Photographer Stefan Moses: chronicler of the Federal Republic

The last Wiesn measure blew him away. Sternschagelvoll a man lies on the grass, all fours stretched out. A woman in a circle skirt bends over him curiously, as a precaution from a safe distance.

In the background are groups with Oktoberfest visitors. Onlookers, who wear their handbags like shields in front of the body and seem to think "Yuck". How good it feels to have everything under control. Stefan Moses, one of the most well-known German photographers of the post-war era, has relentlessly and ironically presented the mirror to society.

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Since the fifties he has been traveling with his camera, through Germany, Europe and other continents. Strange things seem familiar to him, supposedly familiar whimsical. Like the three women who sit next to each other at the hairdresser somewhere in the young Federal Republic.

Each one leaves them in a magazine to cover the waiting time. They do not look at each other and do not talk to each other. This is probably due to the bulky dry hoods, which seem to come from another galaxy. The humans undermine to strange creatures from space.

Also in the sixties was the photo of a young man basking on a camping site in front of his tent on the air mattress. Where is he in his thoughts, maybe on a distant beach?

Next door on the leash neatly hangs laundry to dry, as in the garden behind a random row house in a stuffy suburban settlement. Behind it park cars. In one of these small cars, status symbols in an emerging economic wonderland, he will soon return to everyday life from this break.

"My photographs should disturb"

"For me, Germany is just as exotic as Afghanistan or Paraguay, unexplored areas everywhere," Moses once said. He did not want to show pictures in which one could make himself comfortable like in a soft armchair. "My photographs should disturb."

Unusually, for example, the more mature ladies in London, who are sleeping in sleeping bags on the roadside under a tree. They do not celebrate pajama parties in the open air like their grandchildren might. Instead, armed with cameras, they wait for the British Queen to ride past her horse.

Moses, who died in Munich in February 2018, liked to call himself a "human photographer". Gambling children in Jerusalem or a young shoeshine in New York interested them just as much as Willy Brandt or Wagner admirers in Bayreuth.

On his black-and-white shots, he impressively portrayed both celebrities and ordinary citizens. "Color drowns a yes!" He said in 2015 the "Central Bavarian newspaper." Moses: "The danger is great, one day all these colorful pictures will flood us." Color passes! Black and white exists! "

"Germany is the most interesting country"

The unmistakable profile of the then Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who is watching with folded hands a Corpus Christi procession in Bonn, appears to be carved in stone. The actor Curt Bois stands in front of a tree with intentionally slipped glasses, while the sculptor Bernhard Bleeker appears like a statue next to the artworks in his studio.

Three women from the North Sea town of Büsum grin into the camera and present a container, which they have filled with Rollmöpsen. Like many other nameless individuals, Moses has taken her directly from work and photographed in front of a gray felt curtain.

Stefan Moses / Elsa Bechteler-Moses / DHM

Fresh fish: Büsumer Rollmopspackerinnen (1962/1964)

"My job is to capture people before they get lost," he said. His great project to portray the society of the Federal Republic across all occupational groups and social strata, he pursued first in the West, after the turn in the East. "Germany is actually the most interesting country," he said in a television interview with Bayerischer Rundfunk. "And the Germans, the people are also weirdly funny."

Escape from the forced labor camp

Moses had experienced during the Nazi period because of his Jewish origin exclusion and persecution: the lawyer born in 1928 in Liegnitz, Silesia, was no longer allowed to attend school from 1943; In the spring of 1944 Moses was deported to the forced labor camp Ostlinde. In February 1945, the then 16-year-old managed to escape.

He finished his teaching at the famous children's photographer Grete Bodlée and initially worked as a stage photographer in Weimar, later as a photojournalist for media such as Neue Zeitung and Revue, SPIEGEL, Stern and Zeit. Moses remained in the country of the perpetrators, although he could have walked: An uncle had already prepared his departure for the United States.

"I really wanted to get to know the country and the people who had survived the war with me," Moses said in 2002 to the "Welt am Sonntag". It was the "curiosity about everything coming" that made him stay: "Of course we were all full of anticipation and hope for new freedoms, new life, democracy and new happiness."

What matters is the fleeting moment

Unlike his famous French colleague Henri Cartier-Bresson, Moses did not wait for the "decisive moment" when taking pictures. He pressed the trigger to capture a "fleeting moment". He did not understand his photos as individual images, but as flowing sequences of images. Sometimes, a shot was only taken when the person in charge thought it was all over.

The photographer found his work more difficult than outsiders could guess. "People are dancing around on my head doing what they want," he confessed, not without irony. "I hardly come to take pictures, they talk so much that you get completely drunk." After a few shots, so his experience, the time was over. "People have to go back to the bathroom or to the kitchen or work, it's an exciting and a tedious job," says Moses.

In a poem, the photographer once wished, "I would like to die standing up, and then become a book." He linked the desire with the request to the heirs to pour it also efficiently. The great chronicler of the Federal Republic became 89 years old.