Buhse, the shoemaker

Willy Römer: “At last, some help in the penury of shoe soles!” Berlin, ca. 1910

From the photos of Willy Römer about the craftsmen of Berlin in the 1920s, one profession is conspicuously absent: that of the shoemaker. Among his published photos I have found only the above one, which represents not really a shoemaker, but rather a cobbler. Which is not surprising. Shoemaking was one of the first craft trades to become a large-scale industry around the turn of the century, and as Richard Stade reported in 1932 in his Der Niedergang des Schuhmacherhandwerks als Produktionsgewerbe (The fall of shoemaking as a production craft), by the middle of the 1920s the proportion of the craft was only 3% in the total shoe production. We read the same in the following sketch of Gabriele Tergit, the popular column writer of the period, who between 1924 and 1933 published a series in the Berliner Tageblatt on the characteristic figures of the life of Berlin, including the shoemaker.

Gabriele Tergit – by her civil name, Elise Hirschmann – was born in 1894 in Berlin in a Jewish bourgeois family. She learned history, sociology and philosophy, and from 1915 she was one of the first female journalists in Germany. Her concisely and impressively written regular courts reports made her a name – she reported, among other, about the press trials of Hitler and Goebbels –, but she also regularly wrote on the everyday life of Berlin (and these articles were always immediately taken over also in the Prager Tageblatt). In 1931 she also published a novel entitled Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (Käsebier conquers the Kaiserdamm), in which she wrote, through the world of the Neukölln cafés, about the power of advertisement and propaganda, foreshadowing the propaganda of Goebbels – about this book we will write separately. But she also wrote about the cultural history of flowers, in whose title we can also find the imperial crown. In 1933 with an incredible luck she managed to escape to London from the Nazi purge, but her writing career, like of many other German refugees, was interrupted. In her home country she was discovered only in 1977 on the occasion of the “Berliner Festwochen”. She died in London in 1982. Her short sketches on the everyday life of Berlin were collected in 1994 by Jens Brüning at the Suhrkamp publisher with the title Atem einer anderen Welt: Berliner Reportagen (Breath of another life: Reports in Berlin). From this volume we translate the following essay.

Buhse, the shoemaker

Buhse is a cobbler, and his workshop is in the basement of a noble house. In his cellar there are two dressers with countless raffle and sideshow trinkets, a piano, a wardrobe, a sofa, a table with chairs, and a folding screen that covers the sleeping accommodation. At the table, one step for the purpose of the workshop. But the ornament of the place is a large framed diploma, with a Gretchen or Evchen at the spinning wheel on the bottom left, to make room for a putto to flutter a band, and with a female figure to the right – the Freedom, the Electricity or the Industry – holding a torch. The whole is the diploma of a silver medal at the 35th shoemakers’ exhibition in Biesteritz.

Buhse is the son of a carpenter from Pasewalk. When he was 25 years old, he married the maid of Countess Zetlitz, and got a golden pendulum clock as a wedding gift. She held a stately home, and did not speak to the porter’s wife. Buhse made boots and saffian slippers and elastic-sided shoes. Over time, he got less and less orders for new shoes, and more and more resoling and mending on shoes which he himself would have made much better. As the first gray hairs came, he dyed them black. His son married an easy girl and got into evil ways. Buhse remained with a granddaughter who married early and already had her first child. So he had child’s crying in his cellar by his old age again.

On the first floor the Consul’s wife said to her husband: “I’ve never had such a good cobbler. To him I would even trust my silk shoes. The Consul looked up from his newspaper. “Yes, yes, good craftsmen are a rarity nowadays. Such people must be supported, one has to give them occasion to earn some money.” So after twelve years Buhse got a commission for a pair of new boots. He arrived with a large sheet of paper and a pencil to take measure.

From morning till night Buhse went about the leather stores, he was looking for calfskin. He knew leather. When he sat late to the table, and his granddaughter was peevish, he just smiled. He negotiated for a long time, but finally he had it, the impeccable piece of calfskin, this poem, this dream, this idea of a calfskin. Not a piece of cardboard was put into the boots.

“My dear Mr. Buhse”, the Consul said, “I’m really sorry, but the boots are too tight. Please change them, or else…” “But please,” interrupted him Buhse, the shoemaker, “I will of course make a new pair!” Buhse tried to change. It did not go. “That’s it”, he mused, as he began a new pair, “that’s it. One just sit here and torments himself to stuff the mouths, and for the rent and taxes, and forgets everything, and forever mends and heels and resoles, and once one could really show what he knows, he knows nothing any more.” The second pair was completed.

“My dear”, the Consul said to his wife, “I cannot wear the new boots of Buhse either, they also hurt.”

“Haven’t I always told?”, the woman replied triumphantly, “that I don’t know what you like in these backward craftsmen? One cannot open enough windows!” In her youth she read a lot of Ibsen. Buhse waited. Perhaps for a gold medal for the pair of peerless calfskin boots, perhaps for his guild master’s appointment, perhaps to the moved visit of the Consul: “Your boots! One flies in them like a bee! All my friends will only work with you!” Two weeks passed, and Buhse stood in his way. “You work very well”, the Consul said, “but they still hurt a bit. But one can still wear them,” he added as he looked at Buhse’s face.

