In Anne Schönharting’s family, one room of a semidetached house in Diera, near Meissen, carried an unusual name: the “Africa Room.” It housed a collection assembled by her great-grandfather Willy Klare, who from 1907 to 1914 managed a cocoa plantation in what is now Equatorial Guinea for a Liverpool trading firm. The objects he brought back—weapons, everyday utensils, animal preparations, jewelry—joined hundreds of photographs, letters, and postcards. Four generations kept this inheritance, rearranging it within domestic space and adding their own travel souvenirs along the way. During the GDR years the room signified distance and mobility, a private window onto a wider world; its colonial origins went largely unexamined.
The Legacy, published by Hartmann Books in 2020, is Schönharting’s first book and the outcome of her confrontation with that inheritance after her parents’ death. She does not claim to resolve it. Her own photographs are set alongside reproductions of the inherited objects and historical images, producing an associative rather than documentary sequence—one that moves between family history, German and European colonial history, and the photographer’s sense of private and social responsibility. The book includes texts by Albert Gouaffo, Willy Klare, Johannes Odenthal, Hans Paasche, and Schönharting herself, and was designed by Kollektiv Scrollan in Berlin; Natascha Roshani and Oliver Gehrs edited it for Dummy Magazin. German and English throughout, it runs to 154 pages with 94 illustrations.
Among the aspects that reward close attention are the book’s physical construction and its handling of the archive. The hardcover carries foil stamping, foldouts, and an enclosed postcard—features that structure reading rather than merely decorate it, allowing the inherited material to surface at intervals and in fragments. The interplay between Schönharting’s contemporary pictures and the historical matter refuses the neat argument that a conventional documentary treatment might impose.
For collectors, the book earned the German Photobook Award in 2023, the Gold Medal, recognition that speaks to its considered integration of photographs, archival reproduction, and design. It also accompanied CONTINENT – In Search of Europe, an OSTKREUZ exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin from October 2020 to April 2021. Schönharting, born in 1973 and a member of OSTKREUZ since 1999, has served as the agency’s co-managing director since 2019. These are the documented circumstances; the work itself, in its sequence and its restraint, is the enduring reason to seek it out.
