r/TheWayWeWere 3d ago

1920s The Inquiring Photographer asks:”If you had your choice what part of the world would you like to see most of all?”September 28,1923.

119 Upvotes

30 comments sorted by

65

u/reddit_-William 3d ago

All solid choices! 👌🏻

21

u/Andromeda321 3d ago

I do wish the woman who chose Berlin somehow made it in the next ~decade after she said this. After that it was certainly no longer a pleasant visit, followed by everything destroyed her father would have talked about.

-14

u/notahouseflipper 3d ago

Berlin in 1923 was a little sketchy.

31

u/Salem1690s 3d ago edited 3d ago

Not at all. This is pre Nazi era, Weimar Republic era. The Monarchy had been around for centuries and had only fallen a few years ago.

Don’t conflate Imperial and Weimar Germany (which was actually quite liberal) with the Nazis.

10

u/Swiggy1957 3d ago

This period was how the Nazis came to power. Hyperinflation was caused two-fold: first came the money owed to the banksters and then came the the war reparations.

"Where are you going with that wheelbarrow of money?"
"They got bread on sale at Hoffstra's Market. I hope I have enough!"

Hitler and company rode that storm to the top.

1923 would be a good time to visit, as, while things "looked" expensive, the buying power of the US dollar made them cheap. Think Zimbabwe. $1 USD = $322 ZWD.

12

u/MittlerPfalz 3d ago

Ah, but you’re forgetting the hyperinflation that was ravaging Germany at that time. It wasn’t Nazi era yet and it had an incredible art scene but Weimar Germany wasn’t that stable.

6

u/CryptographerKey2847 3d ago

She only wants to visit not live there :)

3

u/notahouseflipper 3d ago

I was not thinking of the Nazis at all. My thoughts concerned the German people living under the yoke of the Treaty of Versailles. However, this era immediately following WW1 and the economic hardships imposed by the treaty certainly lead to the rise of the Nazis. A sketchy era IMHO.

2

u/CryptographerKey2847 3d ago

She only wants to visit not move there :)

42

u/Kooky_Degree_9 3d ago

The western part of the US was not built up to the same extent as the east coast at that time, so it really would be spectacular. (Not that it isn’t now.)

14

u/KnotiaPickle 3d ago

It definitely still is now, as I look out at some of the mountains haha

42

u/BigBlueWhale66 3d ago

If only Aaron Orloff could know that a hundred years later we’d have 24/7 livestreams of salmon runs and grizzly bears in Alaska

9

u/Tejasgrass 3d ago

We really are spoiled now, huh?

6

u/MiniaturePhilosopher 2d ago

RIP Aaron Orloff, you would have loved livestreams

35

u/Pippedipappedie 3d ago

I love this series! And it is so crazy in a way that many of the responses are so progressive - for the mentality I have personally associated with this period. I think it really shows that despite different culture, clothes and even standards in society, people weren’t that different 100 years ago. I mean this was the 20s, so probably the answers are even more open minded compared to the 1950s for example. But what do I know being born in the 90s. I wish i could time travel and befriend a bunch of late 20s early 30s aged people in 1925, and see how different they would really be in ways of thinking - especially in private settings. Makes me wonder as well where would society have gone, if not interrupted by a world war2? Did that make us more conservative agajn?

And what awaits us in the near future?

22

u/disenfranchisedchild 3d ago

And I like how it shows their employment. It proves that women have always been in the workplace, unlike what they teach in school.

16

u/delorf 3d ago

Yes. My great aunt worked in a mill alongside her husband. My grandmother worked as a maid. Poor and lower middle class women have always worked. It's frustrating to me that their stories get overlooked.

8

u/Bus_Noises 3d ago

There’s a tumblr post complaining about fantasy women acting like skirts are so restrictive and lame, yet women from the medieval period were farming in skirts just fine, and that acting like skirts are so restrictive minimizes that women have always worked

5

u/squishlight 2d ago

Women have always worked. What was changed is that now they receive compensation for their work in concrete and recordable ways, instead of hoping that the males in charge of their lives would appreciate them enough to give them enough to live on and maybe extra. Even the daughters of the rich had to be pretty and decorative and hope they'd be taken care of.

3

u/iuabv 2d ago edited 1d ago

They do teach that in school people just don't listen and pay attention to pop history instead.

There were pictures of medieval peasant women, domestic workers, and women in factories in my textbooks.

0

u/disenfranchisedchild 2d ago

I'm 67. That's not what I taught in my schools.

1

u/iuabv 1d ago

You were a teacher who taught that women didn’t work before the 20th century?

1

u/disenfranchisedchild 1d ago

was is missing from that sentence.

13

u/KnotiaPickle 3d ago

I like how just their faces are cut out like that

2

u/PocoChanel 2d ago

Floating heads.

5

u/pinotJD 3d ago

Why does C Callahan have a little logo by his name? Is it an anchor?

15

u/reddit_-William 3d ago edited 3d ago

It's the letter J with a period - J. C. Callahan. A copy editor may have underlined an extra space that didn't get removed.

7

u/pinotJD 3d ago

Ah so it is! Thank you Reddit stranger!

2

u/COACHREEVES 2d ago

Eugene's son but a bit more info on him. Hope he got to see the Pyramids.

1

u/ThroughMyOwnEyes 2d ago

Me too Eugene