There's always a lot of speculation when I post these old photos. I've speculated that the owner of this album was from Pforzheim, Germany because the first two photos in the album, in a place of prominence, were from Pforzheim photographers, and because the only commercially produced postcard is of a Pforzheim landmark.
But, there are a lot of towns associated with the images in the collection, two new ones in this post. There's a photographers stamp on the back of the top photo. "Photographie, G. Lampe, Baden-Baden, Ludwig Wilhelm, PL. 5" Yet another town in Baden-Wurttemberg. For those who can't make out the embossed credit on the bottom card, "Eder & Sohn, Kempten i. Allg" Kempten is in the Allgau region of southwest Bavaria, near the Baden-Wurttemburg border. It's also the oldest urban settlement in Germany, known to have been inhabited as early as 50 B.C.
Of course, there's a lot more to wonder about than where the owner of this album actually lived. I don't know about anyone else, but every time I see photos from Germany taken in the years before World War 2, I wonder what the people in those photos believed. Going on the assumption that all the photos in the album were taken in the late twenties, the little boy in the baby carriage, almost certainly, became a member of the Hitler Youth. But was he a loyal follower of the Fuhrer, or did he go along to get along? The small boy in the lower photo would have been the right age to fight in the war. Was he army, navy, a flier, the S.S.? Did he survive? And if he survived, did he go back to an ordinary life, or was he tried as a war criminal?
I'm not going to try and translate the handwriting on the back of the top postcard, but the name Huck makes another appearance. This time Josef. Baby or father? Perhaps a native German speaker can let us know.
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