Getty Museum

[Unemployed, Cologne (Arbeitslos)]

Date

1928

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

German

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> The Wall Street crash in October 1929 had a particularly disastrous effect on the German economy. It caused a withdrawal of American loans and thus a credit crisis of unprecedented proportions. By 1932 the number of unemployed exceeded six million. “An almost unbroken chain of homeless men extends the whole length of the great Hamburg-Berlin highway,” noted the travel writer Heinrich Hauser in his 1933 essay “The Unemployed.” “There are so many of them . . . that they could shout a message from Hamburg to Berlin by word of mouth.” The unexpected death of Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929), the German foreign minister and former chancellor, just weeks before the crash became for many the ominous symbol of a calamitous year, the first cracks in the not-too-solid foundation of the Weimar Republic. > > In an interesting confluence of events, 1929 also saw the publication of August Sander's *Face of the Time*, a book of sixty photographs intended as a preview of his larger effort, “Citizens of the Twentieth Century.” It was released by Kurt Wolff's Transmare Verlag in Munich, which had acquired a reputation for publishing the work of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the Expressionist poets, and *Neue Sachlichkeit* photographers such as Albert Renger-Patzsch (1887-1966). Sander's book traced precisely the sociopolitical development that now so painfully revealed itself as a Faustian bargain: Germany's transformation from an agrarian society into an unstable center of international capitalism. > > Anticipating Germany's economic decline, Sander poignantly ended his book with a picture of an unemployed man loitering at a street corner. The photograph shown here is an important variant of that image. The man has lost all attributes of honor and social respectability: his head is shaven, his shirt and suit are torn. He represents the depersonalized existences that, according to historian Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), populate the urban wasteland in its final degenerate stage. (See [84.XM.126.282](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34437/august-sander-shepherd-hirte-german-1913/) and [84.XM.126.83](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34244/august-sander-portrait-of-two-men-german-negative-1912-print-1920s/) for more on “Twentieth Century Citizens”) > > Adapted from *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 58. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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