Unser Hamburg

At the beginning of this book was a series that appeared in the Hamburger Morgenpost in 2012. The editorial team regularly published historical images from the Morgenpost's press archive and invited readers to submit photographs of life in Hamburg from earlier times. The response to the series was overwhelming. Thousands of photos, showing the everyday lives of Hamburg residents in the 20th century from a personal perspective, were sent in by readers: family and private moments, images of work, leisure, and pleasure, of war and the changing cityscape, of transportation and technology, as well as the Elbe and the port as the lifelines of the city. Many large-format images in this book tell their stories on their own, while others are complemented by informative texts based on the memories of eyewitnesses. By drawing on the Hamburger Morgenpost's archive of over a million images, "Unser Hamburg" offers a representative visual memory of the city and simultaneously preserves a personally remembered Hamburg that exists only in private archives, family albums, and the fading memories of contemporaries.