The story of a family that was photographed every Christmas from 1900 to 1942
These stereoscopic holiday photos of a married couple from Berlin — Richard and Anna Wagner — were taken every Christmas, starting from the first year of their marriage in 1900 and up to 1942. The Wagners sent these photos to their friends as a Christmas greeting card.
Now these homemade family postcards are an incredible retrospective and suggest thoughts about the transience of time. The pictures show not only the explicable physical changes of these two people, but also the evolution of everyday life and technology. We offer you to look at some Christmas pictures from the Wagner archive. Perhaps a new Christmas or New Year tradition will arise in your family.
For 42 years, the couple posed in front of the Christmas tree, creating an elegant visual story with a long perspective.
The years followed one another, and the photos show signs of change: in 1915, the map on the background indicates an ongoing war, the coat in the 1917 photo speaks of a shortage of coal for heating during the winter, and the presence of an electric vacuum cleaner in 1927 is a sign that the couple had electricity in their house.
Their last photo together is dated 1942. Anna died three years later, and Richard died shortly before Christmas in 1950.
The memory of their love lives on in this large-scale series of photographs found in an attic in the eastern part of Berlin and published half a century after the Wagners were last photographed at Christmas.
Keywords: Berlin | Vintage | Germany | New year | Postcards | Retro | Retro photos | Christmas | Family archive | Family