“They do not notice anything”, thought Buhse, “whether the insert is of cardboard or of good leather, whether you work properly with a steel rail or not, they do not notice anything, anything, it’s all the same to them.” In the evening Koller, the upholsterer Koller from the Gneisenaustraße and the carpenter Koblank sat together. “They do not notice anything”, said Buhse, “whether the insert is of cardboard or of good leather, whether you work properly with a steel rail or not, they do not notice anything.” “Yes”, said Koller, “they buy the couch for 39,40 marks, they have no idea about it. I know how it’s done, in the evening they sweep up the workshop, they collect the fallen wool and all dirt, they always spare out the proper filling. And people are so stupid, especially the ladies. They just plump upon it, have a look at the cover, and they say: “Yes, it is really worth the fee!” They understand nothing about the inside.

Koblank added: “Yesterday morning the buyer was there again. Just let it be cheap, regardless of whether the wood will crack afterwards, nobody glues twice nowadays. People are so stupid that if it lasts for a long time, they are unhappy, instead of saying, the man did a good job.”

“But then, when they will have corns and crippled toes, then they will regret”, said Buhse, the shoemaker.

“Not even then”, said Koller, and spat to one side.

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)”

El legado de Bajchisarái

Vendedor tártaro de alubias en el mercado de Bajchisarái, 1920s. Foto de Useyn (Hussein) Bodaninsky. Del archivo de fotos del museo tártaro de Bajchisarái, se vende en postales.

Cuando el kanato tártaro de Crimea, a consecuencia de la guerra ruso-turca de 1768-1774, fue anexado a Rusia, la península fue predominantemente habitada por tártaros, con barrios minoritarios griegos y armenios en las ciudades costeras. La proporción de tártaros disminuyó gradualmente en los dos siglos siguientes. Muchos de ellos –se dice que hasta la mitad– huyeron a Turquía durante las guerras ruso-turca y después la de Crimea, mientras el gobierno empezaba a establecer en la península pobladores rusos, así como cristianos que huían de los Balcanes: búlgaros, valacos y griegos. En el siglo XIX el gobierno ruso y la Iglesia ortodoxa se esforzaron en promover el pasado cristiano griego y bizantino de la zona, y la serie de magníficos palacios aristocráticos y complejos imperiales construidos a lo largo de la costa sur, de Sebastopol a Yalta, también buscaba subrayar el carácter ruso de Crimea..

El despertar de la cultura tártara se inició en la década de 1880, gracias principalmente a Ismail Bey Gaspırali (en ruso, Gasprinsky, 1851-1914) nativo de Bajchisarái, que dedicó toda su vida a la modernización de la educación y la cultura tártaras, y a la solidaridad entre los pueblos turcos de Rusia. La influyente  revista Tercuman (Intérprete, 1883-1918), fundada por él, llegaba a todos los pueblos turcos del imperio, convirtiéndose en todas partes en la fuerza impulsora de la cultura local. En el obituario de Gaspırali, publicado en el número 202 (1915) de la revista, se leía:

«Sí, Tercuman es nuestra literatura nacional, nuestra educación nacional, el tesoro de nuestra historia nacional moderna. ¿Tenemos biblioteca pública nacional? ¿Tenemos museo público nacional? ¿Tenemos academia pública nacional? Lo que tenemos son veintitrés volúmenes de Tercuman. Este es nuestro gran tesoro nacional.»

Derecha: İsmail Bey Gaspırali. Izquierda: cartel del Molla Nasreddin periódico satírico: Gaspırali (con su Tercüman y la cartilla de tártaro moderna en la mano) se enfrenta a los enemigos del progreso.

La creación de las instituciones enumeradas en el obituario se convirtió en la tarea de la generación posterior a Gaspırali. Entre oras cosas, la creación de un museo tártaro fue emprendida por Useyn (Hussein) Bodaninsky (1877-1938). Hijo de un maestro tártaro, él también se graduó en la Escuela Normal tártara de Simferopol, es decir, de Akmescit. Entre 1895 y 1905 estudió en Moscú, en la famosa Universidad de Arte e Industria fundada en 1825 por el barón Stroganov, luego pasó algunos años en París, llegando a ser entre 1911 y 1916 un reconocido y apreciado diseñador de interiores y decorador en San Petersburgo. En 1916 regresó a la península de Crimea donde fue nombrado director del Palacio del Kan en Bajchisarái. Aquí fundó el museo tártaro, aún hoy presente en dicho palacio.

A principios de los años 20 Bodaninsky y sus colegas fueron los primeros en recoger materiales etnográficos e históricos tártaros de Crimea. Trabajaron con tanto ahínco como si supieran que no tenían mucho tiempo. Llevaron a cabo una larga serie de excavaciones arqueológicas en las ciudades de cuevas habitadas por los tártaros en el siglo XVI y en los antiguos cementerios, y fotografiaron sistemáticamente las aldeas tradicionales tártaras, su artesanía, fiestas y costumbres. En sus fotos todavía reconocemos los rasgos principales de la Bajchisarái moderna, pero sin esas fotos no se no podría concebir ya la antigua vida de la ciudad, centro cultural de los tártaros de Crimea.

