History | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

Denis Shiryaev upscaled and colorized footage “from the dawn of film taken in Tokyo, Japan from 1913-1915”.

In commemoration of the outbreak of the First World War, the Martin-Gropius-Bau is presenting an exhibition entitled The World c. 1914. Colour Photography Before the Great War, which features nearly forgotten colour photographs and films commissioned by the French banker Albert Kahn (1860-1940) before the First World War.

I would like to see this exhibition. It keeps fascinating me how little has changed in the last one hundred years. We wear other clothes, have more gadgets but the basic things of everyday life are still the same. You see pictures of people just like you and me. And they’ve been gone for decades. Color photography gets us a bit closer to this bygone world.

See more pictures at Spiegel Online.

Classic car show at the marketplace of my great-aunt’s hometown, on her 85th birthday.

When talking about English and French my grandma, born 1921, said she can’t imagine speaking foreign languages having never had the chance to learn at least one. After seven years of elementary school (“Volksschule”) where she had been doing a good job, her parents didn’t have the money to buy school books. So she couldn’t attend high school but started to train as a taylor. She said she always got angry when she heard someone talking about “the good old times”. From her point of view there wasn’t anything like that.