One morning, my phone alerted me to a new message from my brother Michael. The picture was a portrait of my grandfather, Wilhelm Werner Fuchs, and his older brother, Herbert Heinrich Fuchs, 2 and 4 years old respectively, shot in Karlsruhe, Germany in November of 1905 at Hirsch Brothers Photographic Studio on Königstrasse.
The two lads stand holding hands, dressed in the fashions of the day, Herbert in his sailor suit and Willy in his plaid gabardine turtleneck coat, cinched at the waist so that it appears more like a tiny dress. He looks like Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince.
Herbert, taking up the left side of the frame, has his free hand on his hip, and is looking out past the camera, with a quasi-debonaire expression on his handsome face, his thick, dark hair combed back in flowing, clumpy waves. He is meant to be gazing bravely towards the future, a little sailor, ready for anything. There is, however, the slightest hint of a four-year-old’s fear, somewhere in the set of his jaw, perhaps, that reminds one of that familiar feeling of being posed — handled by an unseen stranger.
In the end, he manages an excellent, mannish approximation of an expression adults might describe as “confident” or “serene.” (Quite opposite of how I imagine young Herbert must really have felt.)
His wee brother Wilhelm, who will come to be known as “Bill” in later life, stares directly into camera. His hair is lighter than his brother’s, and much curlier, his free hand hangs limply. His facial expression fascinates me. Because I knew him as our patriarch, I see great intelligence in his eyes, of course. Despite the faded monochrome of the photo, the blue of Wilhelm’s eyes, as well as that of his elder brother’s, is evident. More than anything, however, my grandfather has what I can only describe as a keenly “open” expression on his young face. Same for Herbert. They are two tiny time travelers, preparing to set forth on an incredible journey. They have absolutely no way of knowing the magnitude of what lies ahead of them.
“Shau dir jetzt den Vöglein an,” (“Look at the birdie now,”) Photographer Hirsch may have said. “Beweg dich nicht.” (“Don’t move.”)
They could not have known, for example, that in less than a decade Germany would declare war on Russia, thus entering “The Great War.” Nor had they any way of predicting the subsequent rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, followed by the devastation and genocide perpetrated by the Third Reich.
These two sweet-faced boys certainly had no idea what history would do to their family, how it would send them like embers on the breeze to every corner of the globe.
And there would not have been even an inkling that some as-yet-nonexistent technology would allow their grandchildren — now middle-aged and older, some with grandchildren of their own — to share their moment of awkward stillness, this image of these two innocent, hand-holding brothers, across both time and space. Die kleine Zeitreisenden
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