Bajchisarái, 1920s

En 1934 Bodaninsky fue relevado del museo. En los años siguientes vivió de su trabajo de decorador en Moscú y Tbilisi. Allí fue arrestado y el 17 de abril 1938, en Simferopol, ejecutado por cargos falsos. Se desconoce la ubicación de su tumba y nunca ha sido rehabilitado. El 18 de mayo de 1944 toda la población tártara de Crimea fue deportada a Uzbekistán, donde en los dos primeros años casi la mitad de ellos murieron. Sus casas fueron ocupadas por los recién llegados de Rusia y Ucrania. De su cultura material nos queda sólo lo que Bodaninsky y sus colegas lograron recopilar en dos décadas, lo que podemos ver en estas fotos.

Curtidor, Bajchisarái, 1920s

Mujer hilando, Bajchisarái, 1920s

Tejedora, Bajchisarái, 1920s

Telar, Bajchisarái, 1920s

Heritage of Bakhchisaray

A Tatar seller of haricot beans on the market of Bakhchisaray, 1920s. Photo by Useyn (Hussein) Bodaninsky. From the archive photos of the Tatar museum of Bakhchisaray, sold on postcards.

When the Crimean Tatar Khanate, as a result of the 1768-1774 Russo-Turkish war, was annexed to Russia, the peninsula was predominantly inhabited by Tatars, with minor Greek and Armenian neighborhoods in the coastal cities. Their proportion gradually decreased in the next two centuries. Many of them – some say, half of the Tatars – fled to Turkey during the Russo-Turkish and later the Crimean war, while the government started to settle down in the Crimea Russians as well as Christians fleeing from the Balkans: Bulgarians, Vlachs and Greeks. In the 19th century the Russian government and the Orthodox church both emphasized and promoted the Greek and Byzantine Christian past of the peninsula, and the series of gorgeous aristocratic and imperial resort palaces built along the southern coast from Sevastopol to Yalta also strengthened the Russian character of the Crimea.

The awakening of Tatar culture started in the 1880s, primarily due to İsmail Bey Gaspırali (in Russian Gasprinsky, 1851-1914) from Bakhchisaray, who devoted all his life to the modernization of Tatar education and culture and to the solidarity among the Turkic peoples in Russia. The very influential journal Tercüman (Interpreter, 1883-1918), founded by him, reached all the Turkic peoples in the empire, becoming everywhere a driving force of local culture. As the obituary of Gaspırali, published in the 202 (1915) issue of the journal, wrote it:

“Yes, Tercüman is our national literature, our national education, the treasury of our modern national history. Do we have a national public library? Do we have a national public museum? Do we have a national public academy? What we have is twenty-three volumes of Tercüman. This is our great national treasury.”

Right: İsmail Bey Gaspırali. Left: Cartoon from the Molla Nasreddin satirical journal: Gaspırali (with the Tercüman and the modern Tatar primer in his hand) facing the enemies of progress.

The creation of the institutions listed in the obituary became the task of the generation after Gaspırali. Among them, the establishment of a Tatar museum was undertaken by Useyn (Hussein) Bodaninsky (1877-1938). Born the son of a Tatar teacher, he also graduated in the Tatar teacher-training college in Simferopol, that is, Akmescit. From 1895 to 1905 he learned in Moscow at the famous University of Art and Industry founded in 1825 by Baron Stroganov, then he spent a few years in Paris, becoming between 1911 and 1916 a renowned and sought-after interior designer and decorator in St. Petersburg. In 1916 he returned to the Crimea, where he was appointed director of the Khan’s Palace in Bakhchisaray. Here he founded the Tatar museum, still today working in the Khan’s Palace.

In the early 1920s Bodaninsky and his colleagues were the first to collect Crimean Tatar ethnographic and historical material. They went on with such an effort, as if they knew they had not much time left. They carried out a long series of archaeological excavations in the cave cities inhabited by the Tatars in the 16th century and in the former cemeteries, and they systematically photographed the traditional Tatar villages, crafts, feasts and festive costumes. In their pictures we still recognize the main traits of modern Bakhchisaray, but without these photos we could no longer conceive the former life of this city, the cultural center of the Crimean Tatars.

Bakhchisaray, 1920s

In 1934 Bodaninsky was discharged from the museum. In the following years he lived on decorative works in Moscow and Tbilisi. There he was arrested, and on 17 April 1938 executed in Simferopol on trumped-up charges. The location of his grave is unknown, and he has never been rehabilitated. On 18 May 1944 the entire Crimean Tatar population was deported to Uzbekistan, where in the first two years nearly half of them died. Their houses were occupied by Russian and Ukrainian newcomers. From their material culture there is left only as much as Bodaninsky and his colleagues managed to collect in two decades, and as we see in these pictures.

Tanner, Bakhchisaray, 1920s

Spinning woman, Bakhchisaray, 1920s

Weaver, Bakhchisaray, 1920s

Weaver, Bakhchisaray, 1920s