositions and techniques.
und experimentiert mit ungewohnten Bildkompositionen, Blickwinkeln und Techniken.
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde AJW 430
This marked the start of a busy career in exhibitions and publishing. Aenne Biermann’s photographs were shown in Germany and abroad, and published in catalogs, books, and magazines. She entered competitions and won many prizes. Aenne Biermann enjoyed great success during this period, but also worked incessantly. Her archive contained more than 3,400 negatives, all carefully numbered. She developed the prints herself in her darkroom.
Death at 34
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde AJW 456
“She had a short working day and perhaps her habit of working late into the night in the darkroom to enlarge and develop prints was the root cause of her serious illness,” recalled her friend Rudolf Hundt. At the height of her career in the early 1930s, Aenne Bierman became seriously ill.
Bayerischer Rundfunk
A lengthy stay in a convalescent home did not bring the hoped-for recovery and she died on 14 January 1933 at the age of just 34.
The brutal impact of National Socialist persecution
Stadtarchiv Gera A 2880
Shortly after Aenne Biermann’s death, the National Socialists came to power. As a Jewish family, the Biermanns felt the brutal impact of the racist persecution that ensued.
Herbert’s brother-in-law, Dr Rudolf Paul, recalled: “I saw with my own eyes how on 1 April 1933 [the Nazi boycott of Jewish-owned business throughout Germany ] the entrances to the Biermanns’ store were blocked by SA units [the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party ] whose aim was to prevent shoppers from entering.”
Herbert Biermann was forced to sell the large textile department store that he ran with his brother Erich, as well as the family villa. During the November pogrom in 1938, a wave of orchestrated violence against Jews, During the orchestrated violence against Jews in November 1938, known as the November pogrom, both brothers were deported to Buchenwald concentration camp, where they were interned for three weeks – three weeks of hell, as Herbert wrote retrospectively. Their sister Lilli Paul was deported and murdered.
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, AJW 428
„Separation by satanic powers"
The Nazis also prevented Herbert Biermann from marrying his former sister-in-law Hildegard Sternefeld. Her marriage to Aenne’s brother Ernst had ended in divorce, and after Aenne’s death she moved with her son to Gera to run the widower’s household. Although she had converted to Judaism upon marriage, the Nazis’ racial ideology classed her as ‘Aryan’. Marriage to a Jew was therefore out of the question. Herbert recalled bitterly:
„Although she was completely bound to my fate, the Nazis refused to grant us a marriage permit. Under English law this meant my last chance to obtain the Palestine certificate [authorizing emigration to the British Mandate of Palestine] with her had disappeared! […] This separation occasioned by the satanic powers cast a shadow over my life for years to come…”
Wikimedia commons, public domain
The family flee to Palestine
Helga Biermann had already emigrated to Palestine at the age of fifteen and her brother Gerd joined her in 1938 after the November pogroms . Herbert Biermann was the last of the family to leave Nazi Germany. He packed two so-called Liftvans – large, wooden crates used to ship household goods. Together they weighed five and a half tons. It is thought that one of them contained Aenne Biermann’s photo archive. A delivery firm from Gera was hired to transport the crates via the Mediterranean port of Trieste to Palestine.
Herbert Biermann left Gera on 29 September 1939. He traveled by train to Rome and from there flew to Palestine, in constant fear that the theater of war could extend further – the German Wehrmacht had invaded Poland a few weeks earlier. He reached his destination and found refuge there, but he faced the onerous task of carving out a new life for himself.
Herbert Biermann
to Martin Engels, a friend from Gera
Landesarchiv Berlin, B Rep. 025-09-24, Nr. 187/59
An artist’s body of work is destroyed
The two shipping containers never made it to Palestine. They only got as far as the free harbour of Trieste; the outbreak of war meant that they could not be transported any further. The German occupiers inspected the free harbour and picked out the containers containing Jewish property to confiscate them. In 1944 Hermann Biermann’s container was also looted. The contents that could be utilized were brought back to Berlin.
What happened to Aenne Biermann‘s artworks remains a mystery. Were they destroyed? Or were they not in the container at all?
The negatives and prints left behind in Gera were destroyed in a bombing raid. Persecution and war therefore led to the almost complete destruction of an artist’s oeuvre.
A fraction of the works survive
Bayerischer Rundfunk
A small proportion of Aenne Biermann‘s work – around 400 original prints - survived in museums and private collections. Art historian Franz Roh, a close friend of the Biermanns, owned many of the photographs, as did the architect Thilo Schroder, another friend of the family. Art collectors Ann and Jürgen Wilde acquired 73 of these works and in 2010 passed them on the Pinakothek der Moderne museum in Munich with their Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation.
Research into the provenance of the works revealed that Schroder and Roh had received the works from Aenne Biermann herself. Their provenance is therefore undisputed.
The hope remains that one day it will emerge what happened to the contents of the container and perhaps that additional artworks by this extraordinary artist will be found.
