Gerty Simon : Poignant Pictures of a Lost World

"Under the Nazi regime I found myself as a Jew in particular danger, because as a photographer, I had taken numerous photographs of Social Democratic and anti-fascist personalities and exhibited them in public.”

So wrote Gerty Simon, seeking refuge in the UK in 1933. She’d left Berlin where she seems to have known everyone in Weimar high society — not just politicians, but also artists, film makers, dancers, musicians and writers. Lotte Lenya, Albert Einstein, Käthe Kollwitz and a very young Judith Kerr — later to become a beloved British children’s author — all sat for her. Her association with politicians and so-called “degenerate” artists — as well as her role as a creative and independent woman, all put her in danger in an increasingly repressive environment.

She settled in Chelsea, and re-established herself as a photographer remarkably quickly, taking pictures of people like Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Aneurin Bevan. Newspaper reports called her the “famous photographer.” Her work was successfully exhibited in 1934 and 1935.

And then Gerty Simon fell out of the limelight. “She does seem to have been completely forgotten,” says Barbara Warnock, Education and Outreach manager of the Wiener Library, where Simon’s photographs go on display at the end of this month.

Simon was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Bremen in 1888, moving to Berlin after World War One. Her husband, like her father, was a lawyer. They had one son, Bernard, who was 12 in 1933, when his school, a progressive boarding school transferred to Kent, and Simon followed. Her husband remained in Berlin, unable to continue as a lawyer and judge, but finding work as a notary. The family was not reunited until 1939, and father and son were both imprisoned as enemy aliens. At 19, Bernard was even sent to an internment camp in Australia — despite having lived in the UK for seven years.

There’s a suggestion that Gerty Simon suffered ill health, and another that she moved on to oil painting, but no one really knows why she stopped taking photographs. She died in 1970, four years after her husband, and her photographs passed to her son. When Bernard died in 2015, they were inherited in turn by his partner, Joseph Brand.

“He wasn’t sure what to do with them, so he contacted the Association of Jewish Refugees. They suggested the Wiener Library,” says Warnock. Unfortunately, the glass plate negatives that Simon used had been destroyed, but there were hundreds of prints, along with letters and other evidence about Simon’s life.

The Library has appealed for help in identifying around 70 of Simon’s sitters. They have set up a Flickr page with the images, and any fragments of details they have. Some have already been identified as a result. Gerty Simon’s poignant photographs evoke a doomed world. It is extremely moving to see them after 80 years of obscurity.

Poignant pictures of a lost world. By Keren David .  The Jewish Chronicle , May  23 , 2019.

Berlin/London : The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon.  The Wiener Library, 30 May 2019 - 15 October 2019

The Wiener Library needs help to discover the names and identities of around 70 unknown sitters who feature among the 300 or so portraits that make up our Gerty Simon collection. The portraits are available to browse on our Flickr page, where users have the ability to comment on, and suggest potential sitters. Where possible we have included any fragmentary details that are written on the reverse and have given an approximate date according to whether the portrait was taken in Berlin or London. You can either leave a comment under each image, or email our Photo Archivist with "Finding Gerty" in the subject line.

Finding Gerty 

A London museum has begun a search to uncover the identities of people featured in pictures taken by a German-Jewish photographer who fled to the city 85 years ago.

The Wiener Library, the world’s oldest Holocaust museum, wants to discover the names of 80 individuals who feature in pictures taken by Gerty Simon ahead of a planned exhibition next year.

The exhibition will mark the first time in eight decades that the work of this pioneering photographer has been brought to public attention.

Before she left Berlin in 1933, Simon was already a well-established and prolific photographer. Her work was repeatedly presented in exhibitions in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including the 1929 “Fotograhie der Gegenwart” exhibition.

Simon photographed a wide range of Weimar Berlin’s artists, politicians, and cultural figures, such as Albert Einstein; the artist Kätte Kollwitz; the painter and printmaker Max Liebermann; the composer Kurt Weill; and the essayist and theater critic Alfred Kerr. Kerr’s daughter, Judith, whom Simon also captured, subsequently became one of Britain’s best-loved and most successful author of children’s books.

