Different People, Different Typewriters

Given this is an English language blog, the vast majority of images on it of journalists, writers, entertainment people and politicians using typewriters are bound to show machines made by the leading American brands: Corona, Remington, Royal and Underwood. Which means, of course, that typewriters from the world’s next largest producer, Germany, and other countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain and Brazil, tend to be neglected. Here’s a small effort to redress that imbalance, a few photos showing people using machines other than US typewriters.

Alpina

An unnamed lady in an office (perhaps a promotional picture for the brand).

Erich Helmensdorfer (1920-2017), a German journalist and television presenter in his Munich office.

French-born actress Isabelle Huppert (1953-) in the 1991 movie Malina with German actor  Mathieu Carrière (1950-).

Orga-Privat

Hans Fallada’s letter to publishing house Rowohlt-Verlag Berlin. Fallada (1893-1947, born Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen) was a German writer.  The typewriter was photographed in his former house in Carwitzetzt.

Triumph

A woman at a typewriter in 1941.

Secretary Liselotte Schmidt, in 1954.

Esther Margareta Vilar (1935-, born Esther Margareta Katzen) is an Argentine-born German writer. Photo taken in 1972.

Lonny Kellner (1930-2003) was a German singer and actress and the wife of comedian, radio and television personality Peter Frankenfeld.

Siemag

Alfons Bauer (1920-1997 ) was a German composer and zither player. This photo was taken in Hamburg in 1955.

Gossen Tippa

Hugo Andreas Hartung (1902-1972) was a German writer, radio play author and occasional screenwriter. Seen here in 1962.

Adler Tippa S

Isla Werner (1921-2005) was a German actress. Photo taken in 1991.

Adler

Liselotte (“Lilo”) Pulver (1929-) was a Swiss actress who played James Cagney's attractive secretary “Fräulein Ingeborg” in Billy Wilder's comedy One, Two, Three (1961).

Erika Model 14

Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013) was a German poet. She was born Ingrid Bernstein in Limlingerode, Prussian Saxony. Photo taken in 1972.

Silver-Seiko

Curd Jürgens (1915-1982, born Curd Gustav Andreas Gottlieb Franz Jürgens) was a German-Austrian stage and film actor. He was usually billed in English-speaking films as Curt Jurgens. Photo taken in 1976.

Horst Janson (1935-), a German actor, seen here with his daughter Sarah-Jane in Grafing, Munich, in 2006.

Olivetti Dora

German actors Horst Werner Buchholz (above, 1933-2003) and Hardy Krüger (below, 1928-, born Franz Eberhard August Krüger). Buchholz in Munich, Krüger in Los Angeles.

Olivetti Lettera 35

Maria Ilva Biolcati (1939-) is an Italian singer, stage and film actress, and television personality. Photo taken in 1985.

Princess

Klaus Huebner (1924-) is a former German politician and police officer. Photo taken in 1987.

Olivetti Valentine

Alexander May (1927-2008) was an actor and writer as well as a director, editor, producer and poet.

Olympia SG1

French singer Johnny Grey.

Olympia Monica de Luxe

and Olympia International

Helmut Rellergerd (1945-) is a German author. Under the pseudonym “Jason Dark” he brought the character of ghost hunter John Sinclair into being. First image taken in Bergisch Gladbach in 1997.

Rheinmetall

John von Düffel (1966-) is a German dramaturge and writer. Pictured in the Thalia Theatre, Hamburg

Hermes Baby

Aldona Gustas (1932-) is a Lithuanian-born German poet and illustrator.

Continental

Arno Hellmis (1901-1940) was a German sports reporter during the Nazi era.

Brother

Ottfried ‘Otti’ Fischer (1953-) in the TV film The Bestseller. With him is his co-star, Nina Proll (1974-), an Austrian actress.

Olivetti Praxis 48

Singer and actor Roy Black (1943-1991, born Gerhard Höllerich) with his brother Walter Höllerich in Munich in 1977.

Adler Gabriele 12

Manfred Krug (1937-2016) was a German actor, singer and author. Photographed in 1980 in Berlin.

Olympia

Alfred Weidenmann (1916-2000) was a German film director, screenwriter and author of children's books.

"His Typewriter's Covered and Silent ..." Zach Brogan and the Poetry of Berton Braley

Berton Braley

In early May 1914, a veteran Irish-born reporter, Zachariah Brogan, died a miserable, lonely death beside the Northern Pacific railway line three miles east of Columbus, Montana. When his body was found by a section crew late in the evening of June 1, it was badly decomposed and partly eaten by birds. Brogan had put down a sachel of clothes and note books, rolled up his overcoat, laid his head on it, and died in his sleep. He would have turned 71 on July 12. Word of his death reached his family in Leavenworth, Kansas, on June 4. His son initially believed Zach Brogan had been killed in a railway accident, while on his way from Butte, Montana, to Tacoma, Washington. A printer by trade, he had been working as a newspaper reporter in Butte, but in Leavenworth he was remembered as a world-class checkers player.

Is the journalists' traditional sign-off “30” – also the number of pieces in some versions of the game, or the number of minutes in some matches - an added clue to Brogan’s checkers fixation in Berton Braley’s 1915 poem “The Dead Reporter”. Braley had also worked in Butte as a reporter, and may well have gotten to know Brogan. Brogan certainly seems the sort of colourful character who would have interested Braley.

