Cultural

Heinz von Perckhammer (1895–1965) was a Tyrolean photographer best known for his Chinese nudes and Beijing street scenes. Perckhammer was born in Merano, Austria-Hungary (now Italy) on 3 March 1895. In the First World War he served aboard the SMS Kaiserin Elisabeth during the Siege of Tsingtao and from 1917 to 1919 was a Japanese prisoner of war. He remained in China for several years after his release. In 1928 two volumes of his photographs were published in Berlin: one of carefully posed Chinese nudes, many taken in Macao brothels, under the title Edle nacktheit in China (The Culture of the Nude in China),[1] and one of Beijing street photography, as Peking.[2] In 1929 he accompanied the airship LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin on its round-the-world tour, as a photojournalist for the Berlin illustrated weekly Die Woche.[3] By 1932 Perckhammer had established a studio in Berlin, where his work included nudes and fashion photography. In the late 1930s some of his images were used as pro...

Zoltan Glass was born in Budapest on April 26, 1903, to Reszon and Olga Glass, a Jewish couple whose family circumstances are unclear. Zoltan had at least one elder brother, Stefan, who also became a photographer, based in London. Zoltan began his career as a cartoonist and retoucher for a local newspaper, but in 1925 he moved to Berlin. Initially he earned his living as a freelance jack-of-all-trades. Eventually he found regular employment as the picture editor of a Berlin evening paper, the 5-8 Uhr Abendblatt, and then, from 1931, as a photojournalist on the more important daily, the Berliner Tagblatt. (Interestingly, two other Hungarian-Jewish newspapermen from Budapest who learned their craft on Berlin journals at that time were the writer Arthur Koestler and the cartoonist Victor Weisz, better known later as Vicky of the Daily Mirror and London's Evening Standard.) As a member of the network of highly talented Hungarian émigrés active in the creative life of the German c...