Some of Simon’s subjects, such as Weill’s wife, the singer and actress Lotte Lenya, became close family friends. Like Simon, many of them – Jews such as Weill, and left-leaning artists such as Lenya – were also forced to leave Germany.

After arriving in London, Simon quickly reestablished a studio in the city’s western neighborhood of Chelsea.

“Her reputation will have preceded her to London and it is most likely she will have had contacts and advocates here,” says Wiener’s photo archivist Elise Bath.

Simon’s British subjects included the renowned art historian and broadcaster Sir Kenneth Clark; the Oscar-winning actor Dame Peggy Ashcroft; and Aneurin Bevan, the post-war Labour Cabinet minister who remains a revered figure today for founding Britain’s National Health Service. Simon’s work featured in a number of exhibitions in London, including one entitled “London Personalities” held at the Storran Gallery in Kensington in 1934.

Simon traveled to London with her son, Bernard, but her husband, Wilhelm, was not able to get out of Berlin until after Kristallnacht five years later. Simon’s move to Britain in 1933 was, in part, precipitated by the fact that Bernard was a pupil at the Herrlingen school of German-Jewish educator, Anna Essinger.

Strongly influenced by the attitudes of the Quakers whom Essinger had encountered in the United States during her youth, the school instantly met the disapproval of the Nazis. With the permission of their parents, Essinger moved the school and its 66 mainly Jewish pupils – including Bernard – to Britain in September 1933 under the guise of a summer vacation.

In its new home in a 17th century manor house in the Kent village of Otterden in southern England, New Herrlingen, or Bunce Court as it was more commonly known, flourished.

Bernard and his father were both interned as part of the round-up of “enemy aliens” in June 1940, when a German invasion of Britain appeared imminent. Wilhelm was swiftly released but Bernard found himself part of the infamous voyage of the Dunera – when 2,000 German refugees, many of them Jewish, were transported in appalling conditions on a 57-day crossing to Australia. Bernard was eventually able to return to the UK. He later forged a career working for Time Life magazine.

Simon died in 1970. After Bernard’s death, his partner, Joseph Brand, donated his papers and archives – including about 330 of Simon’s portraits and a small number of family photographs – to Wiener in 2016.

“The power and significance of the collection was immediately apparent,” says Bath.

“This collection of photographs is remarkable; to see all of the images together is to get an almost overwhelming sense of Gerty’s artistry and productivity. While the drama, intention, and clarity of the images themselves is apparent, Gerty’s personality seems to shine through as well.

“Her professional and creative essence is obvious: she is rather an inspirational figure not only in the fact of her professional independence, but also because her creativity and the innovative style she is working to develop,” Bath says.

The library has spent the last two years cataloguing the images, digitizing them, and carrying out conservation work. It recently commenced a social media effort to identify unknown individuals in about 80 images. It is all part of the preparation for the opening of an exhibition – “London/Berlin: The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon,” curated by Dr. Barbara Warnock and due to open in June 2019.

The unidentified images have been uploaded onto Flickr for members of the public to offer their suggestions on who the subjects might be. The library is encouraging the use of the hashtag #FindingGerty to increase awareness of its search.

Wiener’s staff have labeled the images with whatever detail they already have about individual pictures. Some of it comes from notes on the back of them which they believe were made by Simon. Such fragments of information – for instance “Russian sculptor” – is combined with an approximate date determined by whether the portrait was taken in Berlin or London.

Bath believes that the photographs were taken for a number of reasons. Some seem to be publicity shots, others are commissions for private individuals.

“What strikes me is the artistry of these images,” she notes. “Gerty was so clearly an artist who was carrying out incredibly creative, quite experimental work, probably in part for her own enjoyment and artistic development.”

It is likely that the identities of some will never be revealed. A small number of images were, for instance, taken at a glass factory in the east German city of Jena and feature workers from the factory.

The library is, however, more optimistic that it will be able to uncover the identities of the sitters in the portrait studio images. “The photographs have a real power to them which seems to capture people’s imaginations,” says Bath.

