Berlin comes to life! The photojournalist Eva Kemlein (1909 – 2004)

Eva Kemlein

She chronicled Berlin’s post-war and theatre life. A photojournalist for the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, whose first issue of 1945 carried the headline ‘Berlin comes to life!’, Eva Kemlein’s images of survivors – as a Jew, she herself had made it through the Nazi era in hiding in Berlin – left an indelible mark on the memory of the post-war era. In 1950, she documented the Berlin City Palace before its demolition. For nearly fifty years, from the summer of 1945 until shortly before her death in August of 2004, Eva Kemlein photographed Berlin’s theatre world, particularly the productions at Deutsches Theater. Her portraits of Ernst Busch and Heiner Müller, and of Helene Weigel as Mother Courage, at Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble are unparalleled. Eva Kemlein was a traveller between worlds; she lived in West Berlin and primarily photographed the East Berlin stages. At the same time, the exhibition at the Centrum Judaicum, in cooperation with the Stiftung Stadtmuseum, which manages her estate, is a show that presents a remarkable life between East and West.