Discovering Lisel Haas in the Birmingham Archives

Tuesday 30 September 2025

Franziska Eggers

Going into the archives every week has been an exciting experience – the journey to the fourth floor of Birmingham’s Central Library, knowing that a new box of photographs and documents holding Haas’s life was waiting for me, felt a little like Christmas day. This work was mostly solitary, but occasionally I got to explore boxes with others, and we would share our knowledge, piecing together strands spread through the collection.

The archive was given to the city by Haas’s niece, and consists of personal and professional photographs and correspondence. It is relatively untouched and some boxes bear more traces of an archivist than others – some were sorted alphabetically or contained detailed translations and numbered filing, whereas others had inaccurate descriptions which barely encompassed their contents.

Lisel Haas, born 1898, was a Birmingham-based Jewish émigré photographer, specialising in theatre and portrait photography. She arrived in Birmingham in December 1938 and started working not long after, taking on the role of official Photographer for The Alexandra theatre in 1940.¹ Prior to moving to the UK she had an established studio in her birthplace Mönchengladbach, which she left shortly after having to label her studio as a Jewish business, and the violent events of Kristallnacht. While information about her life before Birmingham is minimal, the archive contains an impressive collection of her photojournalism in Germany which highlights how prominent she was. 

Unfortunately, there are only a few written documents alongside the many photographs and newspaper clippings from Haas’ time in Germany. All we know about her journey to Birmingham is that her brother Erich Haas, a Psychiatrist who had emigrated and began requalifying as a doctor in 1933 on the advice of a fellow English Psychiatrist, helped to arrange Haas and her father’s emigration.²

Once in Birmingham, Haas lived at 12 Grove Avenue with her father, before moving down the road with her partner Grete Bermbach from Mönchengladbach to 4 Grove Avenue. From the summer of 1940 when Haas started working for the Alexandra theatre, she grew her reputation in theatre photography not only in Birmingham and its surrounding areas but also in London and other UK cities. She worked mainly for The Alexandra, The Repertory Theatre and The Crescent theatre as evidenced by the pictures and show programmes in the archive. From the early to mid 1950’s she moved towards portrait photography of actors and local people from central and South Birmingham, near Moseley, where she lived. Her gradual retirement from theatre photography is evidenced not only by the portraits held in the archive but her resignation letter to the Crescent Theatre in which she resigned as official photographer due to a disagreement with the regime of new directors in 1965. 

Haas’s career in Birmingham was incredible. She had a wide-reaching reputation, and career, from which she properly retired in the early 1980s (although she was still sending out letters about copyright three years before her death). Her career was longer and just as, if not more impressive than her early career in Germany. Haas showed incredible resilience throughout her life, arriving aged 41 in Birmingham having left behind the network of an already impressive career, and managed to make a name for herself in a new country. This is shown by the news corporations’, publishers’ and broadcasters’ continual demands for her photographs, the famous actors she photographed, and importantly the quantity of thank you letters she received from customers. 

From very early on in Birmingham, Haas had a home photography studio as shown by her correspondence with the City of Birmingham Electrical Supply Department about needing separate home electricity in her studio for her dark room and her many follow up letters insisting that they fix the electricity as soon as possible as her livelihood depended on it. Haas’ emigre identity, while not unusual for Birmingham, is complex and interesting as it both helped and disadvantaged her. On the one hand, she found it uncomfortable to give lectures about her profession in England as she states in a letter to Mr Genaw of the Kings Norton Photographic society ‘To be quite honest about it: Despite my twenty years in England I still find English idiom somehow elusive and lecturing almost embarrassing.’ On the other hand, I feel that moving to Birmingham gave her a new lease of strength and creativity, as she stood up for herself and her art, constantly struggling against large news corporations to be paid for her work published in paper and on screen, as well as standing up for her work and taking charge of her subjects. For example she wrote back to a request from the CBSO in 1958 that a photograph of the whole orchestra would be out of her range, whereas she would love to take individual photographs of the orchestra playing free of charge because of the ‘vivid artistic results’ she could achieve through this.³ Furthermore she pursued creative projects outside of photography; there are a whole string of letters to Anne Sisson and editors from 1959 as she was very interested in translating Death Came to Supper into German. I find that her independence and strength are perfectly illustrated by her self portraits. She poses confidently, dressed in bold, eye-catching patterns with chunky jewellery, statement glasses and a kind, self-assured expression.

After this process, I still wonder about the ‘real’ Lisel Haas and who she was outside of the archive. There is so much more I wish I could still discover; her 40 years of life before England, her artistic training, her travels and her family life, all of which have left traces in the archive but might remain a mystery. Nevertheless, the time spent with her documents and photographs has left me with the impression of an independent, creative woman, and I encourage anyone with time to go visit her archive themselves.

1. Günter Erckens Juden in Mönchengladbach Band 2 (Peter & Walter Pies,1989).

2. Obituary. (1991). British Medical Journal, 302(6768), pp.108–109. doi:https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.302.6768.108.

3. City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra