In praise of craft

“Organ grinder with the monkey, which entertained the children with tricks, and then collected
money for the organ grinder, and sweets for himself. (1925)” (The captions in
quotation marks were written by Willy Römer on the back of his photos.)

The barrel organ and the organ-grinder seem to have already become a constant companion of Río Wang, as if they were marching up before the curtain between two acts of a Persian operette, to play some sad and untuned melody during the rearrangement of the stage. This organ-grinder also featured already here together with his contemporary and later colleagues from Berlin.


Franz Schubert, Die Winterreise Op. 89. XXIV: The organ-grinder (Der Leiermann). Sung by Dietrich Fischer Dieskau

The photographer, Willy Römer (1887-1979) was one of the most prominent photojournalists in Berlin between the two world wars. He started to learn the profession in 1903, at the age of sixteen, at the first press-photo company of Berlin, the Berliner Illustration-Gesellschaft, and then his master, Karl Delius took him to Paris for four years. In the world war he was a soldier at the Eastern front, but he also brought there his heavy 13×18 camera, and took hundreds of photos in Russian Poland, Belarus and Warsaw’s Jewish quarter, typically not on military actions, but about local life – we will write about them separately. And at the end of 1918, having returned to Berlin, he walked the streets from dawn to dusk, photographing the revolution, including the moment of his own arrest.

Arrest warrant against Willy Römer photographing the revolutionaries,
on the Lindenstraße, 5 January 1919.

Returning home he purchased the Phototek company, founded not much earlier by his colleague Robert Sennecke at Belle-Alliance-Straße 82 in Kreuzberg (today Mehringdamm 58), and after his colleague from Paris, Walter Bernstein became sales manager and co-owner in 1920, they made the company one of the most important press photo agencies of Berlin between the two world wars. Römer and his four “operators” went around the city all the day on the basis of the events chosen in the morning fom the newspapers, and they sent daily 10-12 photos to about 250 newspapers all over the world.

Press photographer Walter Gircke in eye contact with Willy Römer during the reception of the returning German troops at the Brandenburg Gate. Berlin, probably on 10 December 1918.

The prosperity of Phototek was interupted in 1933, when the new system declared the company “Judenfirma” because of Bernstein’s origin, and prohibited the German press to buy photos fom them. The company soon went into bankruptcy, and Römer continued to work as a lonely photographer under difficult conditions.

Willy Römer: The SA calls for the boycott of Jewish shops, Friedrichstraße, 1 April 1933.

But either as the owner of a prestigious press photo company, who can afford to devote a part of the working day to his passion, or as a lonely photographer who, in lack of orders, can deal with his own hobby, Willy Römer always photographed what he loved: the daily life of Berlin. The street life, political events, children’s games, river boats, courtyards, entertainers and bear-leaders. And, of course, organ-grinders.

“Another organ-grinder and another monkey, but they also collect money and sweets (1925)”

We are also accustomed to the fact that the photos of organ grinders have their conventional composition. These are genre scenes, mostly with a worn-looking, comically or nostalgically anachronistic old man and music box, on which the photographer looks in amazement as on the figure of a past age, and he himself does not quite find a place in this world. Römer’s organ-grinder shootings do not follow this cliché. Photographing organ-grinders fitted for him into a larger concept: the detailed documentation of handicrafts in contemporary Berlin.

“Recording a new music on the cylinder after the sheet music with the marking apparatus. (1929)”

The recorded music is actually Bill Murray’s Pucker Up and Whistle from 1921, a piece really fitting to the barrel organ. For its video with subtitles see here

“The insert pins and clips in the pre-drawn cylinder for the new piece ofmusic. (1929)”

The iconography of work started to develop in photography relatively late, around the turn of the century, mainly as a critique of the alienated work in the large industrial factories and in order to show up its alternatives, first through the more or less idealized genre scenes of rural works and traditional crafts, and later through politically charged workers’ representations. However, Willy Römer’s photos on working in Berlin do not fit to any of these trends. He himself grew up in a Berlin artisan family, the son of a tailor, and it seems that he was primarily interested in documenting objectively and in its context the artisanal crafts which in the Berlin of the 20s still gave bread to nearly 300 thousand people, a third of the city’s workers. He captured in detailed photo series the complete work process of bakers, chimney sweepers, the washerwomen of Köpenick, caters, boatmen and fishermen, nail-smiths, file-makers and street vendors.


To these works belongs also that of the organ-grinder, which Römer followed with his camera from the beginning, the preparation of the barrel organ and the inclusion of the tune cylinders to the organizing of the street presentation. His photos represent the organ-grinder not an anachronistic figure, but a master craftsman professionally performing his job, and also present the context of the performances, the collaboration of the organ-grinder, the entertainers and the public.


The nearly 70 thousand-piece photo legacy of Willy Römer, one of the few complete photo archives from the Weimar era, after being offered in vain for sale by his widow and daughter to several Berlin museums, was eventually purchased by Diethart Kerbs, the recently deceased renowned photo historian of the arts college of Berlin-Charlottenburg. He published a first selection of them in thirty thematic booklets between 1983 and 1991 with the title Edition Phototek at the Dirk Nishen publisher in Kreuzberg. The first volume of the series presented precisely the organ-grinders. Diethart Kerbs writes about them in the postscript of the booklet:

“At a time when there were no radios, record players and tape recorders, and the TV was not yet invented, the organ-grinders and other courtyard and street musicians mediated sensual pleasures for the ears of broad social layers. The sweet syrup of light tunes on the back bread of everyday life offered a welcome occasion to look out from the window, to come out in front of the store or workshop door, to run down to the court, to take a break, to keep a neighborly chat: music as a social event. The organ-grinder brought the goods of euphony for free in the backyards, and had to ask for the fee that was thrown to them in the form of small coins out of the window. They had to play together a living on long walks through the city.

The organ-grinders had two classes: an upper class, who had their own barrel organs, and a lower class, who had to borrow the equipment for a rental fee.The focus of organ construction and rental was in the north of Berlin. There lived mainly workers and artisans, many of them immigrants from Eastern European counties, but also from Italy. The Italians of northeastern Berlin included the Bacigalupo family, who founded in 1877 their barrel organ factory at Schönhauser Allee 74, and later moved it into 74a. In these workshops they manufactured, repaired, sold and rented the barrel organs.”

Willy Römer’s photos were rediscovered in recent years. In 2004, the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, and then the Museum der Stadt Wien organized an exhibition of them, and they have since released several albums. Soon we will also write on some of his other subjects.

“Organ-grinder on the skating rink. When there was yet no radio music from the loudspeakers, the Berlin youth was contented with the traditional barrel organ music while skating. And it went well. (1912)”

Welcoming committee

After the organ grinders, and especially the organ grinders of Berlin, here you are, an organ grinder in Berlin, this morning in Berkaer Straße. “Darf ich ein Foto machen?” “Na klooor”.

Time loop

Old man (perhaps Uncle Soma) playing a barrel piano, Tahi Street, Angyalföld district, Budapest, ca. 1963

Our post is published at once here and on the “Plant a Tree” local history blog of Budapest’s Angyalföld district

the organ-grinder, soda man, ice man, tinker,
Uncle Gyula, the lame huckster…

the wax-soft childlike perception, which retains such small moments, easily ignored by the adults.

Paths of organ-grinders in Angyalföld (the places mentioned in the post, projected onto the map of the district)

Although the Pallas Great Encyclopedia, published at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, mentions somewhat pejoratively the organ-grinders, like who importune the public, and the great poet Dezső Kosztolányi in 1927 wrote about the disappearance of the anachronistic organ-grinders, still in the early sixties a number of people went about the Tahi Street with such a music-box mounted on a two-wheeled cart. The former children, today sixty and older, still happily remember the machine-musicians of the sixties.

For many children in Angyalföld, the organ-grinder’s music was linked to the Sunday lunch. Others for the price of an ice cream helped to push the cart, or to pick up the fifty-filler coins wrapped in newspaper, thrown from the courtyard windows. They remember the punch cards, too, and they say that the organ-grinder did not buy, but he himself made them.

This is an interesting element of the story, because, as far as we know, this type of barrel piano does not use any punch card.

Street music machines have two major types: barrel piano, what we see in the picture, and barrel organ. The latter name is often used for both types. However, in the barrel piano the keys providing the sounds are operated by a cylinder, onto which the melody is coded by nails, similarly to the little music boxes still available in game stores. Of course, the cylinder in the barrel piano can be up to forty times greater, since the length of the piece of music which can be played depends on the diameter. In the case of the barrel piano, the cylinder operates a piano structure.

This plebeian music machine also has an aristocratic brother, the player piano or pianola. At first glance it is a traditional instrument, with keyboard and foot pedals. In this they really use codes set on punch cards, which gives way to a much more finely differentiated playback. The player piano was also one of the first techniques of music recording, which could record the actual performance of a pianist, thus the result was not the machine-replay of a sterile melody line, but of a true artistic interpretation. Such recordings were made, among others, by Scott Joplin, Béla Bartók, or the young Artur Rubinstein.

It is therefore a mystery how the punch card rolls got into the above childhood memories. Perhaps there was another instrument in the neighborhood which worked on that principle, but it is also possible that the old man simply tricked the young girls. I don’t know.

This photo might show Uncle Soma from the northern Újpest district, who usually played in front of the Polgár Pub in Elizabet street, says one of the informants. Others add that an organ-grinder also lived in Petneházy street, who often played in Gyöngyösi street and the poor Tripolisz neighborhood.

Checking thoroughly the following photo from the 1930s, one thinks that perhaps the same music-machine – just some decades younger – features here in the background. Perhaps the man is also the same in the two pictures?

 
The best use of the opportunities offered by the Werkelmann (as he was called in Viennese German) is shown in Josef Engelhart’s cheerful picture of 1890

And if it is the same instrument, then it is also in the following picture, taken in the thirties? The poor quality and the different perspective make the comparison complicated. The turned feet are perhaps obscured by a scaffolded support, but otherwise the instruments appear similar. However, organ-grinding was typically an one-man-enterprise, and the man with a hat and the one with a worker’s cap are perhaps not identical. Who knows it for sure today?

Organ-grinder in the thirties. Photo by Lajos Szabó, in: Fortélyos félelem igazgat, Móra, 1974
According to our informants, taken from the the neighboring flat, at Attila street 150.

But there were also other ambulant performers in the district along the axis of the Váci Street. In the Tripolisz they even remember a singing beggar, such an old man that his voice did not reach the windows. Nevertheless, he also received his emoluments. In addition to the barrel organ peddlers – who often were disabled soldiers or people in need of an easy physical work for other reasons – there was also an important rival group of backyard music service: the Gypsies. They were mainly young people, who linked up the daily practicing with earning bread, going about with their violins, and playing popular hits or Hungarian songs. Angyalföld was the cradle of a good many famous Gypsy musicians, as we will tell about them in a later post.

There were also two other old men, Uncle Pista and his brother-in-law or brother… maybe they are in Iván Vydareny’s photos taken in 1960 in Angyalföld, pushing their music-machine in the Visegrádi and Gogol Streets.


And the player piano which accompanied our tour in Angyalföld, unexpectedly shows up again for a last time to tell goodbye, purchased for the scenery of the 1969 film version of Ferenc Molnár’s famous The Boys of Paul Street.


“Exactly at quarter of one, after repeated futile experiments, the tense anticipation was rewarded. Into the colorless flame of a Bunsen burner upon the classroom desk there suddenly burst a flash of bright emerald; the professor’s efforts to demonstrate the fact that the compound, whereof the professor wanted to show that paints the flame green, indeed paints the flame green; say, at quarter of one, in that triumphant minute, a barrel piano resounded in a neighboring courtyard. Whereupon all earnestness and attention instantly fled. The windows were wide open, welcoming the warmth of a March day, while the wings of fresh Spring breezes wafted music into the room. It was a rollicking Magyar melody which issued in march tempo from the barrel piano. It was so utterly hilarious an air, so Viennese in spirit, that the entire class felt tempted to smile; indeed, many among those present did not restrain this urge.”

Ferenc Molnár: The Paul Street Boys, 1.

I only knew such street musicians from a radio tale, but we loved them very much also there. (From the almost fifty-minute long tale, the organ-grinder Zakariás plays only some minutes at the beginning and in the end.)


Every mouse loves cheese. Radio game, 1980.
Zakariás: Károly Kovács – Parrot: Ferenc Háray – Aunt Lidi: Józsa Hacser – Uncle Márton: László Csákányi – Soma: Endre Harkányi – Mummy Szeréna: Éva Schubert – Daddy Albin: Samu Balázs – Fruzsina: Hédi Váradi – Big Cat Magus: Gyula Bodrogi – Chequered mice: Ildikó Meixner, Péter Csepeli – With the collaboration of the ensemble formed from the Symphonic Orchestra of the Hungarian Radio – Music and direction: Lászó Gulyás – Written and arranged: Gyula Urbán

Fogd meg a vízben a csillagot! Hasztalan, úgysem tudod! Idelent hiába vallatod, fönt van a fényes titok. Csillagba zárták a sorsodat, csillag a vízben ragyog Tükrödből nem tudhatsz meg sokat, fönt van a fényes titok.

Catch the star on the water! Useless, you cannot do In vain you interrogate it here: the bright secret is up there. Your fate has been closed in the stars which shine on the water: but your mirror won’t tell you much: the bright secret is up there.

Update: Thanks to the appeal of the district library in the spring of 2013, two new photos have popped up from 1965. For completeness I include them here.

