The Potsdamer Bridge seen by Willy Pragher in 1928

Potsdamer Brücke 1928

This beautiful photo, taken by Willy Pragher, shows the bridge at the junction of the Potsdamer Strasse and the Landwehrkanal, in December 1928.

The red circle shows the position of the bridge, south of the Tiergarten

The German photographer and photo journalist Willy Pragher (1908-1992) was the son of a chemical engineer from Bucharest and a German mother. He attended schools in Berlin and Stuttgart.

In 1924 he started taking photographs, in 1928 he began an apprenticeship at the Ullstein publishing house in Berlin. From 1930 to 1932 he completed training in commercial graphics and decoration at Berlin’s Reimann School, the largest private art and craft school in Germany. There he was even trained in photography from 1931.

From 1932 he worked as a freelance press photographer for, among others, the Ullstein publishing house, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and the Badische Zeitung, built up his own picture service and undertook numerous trips. From 1939 to 1945 he worked as an advertising photographer for an oil company in Romania, in 1944 he was drafted into the Volkssturm in Bucharest. From 1945 to 1949 he was a prisoner of war in Siberia. Then he returned to Germany where he resumed his work and where he lived until his death.