Objekt des Monats
Jedes Objekt in der Sammlung des Deutschen Auswandererhauses erzählt eine ganz persönliche Auswanderungs- oder Einwanderungsgeschichte. In dieser Rubrik stellen wir Ihnen jeden Monat ein anderes Objekt vor – eine Fotografie, ein Dokument oder ein persönliches Erinnerungsstück.
July 2015
Kodak Retina IIc camera from the 1950s
Historical Classification
The Retina IIc model was released by Kodak between 1954 and 1957. Cameras from this series were of high quality and available at an affordable price. They were primarily designed to meet the needs of amateur photographers.
Short Biography
Ilse Prechtel was born on March 29, 1928, in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, Bavaria. In post-war Germany, the young and lively Ilse feels constrained. She meets the war refugee Vladas Sakauskas; the two marry. A life in Germany is not an option for the couple. The refugee organization IRO facilitates their migration to Australia. Ilse departs Germany in August 1948.
In Australia, Ilse first finds work in Darwin, where she stays for a total of eight years. Meanwhile, she separates from her husband Vladas. Whenever she can spare time from work, she explores the fifth continent—hunting crocodiles from the water and buffalo from the air. A camera is her constant companion. In 1958, she moves to Brisbane, where she marries architect Colin Tesch. One of their two sons, Peter, becomes the Australian ambassador to Germany in 2009, a year before Ilse’s death.
Significance of the Object
Ilse Tesch’s camera is a standard commercial product. Many museum visitors may have the same model or another camera at home and stand in front of the display case wondering: “What is this piece doing in the migration museum?”
Ilse Tesch’s camera is an example of an everyday object that only becomes a migration-related museum artifact in retrospect: the emigrant Ilse preserved the camera, acquired in Australia, along with the photos she took during her travels in (and from) her new home; her two sons kept the camera and photos along with the stories of emigration and adaptation that they heard from their mother; and now the German Emigration Center preserves the camera with some photos and the stories that Peter and Matthew Tesch have passed on to the museum as the history of an emigration.
These stories give the camera significance by allowing visitors to imagine what cannot be seen: through this lens, the eye of the emigrant saw the new home. It was the finger of Ilse Tesch that pressed this shutter when something memorable caught her attention in Queensland. When they see this camera, the two Australian children think of their mother, who was born in Germany.
There is no story without such historical imagination inspired by narratives.
Do You Also Have …
… a story of emigration or immigration in your family that you would like to share with the German Emigration Center together with the related objects and documents for its collection? Then please contact Dr. Tanja Fittkau by phone at +49 471 / 90 22 0 – 0
or by e-mail at: t.fittkau@dah-bremerhaven.de