Else Wachenheimer-Moos en haar echtgenoot Eugen Wachenheimer met twee onbekende mensen, februari 1932, Augsburg en Hamburg 1932

This is a photograph taken in February 1932 in Augsburg and Hamburg, Germany, by a member of the Wachenheimer family. It shows Else Wachenheimer-Moos, her husband Eugen, and two unidentified people. The image is part of a family album, a typically bourgeois form of visual record. But in the German context of 1932, this simple photograph takes on a heightened meaning. The Weimar Republic was in its death throes, and the Nazi party was gaining power. In just a few short years, the lives of German Jews like the Wachenheimers would be shattered by persecution and violence. The photograph's banality is, in retrospect, chilling. The subjects pose casually, seemingly oblivious to the coming storm. This domestic scene is charged with an unsettling tension between the everyday and the catastrophic. Historical research into the Wachenheimer family and the history of Jewish life in Augsburg and Hamburg in the 1930s would provide crucial context for understanding this photograph and its tragic historical significance.