It could be a series of scenes from a novel dreamed up by Günter Grass. The author of The Tin Drum, The Flounder and other surreal stories of modern Germany would surely have seen the magic-realist poignancy of these bizarre images, found by Jean-Marie Donat, a French collector of photographs. Perhaps he could even help to explain why so many people in early and mid-20th-century Germany seem to have wanted to pose for their pictures with a polar bear.
In a Grass novel, we might follow the adventures of a polar-bear imitator as he puts on his hot, sweaty, furry white costume to appear beside a variety of Germans for their photographs. Here he is with a couple beside the Baltic sea. The man has taken off his top, but still wears long black trousers.
In another beach picture, the bear holds someone’s dog. Is it Hitler’s dog? I only ask because in another shot, inevitably, the two jolly fellows arm-in-arm with the polar bear are in Wehrmacht uniforms. One has a cigarette, another a sword – they are clearly officer class. Perhaps posing with the Arctic bear was a joke before they headed off to the Eastern Front. If so, the smiles would soon be frozen off their faces. Who knows what became of these soldiers. Who knows, too, what became of the aristocratic couple sitting on a rock in the forest with a bear. The bear cosies up to the woman, leaving the bespectacled man looking isolated and uneasy.
Donat has an eye for the surreal. His other curious collections include a gathering of pictures of people in blackface, unselfconsciously showing off their racist masquerade. Yet the polar bear pictures are more truly mysterious, as well as funny. Their genuine unearthliness is a reminder that the modern world and its photographs throw up wonders.
“These photographs were found during 20 years of research, all over Germany, in shops that sell old photos, or in markets,” explains the collector. “They date from 1920 to 1960. All these individual moments add up to the story of Germany over 60 years.”
The surrealists in 1920s Paris pioneered the art of wandering flea markets and junk shops, finding objects that “haunted” them, which they exhibited or photographed as miraculous art objects. These German bears prove it is still possible to dig up the modern marvellous in an antique shop or secondhand book stall.
Here are the Germans at play, on holiday, at the beach. Donat calls the collection TeddyBär. The teddy bear is partly a German invention. But the man in the polar bear costume is both cutely tame and potentially savage. The bear is a wild man of the woods. The teddy has claws. The ice beckons.
• The Teddybär series of photographs, on exhibition at Les Rencontres de la Photographie at Arles 2015, is the subject of a limited-edition book published at Innocences.net.
