Detailed description

Illustrated book "Economic Miracle" - Collector's Edition with signed colour photography

Germany after the Second World War 1952-1967.

Just eight years after the surrender of Nazi Germany, photographer Josef Heinrich Darchinger began his photographic journey through the west of divided Germany. The bombs of the Second World War had turned the major German cities into deserts of rubble. But there are hardly any signs of the fall of a civilisation in his pictures. Even though the photographer has not suppressed anything. He merely documented what he saw. During this time, a New York travel agency advertised the last chance to visit the few remaining German ruins. Darchinger's pictures, in both colour and black and white, provide a glimpse of a country during a reconstruction fever. The economic upswing was so rapid that the whole world spoke of the "economic miracle". However, the people who achieved the miracle seem modest, humble, conscientious and hard-working. But increasingly also like strangers in the world they created.

The photographs show a country in the contradiction between technical progress and cultural restoration, between abundance and misery, between the so-called "German Gemütlichkeit" (eng.: German cosiness) and the constant threat of the Cold War. They show the winners and losers of the "economic miracle", people of all social classes, privately, at work, in their sparsely measured leisure time and while consuming. They also show a country that, looking back, seems like a cinema film from the middle of the last century.

The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote about his colour photographs that they are "rare contemporary documents that show how quickly colour returned to the grey everyday life."

Photobook "Economic Miracle" - Preferred edition with signed colour photography:
Limited edition of 1,000 numbered copies with a colour photograph signed by the photographer: "Reichstag, Berlin, 1958" in size 30 x 35.5 cm. Clothbound in slipcase, XL size: 39.6 x 33 cm, 290 pages. Multilingual edition: German, English, French.