August Sander (1876–1964) was one of the most significant and influential photographers of the twentieth century. His lifelong project “People of the Twentieth Century”, an archive of tens of thousands of pictures, was an attempt to document every layer of German society between the wars. Together, the images capture the effects of deep political and social unrest on people from a wide range of backgrounds who lived in the shadows of the darkest period of modern German history. The American poet Adam Kirsch’s collection Emblems of the Passing World (2015) responds, in verse, to forty-six of these images. The word “after” in Kirsch’s subtitle (Poems after photographs by August Sander)perhaps provides the best approach to these responses, suggesting as it does translation, a version or variation in which the poet will be less faithful to the literal than to the essential truth: one reviewer suggested that Kirsch’s reanimations almost eclipse the originals, which acquire fresh nuance from the insights of the poems.
Although Kirsch finds parallels between the historical circumstances of Sander’s subjects and those of his readers, what really drives the collection is his compassion and empathy for lives that seem to be in direct conversation with our own. What he recognizes in Sander’s sitters is a sense that we are all at the mercy not only of our moment in time but also of the arc of our lives. As he says in the introduction, these photographs reveal “what is ordinarily hidden from us – the way we ourselves appear, and will appear to posterity, as types, when we stubbornly insist on experiencing ourselves as individuals”. In “Young Girl, 1931”, for instance, what makes the image so powerful is that the subject refuses to meet the viewer’s eye directly, as if to protect an individuality she knows she will have to surrender in marriage: “Cashed in for the inevitable husband”. She wants more than she knows she will be allowed, or than the poet, with oracular hindsight, knows she is likely to have been given. But if the photographer’s subjects are all destined to be overtaken by history (Sander’s own son, a Socialist, died in a concentration camp), the poet dignifies their often difficult and painful lives with these formal verse monuments. Kirsch’s poems pay tribute to their subjects’ stubborn attempts to resist their fates – and may even encourage the reader to believe that they, too, can rise above their historical moment.
Young Girl, 1931
after a photograph by August Sander
An atavistic taste for symbol posed
The young girl, who is not so very young,
Inside a bower and handed her a rose
To put italics on her blossoming
The biological celebrity
Her mother and her mother’s mother owned
And gloried in until it had to be
Cashed in for the inevitable husband.
Yet the distracted way she holds the stem
And slightly fails to meet the gazer’s eye
Suggest she hopes she’ll be as different from
Those icons of contested chastity
As their high hair and petticoats from her
Unpainted face and military blouse,
Which hint her generation has in store
A fate less lovely and more serious.
ADAM KIRSCH (2013)
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