And so, for me, it’s a picture about knowing and not knowing. You know you’re on your way to a dance, but don’t know you’re on your way to a war. The picture is a reminder that you never know what will happen to you, to your friends, to your nation. Philip Roth called history “the relentless unforeseen.” He said that history is where “everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable.” In the faces of these young farmers, we glimpse how profoundly unexpected the coming horror was. And that reminds us there is also a horizon we cannot see past.
* * *
I have a picture from January of 2020, taken inside a house. I stand arm in arm with four friends. Below us, our kids—eight of them—are tangled in a joyful pile, their shared hug having collapsed into a scrum the moment before the picture was taken. Nobody is wearing a mask. In January of 2020, the picture made me laugh. By July, not so much. “History is merely a list of surprises,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote. “It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”
So that’s how I always read the picture—the farmers are symbols of a precarious historical moment. They are reminders that I, too, would in time be surprised by history, and that a picture, though static, keeps changing as its viewers change. As Ana?s Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
* * *
Young Farmers is not only a work of art; it is also a historical document, depicting actual people. The boy on the left is Otto Krieger, born in 1894. He knew August Sander, because Sander had photographed Otto and his family three years earlier. The boy in the middle, August Klein, had also been previously photographed by Sander, but the negatives of those pictures, along with thirty thousand other Sander negatives, were destroyed during World War II.
There is, however, one photograph of Otto Krieger and August Klein from before Young Farmers.
In this 1913 photograph, Otto （bottom row, third from left） holds crossed drumsticks, while August （bottom row, far left） holds what seems to be the same cane that appears in the Young Farmers picture. According to the journalist Reinhard Pabst, a fellow Young Farmers obsessive who found and preserved this photograph, the picture may have been taken during a “Flower Day” celebration in the spring of 1913, about a year before Sander’s famous picture.
As Sander probably knew, Otto Krieger and August Klein were not farmers. They both worked in an iron ore mine. The boy on the right of the Young Farmers photograph, August’s cousin Ewald Klein, worked in the iron mine’s office. His godson would later say that Ewald preferred office work because he didn’t like getting his hands dirty.
And so the young farmers were, in fact, two young miners and an office worker, which is to say that they were participants in the industrial economy. The iron from the mine where they worked would go toward building weapons in the coming war.
Sander himself had worked in an iron ore mine beginning when he was thirteen, so he may have felt some affinity toward these boys. The photographer Maggie Steber once noted, “Respect is the most important thing you put into your camera,” and Sander’s respect for these three subjects is evident in the picture. Ewald later said, “We all knew him back then, because he had taken photos all over the area, and he always came into the pub.”
Indeed, it was Sander’s respect for his subjects that would eventually earn the ire of the Nazi regime. Sander photographed Jewish and Roma people （one section of People of the 20th Century is devoted to “the persecuted”）， and in 1934, Nazi authorities destroyed the printing blocks for a collection of Sander’s photography and burned all available copies of the book. The following year, Sander’s son, Erich, was imprisoned for being a communist. He died in prison a decade later, just months before the Second World War ended.
But we haven’t even gotten to the First World War yet. It is the summer of 1914. Erich Sander is fifteen years old.
The three young farmers who weren’t farmers lived in Dünebusch, a village of around a hundred and fifty people in the Westerwald mountains in western Germany. Back then, the village wasn’t accessible by car. To visit, Sander drove to the end of the road, and then walked his camera equipment up the mountain for miles.
Otto, August, and Ewald really were on their way to a dance, which was in a little town about a forty-five-minute walk away. Sander probably knew their route in advance and was already set up when they arrived. They paused in front of the camera, turned their heads over their shoulders, and held still.
Otto, hat cocked, cigarette in his lips, looked like the kind of trouble you wouldn’t mind getting into. August seems handsome and confident and a little bit sleepy-eyed. And then there’s Ewald, who with his tight lips and ramrod straight cane looks nervous to me.
It’s silly to make broad conclusions about human beings from a single frame. Sander himself noted of his subjects, “I freeze one moment in his movement, a mere five hundredths of a second of that person’s lifetime. That’s a very meager or small extract from a life.”
Still, I can’t help but imagine the moments before and after. I wonder what they talked about as they walked. I wonder if they had a good time, how late they stayed out, who they danced with. We know it was Saturday, summertime. We know they were out of the mine, in the light. And we know that it must’ve been one of the last dances they attended together, because the war was only weeks away.
Soon, all three boys were called to serve in the German armed forces. Otto and August were placed in the same regiment and sent to Belgium to fight. In January of 1915, only a few months after the Young Farmers photo, August Klein sent home this picture from snowy Belgium: Klein stands fifth from right; Krieger kneels beneath him.
The boys look different now. The future, which had been just over the horizon, has come into view. But even then, August and Otto could not know. They couldn’t know that August Klein would be killed in the war that March at the age of twenty-two. Otto was wounded three times—including a serious injury in May 1918—but he survived the war. Ewald was also wounded, but he eventually made it back to Dünebusch, where he lived into old age.
Alice Walker once wrote, “All history is current,” and I think that’s true in so many ways. History presses into us, shaping contemporary experience. History changes as we look back on the past from different presents. And history is electric current, too—charged and flowing. It takes power from some sources and delivers it to others. Sander once said he believed photography could help “hold fast the history of the world,” but there is no holding history fast. It is always receding and dissolving, not just into the unknowable past but also into the unfixable future.
* * *
I cannot remember precisely how that picture of kids tangled together felt before a global pandemic rendered it so strangely voltaic. And I cannot imagine how it will look to my future selves. All I can see is that picture, changing as time flees away from it.
August Klein was twenty-two years old when he died. He had around a year to live when he posed for that famous photograph. Anything might’ve happened, but one thing did.
I give Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance four and a half stars.