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Book launch with the author Robert Mueller-Stahl
moderated by Robert Pausch (Die ZEIT)
Venue: Exilmuseum, Fasanenstr. 24, 10719 Berlin
Free admission
The event will be held in German.

Please register here


On holiday, playing sports, during their flight from Germany and after reaching exile: In the Nazi period, German Jews documented their everyday lives through photography. They often preserved their photographs in carefully curated albums and took them along when they emigrated, even when they were permitted to carry little more than a few suitcases. These photographs and albums became powerful artefacts of personal memory, transcending displacement and exile.

Yet such images have long been overlooked in public memory. Their apparent light-heartedness and sense of normality seem to contradict widely held perceptions of the persecution experienced by Jews under Nazism. However, it is precisely the notion of ordinariness, captured during a period of profound crisis and upheaval, that makes them so significant. These photographs and albums offer a new perspective on the Jewish experience during the Nazi era.

Drawing on a sensitive analysis of more than one hundred largely unknown collections, Robert Mueller-Stahl demonstrates how private photography became a means of self-determination for German Jews. Through cameras and photo albums, they were able to see themselves – and to remember themselves – on their own terms. These photographs not only resist the perpetrators’ gaze. They also challenge contemporary understandings of Jewish life under Nazism.

Dr Robert Mueller-Stahl is a historian at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and the Foundation Domäne Dahlem. Based on his doctoral research, he curated the exhibitions Capturing Life: Photo Albums of Jewish Families in the Shadow of the Holocaust and Between Worlds: The Private Photo Collection of Käte Frank, 1928–1948 which were on display at the Schöneberg Museum from June 2025 – March 2025. Since 2025, he has been a freelance contributor to the Exile Museum. His dissertation Capturing Life. German-Jewish Private Photography in the 1930s was awarded the 2025 Humboldt-Special Price for Research on Judaism and Antisemitism by the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Robert Mueller-Stahl: Das Leben festhalten. Deutsch-jüdische Privatfotografie in den 1930er Jahren
Published 2026 at Wallstein Verlag
ISBN 978-3-8353-6052-5


Fig. 1: Kurt and Edith Brent: personal papers, The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections
Fig. 2: Evelyn Klein Altman, papers, Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collections, Schenkung von Don Altman