One of the grand narratives of the story of European photography between the wars is that of the westward journey taken by so many of the great practitioners, from Hungary, Austria and Poland, to Berlin, first, and then, as the forces driving the journey catch up with them, on to Amsterdam and to Paris.
Somehow it is a pilgrimage which goes from a region or a country to a named city. Germaine Krull in fact began by going even further east than she already was, but found only a communist jail and a narrow brush with death waiting for her.
Then there was the second westward journey, “to America”, Alfred Eisenstadt first in 1935 and then Kertesz, less successfully, in 1937. Chim and Andreas Feininger crossed the Atlantic in 1939 – and then came the escapes: Capa in October 1939, and Germaine Krull on one of the very last migrant boats to leave Marseilles.
It raises the question of home, which to the young and adventurous can be anywhere but which narrows down for the old: Krull would return to Paris with De Gaulle after a journey taking her to the Caribbean, to Brazil and then across the centre of Francophone Africa, but it was too late, for her, in August 1944, to resettle: ten years younger than her and with an even more remarkable journey behind him, Capa slid back into a routine as if he’d barely been away. But Capa had bases, not homes, and anyway, he could take some form of closure from the Allied victory over the Germans. For Krull, it was European culture as much as Nazism that she had come to reject, and she’d spend the rest of her life in the Buddhist lands of the far east after one more long journey that this time would indeed be homeward.