Education at wartime 1936-39

Education at wartime 1936-39: The Valencia Worker School in Walter Reuter’s works

From 13^th October to 13^th November 2005

Sala Oberta - La Nau

From Tuesday to Saturday, from 10 to 13.30 and from 16 to 20 h.

Sunday, from 10 to 14 h.

Worker Schools

Following a legal decree, in 1936 the Spanish Republic Government set up the so-called worker schools (institutos obreros) for those young willing to complete compressed baccalaureate studies (reduced from 7 to 2 years). The candidates –over the age of 15- first had to pass an admission test to prove they were fit.

The aim was to create 'student' workers to reconstruct Spain after the fratricidal conflict, an elite of intelligent workers.

The classes started on February 1st 1937. For more than two years (three full semesters) the best teachers of the time lectured at the 'institutos': Samuel Gil Gaya, Núñez de Arenas y de la Escosura, Rafael de Penagos, Juan Renau, Rafael Pérez Contel, Francisco Carreño Prieto, Alberto Sánchez Pérez... next to high stature academics like Machado, Jacinto Benavente, León Felipe, Jusep Renau etc., and classic characters like Campesino and Pasionaria. The Worker School institution participated in the Conference of Anti-fascist Intellectuals (1937). Its students were being prepared to work at the service of the Republic, and so they were actually paid for studying. Worker schools were set up in Valencia, Barcelona, Sabadell, and Madrid.

The Valencia Worker School of Secondary Education stood out. Its premises were at the former Jesuits School – at today’s Avenida Fernando el Católico. It was refurbished to host the initial 143 students, 13 of them being women. The number of students totalled 356.

A former student association was set up in 1987 in Valencia and the book “El Instituto para Obreros" by Prof. Fernández Soria" was published by the Valencian Government. The council even named a street after the School.

At present, its octogenarian students continue meeting under the intellectual spirit they got impregnated of as young men and women who went through experiences like the war (Ebro battle…), imprisonment, refugee and concentration camps (Argeles sur Mer, Sant Cyprian…) and exile.

WALTER REUTER 1906 – 2005, A PHOTOGRAPHY MASTER

Walter Reuter was born on January 4th 1906 in Berlin. Of a working background, he grew up under the influence of left-wing social and young movements in Weimar’s Germany.

His first camera was a 6x9 Contessa Nettel. In the late 1920s he started documenting the plight of proletarian families in the outskirts of Berlin. He took his first 15 photographs to the left-wing magazine AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung). He was paid well. The money went to buying a better piece of photographic equipment. In 1930, chased by the Nazis for the publication of the photographs of the demonstration against the National Socialist Party, he fled the country.

Reuter arrived in Spain in May 1933, after travelling Switzerland and France. He travelled to Andalusia in 1934, where he participated in the ‘Teaching Missions’ and worked in a photographic documentary on La casa de Bernarda Alba together with Federico García Lorca. At the outbreak of the Civil War he joined the Malaga militias of the Unified Socialist Youth. He was indeed one of the most committed foreign photographers in the Spanish anti-Fascist cause, like Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, David Seymour, Hans Namuth and Kati Horna. He defended the Republic with his camera and took part in governmental propaganda projects, and so in 1937 he went to Valencia to prepare a feature on the Instituto Obrero, the Worker School. One of his photographs from this project was later used by Mauricio Amster in the institution’s advertising posters. In October that year, when the government was forced to move to Barcelona, he also moved there. In May 1938 he presented his works in the exhibition “Art at the service of people”. In Barcelona he portrays the rearguard and especially the children and the refugees. His activity as a graphic war correspondent starts that way. He works for the news agency Black Star in New York and London. In Spain, Reuter’s photographs get published in Ahora. Diario de la Juventud, among others.

The 1939 defeat causes him to exile to Paris. He manages to escape from the Germans in France by going to Casablanca, Morocco. But he gets arrested there and taken to the Colombe-Bechar concentration camp in the Sahara, to work in the construction of the Trans-Sahara railway. In April 1942 he manages to escape and board the San Thomé, a  Portuguese ship heading for America. He arrives in Mexico at the time of Lázaro Cárdenas’ Mexican Revolution Party, together with his first wife Sulamith Siliava and his son Jas.

He settled in Veracruz, where he kept in touch with the republican Spaniards exiled in Mexico (Max Aub, Luís Buñuel, Rodolfo Halffter, and Plácido Domingo’s family). He also remained friends with Mauricio Amster, a Pole living in Chile, with whom he had worked in Spain in the photomontage of posters for the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts.

A precursor of today's graphic journalism, he contributed to Mexico's photographic panorama. He also made documentaries and short films, always illustrating social and cultural concerns with images. He worked for the magazines Nosotros, Hoy, Siempre y Mañana, in Mexico, and for the Musée de L’Homme of Paris. He married his second wife in Mexico and had two daughters, Yazmín and Hely Reuter. A few years ago, the youngest one started to classify her father's works together with a group of collaborators, around 120,000 negatives from Mexico, Germany and Spain.

A fugitive escaping from Nazi Germany, a Spanish Civil War veteran and a 2^nd World War and refugee camp survivor, Walter Reuter died in Mexico on 20^th March 2005 at the age of 99. Despite his high stature as a photographer and his humanity, he died in poverty and oblivion.

He remained active until his death. His humanity and solidarity make him a perfect example of the social justice fight.

The photographs included in the exhibition “Education at wartime” are part of those taken for his feature on the Valencia Workers School in 1937. They are a copy of those stored in Spain’s National Library.

Cristina Escrivá, Valencia 2005