Early Life & Apprenticeship
Karl August Reinhold Thiele was born on 29th January 1856, in Hameln, Kingdom of Hanover to parents Heinrich Georg Thiele and Dorothea Henriette Amalia von Wachsmuth.
He came from an educated, upper-middle class family, perhaps best described as members of the ‘bildungsbürgertum’ class. His father, Heinrich, was a political activist and wealthy merchant, a purveyor of “fancy goods”, in the milliner trade. His mother, Dorothea, came from an old and distinguished Hanoverian family with strong links to hereditary forestry work and the military. Within living memory, her family had held noble titles, with the estates and lordship of Brocklosenborstel and Mackelfeld, near Hamburg.
Reinhold’s passion for art began as a child and was encouraged by his family who enrolled him in the local gymnasium, where he learnt to read and write in Latin and became fluent in German, French, and English. A family friend, the heraldist Friedrich Warnecke (1837-1894), later commented that he believed Reinhold inherited his passion for art from his maternal grandfather, Karl Wilhelm Emil Wauchsmuth (1795-1845), a Lutheran pastor with a keen interest in art and author of several books.
Warnecke goes on to describe how even whilst a student, Reinhold’s talent for art drew the attention of prestigious local families who would commission him. This including the von Münchhausen family, perhaps best known for their famous ancestor, Hieronymus von Münchhausen, whose antics inspired the fictional character of Baron Munchausen.
This patronage is made perhaps more interesting by the fact that Reinhold’s great-great grandmother had famously shot and killed a relative of the Münchhausen family at a party. This scandal would have been etched in memory, especially as the deceased, Count Frederich von der Schulenburg, was famously the grandnephew of the Duchess of Kendal, King George I of Great Britain’s famous mistress.
The world that Reinhold was born into was one on the cusp of change. The Kingdom of Hanover was a relatively new entity, having been born out of the earlier Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg, coming into being in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna in 1814, and only ending its personal union with the United Kingdom in 1837. The political landscape was complex, with Prussia on the ascent and the German Confederation, to which Hanover belonged, growing weaker and more ineffective.
This all came to ahead in 1866 with the Austro-Prussian War between Prussia and the Austrian Empire. Hanover backed Austria, defeating a Prussian army at Battle of Langensalza, but with further Prussian forces advancing through Hanover, its ruler, King George V, surrendered. Hanover was annexed and occupied by Prussian forces just three months later, on 20th September 1866.
Reinhold Thiele and his parents in the mid-1860s, taken in Herm. Schmidt’s Hameln Studio. His mother, Dorothea Henriette Amalia von Wachsmuth (1834-1907) on the left, Reinhold in the centre, and his father, Heinrich Georg Thiele (1824-1893) on the right.
Whilst Reinhold was aged just ten-years at the annexation of Hanover, it was a major turning point for him and his family. Reinhold grew up in a household with a deep distrust of the occupying Prussians and anger over the annexation of Hanover. His mother’s grandfather, Major-general Rudolph Albrecht von Bodecker (1759-1831), had spent thirteen-years traveling and fighting across Europe for the freedom of Hanover during the Napoleonic occupation of the German states, and now Hanover had yet again lost its independence.
Papers belonging to the Thiele family describe how Reinhold’s father Heinrich, an otherwise artistic and musical man, became involved in political activism and in opposing the annexation of Hanover.
The papers follow how Heinrich, as a wealth and influential Hanoverian, was reputedly a founding member of the German-Hanoverian Party (DHP), better known as the Guelph Party. This was a centre-left party and formed in 1867 with the sole intention of restoring the Kingdom of Hanover. Although never successful in its cause, it remained a significant party into the 1920s, when a failed coup and referendum led to its decline, later disbanding in 1933.
It was in these early years of the party that Heinrich was active, and by maintaining friendly relations with local police officers he would be tipped off ahead of impending raids on the family house at Osterstraße. 40 Hameln, giving him time to burn evidence and avoid arrest by the state.
Apprenticeship to the “Nestor of German Photographers”
It was into this world of occupying troops and police raids that Reinhold was sent away from the family home to the City of Hanover, on an apprenticeship that would change the course of his life and set him on the course to be the future father of modern photojournalism.
Reinhold was apprenticed out to Friedrich Karl Wunder (1815-1893), a lithographer and famous early photographer, who was in his own lifetime considered the “Nestor of German Photographers”. Wunder had himself started out as an apprentice to a lithography and printing business, before taking it over in 1840.
With the 1839 invention of Daguerreotype, the first commercially viable photographic process, Wunder wasted little time in using funds from his business to research the process, later opening Hanover’s first photographic studio in 1844.
By the time Reinhold was apprenticed to Wunder (likely sometime between 1867 and 1869), he was a celebrated society photographer with clients that include Karl Marx. It seems likely by the 1860s, Wunder would have long since abandoned daguerreotype photography, sparing Reinhold the dangers of mercury poisoning from the fumes emitted during the photo-development process. Tintype (ferrotype) photography was on the rise, and it would be reasonable to assume that Reinhold’s earliest experiences with photography would have involved tintype photography and the production of carte de visite, a popular type of small and affordable portrait photograph that was mounted on card.
During Reinhold’s time at Wunder’s studio, the business was at its peak. Exhibiting his work across Germany, winning medals at Hamburg’s 1868 Photographic Exhibition, an honour that he would actively advertise.
In 1875, two years after Reinhold left, the second son, Karl Friedrich Wunder (1849-1924), took over his father’s business, which was at this time so prosperous that he was able to commission the construction of a new premises, the celebrated “Wunder-Haus” in the centre of the city of Hanover.