Een Wehrmachtsoldaat rijdt op een ezel Possibly 1941 - 1945

This small black and white photograph in the Rijksmuseum shows a Wehrmacht soldier riding a donkey on a beach somewhere, sometime. I wonder about the person who snapped the shot. What were they thinking? Were they in the Wehrmacht too? Were they laughing? The whole scene feels… unexpected, like a dream. The soldier is smiling slightly, but the donkey looks like he's just trying to get through it. They are alone. Photography, like painting, has always been about freezing a moment, but here, the moment feels almost too strange to be real. I look at the ocean behind them, all that space and emptiness, and wonder what it all means. It's a serious picture, but it's also absurd. Maybe that's the point? Maybe the artist was trying to show us something about war, about humanity, about the weirdness of life itself.