There is no information about the authors of the photographs or their age. It is not known when and how the album came to Europe. The only clue is a delicate entry in pencil on the otherwise blank third page. It reads “Farsari” and thus assigns the object to “Yokohama photography”, which was in demand worldwide at the end of the 19th century.

In the middle of the 19th century, the dynamics of global history had also torn Japan from its “idyllic silence” (Mori Ōgai). After more than two hundred years of self-imposed isolation, the island kingdom opened up to the scientific and technological civilisation of the “West”. Although the tourist discovery of the distant destination was initially difficult, the “Land of the Rising Sun” quickly became a new place of longing for the travelling classes of Europe. Aesthetic currents such as the flourishing Japonism and a zeitgeist increasingly critical of civilisation worked together to passionately imagine the popular destination.

Nach dem Frühstück steigen wir zu den Tempeln empor, über lange Stufenreihen in rauschenden Hainen, durch deren dunkles Laub das Meer hindurchleuchtet. Was Griechenland einmal war aber nicht mehr ist, was man [ … ] von seiner Schönheit träumt, das ist in dieser Landschaft zur Wahrheit geworden.
After breakfast we climb up to the temples, over long rows of steps in rustling groves with the sea shining through the dark foliage. What Greece once was but no longer is, what one dreams [ … ] of its beauty, has become the truth in this landscape.
(Harry Graf Kessler, Diary, 15 April 1892)

As early as the 1860s, European and Japanese photographers had studios in Yokohama – the port city that most travellers used to arrive and depart from. The studios mainly produced for tourists, who purchased individual prints or artistically crafted albums. Felice Beato (1832-1909) is considered the founder of “Yokohama photography”. In the early years of his Japanese creative period, the Italian-British photographer captured impressions of a seemingly magical world that had supposedly barely been touched by Western civilisation. His studio popularised the production of prints on albumen paper. His students and competitors – including Adolfo Farsari (1841-1898) and Tamamura Kōzaburō (1841–1932) – responded to the rapidly growing demand. Initially, genre paintings, and later also coloured landscape views, came onto the market.

Thanks to enthusiastic teamwork, it is now possible to document where a book originally stood, even if the difference between the 3.50-metre room height at Pankow’s Amalienpark and the 2.70-metre room height in the workspace made a one-to-one arrangement impossible. Even during the long days of distortion in the flat, the students and researchers involved made a lot of discoveries: The Sinn und Form booklet 1/1949 contains notes by Gerhard Wolf. The young Christa Ihlenfeld dedicates Kurt Tucholsky’s Rheinsberg für Verliebte to her future husband in 1950! Love poems by Stepan Stschipatschow – who do you think that is? – bear a 1951 dedication by Gerhard Wolf to her. What an arc of life shines out between Christa Wolf’s detailed dedication text of 28 July 1957 in Walt Whitman’s book of poems Leaves of Grass and the one for her husband’s 80th birthday in a cookbook by Wolfram Siebeck! How revealing that Gerhard Wolf signed and dated his earliest poetry acquisitions. What a desire for research is triggered by a Rilke volume from Insel-Verlag with the entry “Gerhard Wolf, Bad Frankenhausen, 1947. Abitur”.