It has already had some early successes. A researcher in Austria, for instance, has helped solve the mystery of the identities of a mother and daughter photographed in Berlin in the late 1920s. They were revealed to be Ella af Wirsén, the wife of Swedish diplomat and writer Einar af Wirsén, and their daughter Ulla. Af Wirsén served as Sweden’s envoy to Berlin from 1925 to 1937, and also had postings in Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy.

Alexander Iolas, a Greek ballet dancer who came to study in Berlin but fled Germany for Paris when the Nazis came to power, has also been identified. He later became a prominent US and European art collector and gallery owner and has been dubbed “the man who discovered Warhol.”

“For me,” says Bath, “the Berlin images are particularly powerful, reflecting as they do the rich cultural milieu of the city at the time; its dynamism and breadth.

“It is, however, inevitable that your reaction to these images is affected by the knowledge of what was to come. While Gerty was able to leave Nazi Germany and build a new and successful life for herself in the UK, so many were not,” she adds.

Who did Gerty Simon shoot? The world’s oldest Holocaust museum wants to know. By Robert Philpot. The Times of Israel , November 23, 2018. 

Lost photographs from Weimar-era Berlin and 1930s London are to go on display, telling the remarkable story of a refugee fleeing the Nazis who has fallen through the gaps of art history.

Gerty Simon was an accomplished and successful photographer who staged exhibitions in Germany and Britain, but is barely known today.

Her subjects in Berlin included Albert Einstein and the singer Lotte Lenya, famous first for her thrilling performances of songs by her husband, Kurt Weill, and then 30 years later for her role as the terrifying Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love. In London, she photographed Peggy Ashcroft, Kenneth Clark and Nye Bevan.

Simon’s work will this month go on display at the Wiener Library in London, the world’s oldest archive of material on the Holocaust and the Nazi era.

About 350 startling prints were left to the Wiener after the death in 2015 of Simon’s son, Bernard. Senior curator Barbara Warnock said they were anticipating an archive telling the life of Bernard, who was 12 when he came with his mother to London, not the photographs.

It soon became clear they needed to discover more about Gerty Simon. “The documentation seems to show that she was quite a prominent and famous photographer at the time but she’s been completely forgotten,” said Warnock. “It’s great to have this opportunity to get her work out there again.”

It is obvious from the Berlin photographs that Simon was well connected in the 1920s Berlin scene of actors, writers, composers, dancers and artists, as well as Social Democrat politicians.

One particularly striking portrait from 1929 is of a six-year-old girl, the late Judith Kerr, who would herself come to London with her family in 1933. She went on to find fame as a writer and illustrator of the Mog series and The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

Warnock said Simon and her son fled Berlin in 1933 and settled in Britain. She left behind her husband, who had been a judge and was permitted to carry on working as a notary, a reflection of how much paperwork Jewish families had to deal with.

Warnock said Simon felt unsafe after photographing so many Social Democrats. “She felt exposed, that she might be targeted. She left her husband, her home, her career, her studio to come to the UK.”

Within a short period of time she was photographing leading figures in London. “The impression you get is that she was a force of nature.”

Her work featured in a number of exhibitions, including one called London Personalities at the Storran Gallery in Kensington, west London, in 1934. One newspaper critic described her as a “most brilliant and original of Berlin photographers”.

Simon’s husband managed to join his family in London in 1939 and when war broke out was interned, as was his son and most German Jewish refugees.

It was particularly grim for Bernard as he was one of about 2,500 men, mostly German Jews, sent to Australia on the passenger ship Dunera. He managed to get back and when he did so he joined the Pioneer Corps.

Warnock said Bernard’s partner, on leaving the archive, said that he was not resentful about the internment and was grateful that Britain took in the family.

Simon seems to have stopped working as a photographer around the time of the war and has been somewhat forgotten. The Wiener hopes the show, part of a nationwide arts festival called Insiders/Outsiders celebrating the contribution of refugees from Nazi Europe, will go some way to rectifying that.

“Her photography career was quite short but rather brilliant,” said Warnock

UK show revives lost work of photographer who fled Nazis. By Mark Brown. The Guardian , May 26, 2019.