I came across Braley’s “The Dead Reporter” - published in his collection Songs of the Workaday World - after being alerted by an ex-Irish Press colleague to an updated, PC-ed version of another of Braley’s poems, “Type Was Made To Read”. Braley wrote this for the March 1915 edition of the Linotype Bulletin. As the subject matter is close to my heart, I couldn’t resist adding a fifth stanza to the verse, one referring to the type produced by typewriters. After all, Braley did come from near the home of the typewriter.

Braley was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on January 29, 1882. He was published for the first time at age 11, a fairytale called “Why The Grass Is Green” in The American Youth. In 1905 he graduated from the University of Wisconsin and began work as a reporter at The Butte Daily Inter-Mountain (predecessor of the Butte Daily Post). The next year Braley switched to The Butte Evening News and later worked for the Daily Gazette. In 1909 he moved to New York and worked for Life magazine and the New York Evening Mail. He was at one time an associate editor of Puck magazine and sold poems to the Saturday Evening Post. Braley joined the Newspaper Enterprise Association in 1911 and the next year started writing for McGraw-Hill magazines and for United Press. From 1915-16 Braley was a special correspondent in northern Europe for Collier's and from 1918-1919 as a special correspondent in England, France and Germany. In 1922 he travelled through the Orient and in 1927 was a correspondent in London. He died of cancer in St Petersburg, Pinellas County, Florida, on January 23, 1966, aged 83.

Vale Neil Sheehan (1936-2021)

 

UPI's Saigon bureau chief Neil Sheehan photographed at his typewriter in May 1963.

Neil Sheehan, who died at his home in Washington DC on Thursday, was the New York Times journalist who in 1971 obtained the classified Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg for a series of articles which revealed a secret United States Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War. Sheehan, who was 84, had suffered from complications of Parkinson's disease. See "Now It Can Be Told" (NYT) here.

Cornelius Mahoney Sheehan was born to Irish parents in Holyoke, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1936. He graduated from Mount Hermon School (later Northfield Mount Hermon) and from Harvard University with a BA in history (cum laude) in 1958. Sheehan served in the US Army from 1959-62 and was assigned to Korea and then transferred to Tokyo. In Japan he began moonlighting in the Tokyo bureau of United Press International (UPI). Following his discharge, Sheehan spent two years covering the war in Vietnam as UPI's Saigon bureau chief. In 1964 he joined The New York Times and worked the city desk before returning to the Far East, first to Indonesia and then to spend another year in Vietnam. In 1966, he became the Pentagon correspondent and two years later began reporting on the White House as a correspondent on political, diplomatic and military affairs.

Sheehan's 1986 book A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam was nominated for the Pulitzer Prizes in Biography and History and received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It also won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In 1990, Sheehan received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Henry Koerner and Typewriters

Austrian-born American painter and graphic designer Henry Koerner produced two notable works featuring typewriters – his famous “Figure at a Typewriter” in 1950 and a TIME magazine cover of novelist John Cleever in 1964.

Annabel Patterson’s profile of the artist, Real Portraits: TIME Covers by Henry Koerner, published for an exhibition at the Henry Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty at Yale University in 2015, said, “Two moving portraits of his parents (1945 and 1946) and one of his brother (c 1957), in three completely different styles, not only expressed his melancholy and survivor’s guilt but also his commitment to realism, in however many different manifestations. Even his most George Grosz-like representations of humans carry this creed forward, and it was exquisitely expressed in the 1950 portrait “Figure at a Typewriter”, a portrait of a journalism student who worked with Koerner in his studio in this period. The typewriter and the garden setting, however, are an early statement of the relationship between a person and his or her investment in the world - the trademark, so to speak. Much later, a typewriter would reappear in his TIME portrait of the novelist John Cheever.”

C. C. Little, managing director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, presents Koerner with his poster prize.

Koerner was born Heinrich Sieghart Körner  in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna on August 28, 1915. He was trained in graphic design at Vienna's Graphische Lehr und Versuchsanstalt (1934-36) and worked in the studio of Viktor Theodor Slama, designing posters and book jackets. Following Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938, he fled via Milan and Venice to the United States, settling in New York. He was employed as a commercial artist in the Maxwell Bauer Studios in Manhattan and achieved initial success as a poster artist, receiving first prize from the American Society for the Control of Cancer poster competition and two first prizes from the national war poster competition.

In 1943, the Office of War Information hired Koerner in its Graphics Division in New York. He was drafted into the US Army and joined the Graphics Division of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington DC. It was there that he made war posters which included "Someone Talked", which won an award from the Museum of Modern Art. After VE Day Koerner was reassigned to Germany, working in Wiesbaden and Berlin, and sketching defendants at the Nuremberg trials.

My Parents I

My Parents II, From LIFE magazine, May 10, 1948

Vanity Fair (Mirror of Life)

After being discharged from the army in 1946, Koerner returned to Vienna to discover that his parents and older brother Kurt had been deported and killed. In Berlin, having joined the Graphics Division of the US Military Government, he painted his first major works, including My Parents II and Vanity Fair (Mirror of Life). These paintings were exhibited in 1947, to international acclaim, in a one-person show at Berlin's Haus am Waldsee - the first exhibition of American modern art in post-war Germany.

At college in Pittsburgh

From 1952-53, Koerner was Artist-in-Residence at Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in Pittsburgh. He painted more than 50 portrait covers for TIME between 1955-67. Koerner died on July 4, 1991, in St Pölten, Austria, following complications from a hit-and-run accident on his bicycle in the Wachau in Austria.