René Burri’s Germans (Die Deutschen) examines Germany through photographs made between 1957 and 1997. Its long chronology begins in the unsettled postwar period and extends beyond the decades of division, giving the book a scope larger than a single reportage assignment. Burri, a Swiss photographer able to work in both East and West Germany, approached the country from a position at once proximate and external.
The project first appeared as a volume in 1962. This 1999 Schirmer/Mosel publication is its third, expanded edition, recasting that earlier work within a forty-year span. The extension matters: photographs associated with a divided nation are placed in dialogue with later images, so that political boundaries, public behavior and everyday settings can be read across time rather than as fixed signs of one historical moment.
Burri’s subject is not an abstract national type but the visible life through which a society presents itself—people in streets and rooms, civic occasions, gestures, clothing and the organization of shared space. The title’s broad claim is therefore tested against specific encounters. Poems by Hans Magnus Enzensberger add another register to the photographic sequence, introducing a literary voice without reducing the pictures to illustrations.
For collectors, the importance of this edition lies in the expanded historical structure of a project central to Burri’s engagement with postwar Germany. At 124 pages, it brings the early conception and its later enlargement into one publication, allowing close attention to continuity, rupture and editorial reconsideration. It deserves notice not for claims of scarcity, but as a mature version of a sustained photographic inquiry: one photographer, one country and four decades in which the meaning of “the Germans” could not remain stable.
