Vol. 26 No. 13 · 8 July 2004
pages 25-27 | 5672 words
Dreams of the Decades
Liz Jobey
- Bill Brandt: A Life by Paul Delany
Cape, 336 pp, £35.00, March 2004, ISBN 0 224 05280 2
- Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective
Victoria & Albert Museum
In the summer of 1927, 23-year-old Willy Brandt underwent psychoanalysis in Vienna in an attempt to cure his tuberculosis. He had spent the previous two and a half years in Switzerland, at the Schweizerhof sanatorium in Davos, where, along with the prescribed exposure to sunshine, good food and fresh air, he had undergone surgery to artificially collapse one of his diseased lungs, in the belief that this would give it a better chance to heal. Before that he had spent 22 months at another sanatorium in Ticino, where many of the patients, like Brandt, were German. The spread of TB was one of the legacies of the First World War. As Paul Delany tells us, in Germany TB sufferers doubled in number in the last two years of the war, when ‘soap disappeared completely, and the streetcars were foul with the distinctive stench of famine.’ Rolf Brandt, Willy’s younger brother,
would later talk of having to rummage in dustbins for food and living for a week on one loaf of bread, baked with each day’s portion marked out. All his life he would gobble his meals and leave no scrap on his plate, a typical habit of people who have experienced starvation. Willy did not behave in this way; it seems by the time of the famine his mother was so fearful for his health that she kept up his strength by giving him an extra share from her own rations.
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 14 · 22 July 2004
From Fred Josephs
Having been persuaded by the inset illustration of a nude – something of a jolt to a long-time reader of the LRB such as myself, but a nicely calorific response to the frozen underwear experienced elsewhere in the issue by James Meek – to read further into Liz Jobey's account of the photographic career of Bill Brandt, I was disappointed, I have to say, to discover that the illustration was not what it seemed: it was not a photo of a policeman's daughter at all (LRB, 8 July). I wished it had been, rather than, if the book under review is to be believed, one of a prostitute and so captioned as a reference to an 'unpublished' bit of smut by Swinburne – though I don't see that Brandt was likely to have come across unpublished Swinburniana. Given the date of the photograph, my mind at once went back to the homely features of PC Dixon, even if the corner of architecture visible in the background was clearly too up-market to be found in Dock Green. I'm not sure that photographers, even ones as arty as Brandt was, should be allowed to put trick titles on their work, referring more to their own troubled psyches than to the world around them, when innocents like me go on craving veracity from the camera.
Fred Josephs
Birmingham
Vol. 26 No. 16 · 19 August 2004
From Paul Delany
Fred Josephs writes to express his concern about the title of Bill Brandt's 1945 nude, 'The Policeman's Daughter' (Letters, 22 July). This was Brandt's private name for the picture. When published it was captioned 'Hampstead, 1945'. The house on Church Row where the picture was taken could have been the one where Count Karolyi and his wife were living at the time; they were close friends of Eva Brandt.
Paul Delany
Vancouver