Dissolving: The organ grinder

Willy Römer, the photographer of everyday life in Berlin between 1905 and 1935: An organ grinder and his monkey amusing the children in the courtyard, 1925

Robert Capa: Organ grinder in Berlin, August 1945

Organ-grinder playing in the courtyard of Berlin, Fasanenstraße 13, 1965

Gerhard Thieme (1928-), the GDR’s official gag sculptor: Memorial to the organ-grinder, 1987.
In Berlin’s Nikolaiviertel, first destroyed and then re-created as a socialist disneyland,
about which we will write more, in the courtyard of the Reinhardt Pub

Franz Schubert, Die Winterreise Op. 89. XXIV: The hurdy-gurdy man (Der Leiermann). Performed by Dietrich Fischer Dieskau

For further organ-grinders and monkeys in pre-war Warsaw and Lwów, the disappeared Bucharest and bombed-out Budapest, America and the Caucasian Georgia, as well as in pre- and post-revolution Russia, paddle back on Río Wang.

Citizen Barrel Organ

Niko Pirosmani: Arganshchik (organ grinder from Tbilisi), two versions, 1910

We have already met organ-grinders in pre-war Warsaw and Lwów, Bucharest and bombed-out Budapest, and even in America and the Caucasian Georgia, and a comprehensive illustrated post on the history of the barrel organ is already becoming ripe, indeed. This, however, would not be complete without the Russian organ grinder.

The scene with the organ grinder and the Gypsy girl from an 1910s performance of Stravinsky’s Petrushka

The barrel organ, that is шарманка – whose name is an assimilation of the French charmante with a Russian diminutive suffix – was popular in the towns and even villages of Russia at the turn of the century, together with its master, the шарманщик, whose detailed portrait is drawn in Lev Uspensky’s Записки старого петербуржца 1890-1910 (Records of an old citizen of St-Petersburg), of which we want to specifically write later. It was a special Russian feature that the organ grinder usually went from village to village in the company of a puppeteer, called Petrushka after one of his traditional puppets, who was elevated into high art together with the organ-grinder by Stravinsky in his ballet of 1910.

Alexei Ivanovich Korzuhin: “Petrushka has come!” (1888) Russian village idyll. In the background you can discover our old acquaintances, the early heralds of modernization: the paleocyclist to the right, and the children’s stroller to the left.

After the revolution, however, the barrel organ – unlike in other countries – quickly declined in the Soviet Union. On the one hand, it was separated from its Petrushka, monopolized by the young Soviet agitation and propaganda art for the purpose of workers’ performances. On the other hand, as Gilyarovsky’s Moscow shows it sensitively, the Soviet power tried to eliminate both such kinds of mobile elements, and the traditional population which was its audience. One of the last hommages to the sharmanshchik as a living trade is, we think, the book which we would like to present now, and which appeared in Leningrad without date, but sometime around 1925.


Sharmanochka – Little Barrel Organ. Its author is the same Nikolai Yakovlevich Agnivtsev who published the recently presented In defense of the chimney sweep as well as a number of other forgotten pearls of youth literature. You can read the translation of the poems in popup windows.













Песенка старого шарманщика (Song of the old organ grinder). Dedicated to Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Music and song by Bulat Okudzhava

Шарманка-шарлатанка, как сладко ты поешь! Шарманка-шарлатанка, куда меня зовешь? Шагаю еле-еле, вершок за пять минут. Ну как дойти до цели, когда ботинки жмут? Работа есть работа. Работа есть всегда. Хватило б только пота на все мои года. Расплата за ошибки – она ведь тоже труд. Хватило бы улыбки, когда под ребра бьют.

Barrel organ, charlatan! how sweet you sing! Barrel organ, charlatan! where do you call me? I hardly advance, five minutes an inch: How could I arrive, when the shoes are tight? Work is just work, and work is all the time: so much sweat would have been enough for a life. Pay for the errors as well – it is also work and when it beats under the string – give at least a smile.

Ali Baba, the last Russian organ grinder (Pyotr Yakovlevich Lyubaev, Petyka)
Вокруг Света, June 1970

The nostalgia for the barrel organ, as shown by the song of Okudzhava, was not forgotten after the craft went into oblivion. How could it have gone, once in one of the most popular Soviet children’s books – if not the most popular one indeed –, Alexei Tolstoy’s The little golden key (1936), a recast of Pinocchio (which in my humble opinion is better than the Italian original) Daddy Carlo is no carpenter, but an organ grinder! His statue is still standing in front of the Kiev Children’s Theater. Moreover, it seems that the instrument is living a new golden age, which is marked not only by the increasing presence of nostalgia organ grinders on various fairs, but its genial further developments such as the one presented by the Russian television in the following program:

An organ grinder leading a trained fox and a dog. Ivan Turgenev’s drawing in his sketchbook, 1834