In 1928 Stefan Moses was born into a well-educated, middle-class family in Liegnitz, Silesia. The Jewish background on the side of his father\u2019s family, who had long since distanced themselves from any form of religious orthodoxy, soon led to the inescapable fate of isolation, persecution and in the end mortal danger. Part of the Moses family and many friends and acquaintances took the path of emigration. After the shock of the November pogrom, mother and son moved from Liegnitz to the purportedly safer, because anonymous city of Breslau. But there, in 1944, the state authorities intervened. Moses landed in the Ostlinde forced labour camp and came within an inch of being crushed in the jaws of terror. But by a stroke of luck amidst his misfortune Stefan managed to flee from the camp in February 1945. In the summer of that year we find him with his mother, swept by the waves of destiny from East to West, in Jena. Here he completed his training in photography with Grete Bodl\u00e9e, a photographer of children.<\/p>\n
Youngest theatre photographer in Germany<\/h3>\n
From 1947 to 1949 Moses was the youngest theatre photographer in Germany, working at the National Theatre in Weimar, and was thus involved in the pan-German re-emergence of theatre life. As a photographer Stefan Moses had begun working with children, himself still half a child in those dark times. Now for three years the magic world of theatre became his aesthetic laboratory. And he experienced the transformation of his familiar actor colleagues into their roles<\/em>, which sometimes acted as masks.<\/p>\n The Weimar years are also the time when Moses took his first steps as a photo reporter and photo chronicler. He often captured scenes that did not fit into the required optimistic picture of communism. His irrepressible curiosity for the everyday, the average and for different physiognomies can already be felt here. A talent for the human image begins to take its first cautious steps at this time.<\/p>\n In the year 1950, when after the founding of the GDR the SED began tightening the reins of state control of art, Moses sensed that he would not be able to breathe freely in the \u201cworker and peasant state\u201d. And so he undertook the leap into the West, to Munich. It almost took the form of a farewell to Germany \u2013 understandable after what he had gone through as a child. In Munich two visas for Chicago had already been prepared, procured by a helpful uncle who had emigrated earlier. But his uncle waited in vain.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 it was impossible for me to leave this Germany that I had hardly really begun to know.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n An instinct whispered to him to stay in order to take pictures of the people who, like him, had survived the war. He wanted to be in Germany, and only here, when the new age began, \u201cfull of anticipation and hope for new freedoms, new life, democracy and new luck. [I was] terrifically curious about all that was coming [\u2026], the incalculable future where you would sail with the rapidly floating clouds, with pictures in your mind and a Leica in your hand.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Moses\u2019s first photo stories were published in Munich in the weekend supplements of the Neue Zeitung<\/em>, a newspaper founded by the American occupation forces and devoted to re-education<\/em>, the building of a liberal, cosmopolitan Germany. It was the ideal starting point for a young photographer with boundless desire to discover people and talents.<\/p>\n Wochenendbeilage der Neuen Zeitung, 26. August 1950<\/p><\/div>\n Between 1950 and 1960 Moses worked as a photo reporter for the magazines of the Kindler publishing house, Das Sch\u00f6ne<\/em> and Revue<\/em>, which like the magazine stern<\/em> that was founded around the same time, emulated the leading American model, Life<\/em> magazine, which for its part had largely been created by Jewish photographers that had been driven out of Germany after 1933. The years before television brought the magazines huge circulations, many pages of advertisements, and the role of an influential forum for political discourse.<\/p>\n Kindler sent the young Moses in the 1950s first to New York and then on an extensive trip though Europe which he undertook with the young author and actor Walter Rilla, who had been living in exile in England. The result of this exploration of faces, gestures, conditions, landscapes and architectures was a book with the title from a Goethe quotation from the prologue to Faust<\/em>: \u201cHerrlich wie am ersten Tag\u201d (Fair as on the primal day) \u2013 a visual plaidoyer for the indestructability of European humanity, irregardless of the different political conditions in East and West, South and North. And then came 1956: the bloody uprising in Hungary that shook all of Europe. Moses captured the eerie scenes of the bitterly sombre Budapest autumn.<\/p>\n\u201cThe good Lord sent me to Munich\u201d<\/em><\/h3>\n
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