Publisher's Synopsis
People on trial - in the days of the Weimar Republic this was a fruitful topic for pressmen. At the end of the decade they increasingly involved high-ranking Nazis, spectacular murder cases or art forgeries with prominent figures on the witness stand, not to mention increasing instances of petty theft as the result of unemployment and inflation. And the general public lapped it all up. Leo Rosenthal (1884-1969) was a legal expert, initially worked as a court reporter for left-wing Berlin newspapers and then took up a camera and produced highly atmospheric pictures of the trials of his times. He has yet to be discovered as a chronicler of the Weimar Republic, a collegue of Erich Salomon. Unlike Salomon, he escaped the Holocaust, emigrated to the United States and began a second career as a photographer at the United Nations in New York. The Berlin State Image Archive, which acquired his Weimar works in 1968, is presenting Leo Rosenthal's court photographs for the first time in a lavishly illustrated publication.
