Volkmar Wentzel - Early Life

Early Life

Wentzel was born February 8, 1915, in the city of Dresden in what was then the Kingdom of Saxony (now Freestate of Saxony) in Germany. He was one of four boys born to Dr. Fritz Gustav Wentzel (a chemist) and his wife, Verna Jatho Wentzel.

His father was an amateur photographer who sold photographic chemicals. Dr. Wentzel was also a friend of the photochemical pioneer Hinricus Lüppo-Cramer, and preserved much of Lüppo-Cramer's work after his death. Volkmar Wentzel later said his father would sometimes punish his sons by making them take a "time-out" in his photographic darkroom, but that Volkmar soon learned to love the space. "This was a terrifying, almost traumatic experience, until by accident, with the flick of the darkroom's amber-red inspection light switch, the magic world of photography, my lifetime love, was revealed," he later said. When Wentzel was nine years old, he and his father built a wooden pinhole camera and his first photographs were of statues in the Grosser Garten near their home.

Post-World War I Germany was ravaged by economic and political dislocation. Dr. Wentzel was offered a job as director at an Ansco photographic paper manufacturing plant in Binghamton, New York, so the family moved to the United States in 1926.

Wentzel's mother died in 1931, and his father (burdened with a demanding job, and writing books on photographic materials) became unable to adequately care for his four teenage sons. Wentzel and a friend, Bill Buckley, sold some personal items, pooled the money they had earned from their newspaper home delivery jobs, and decided to settle in South America. They dropped out of high school and departed Binghamton in February 1934, arriving in D.C. after three days of walking and hitchhiking. Naïvely intending to spend the night with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they walked through the deserted grounds and to the north entrance of the White House only to find that the president was not in residence. They slept that night in a YMCA at Farragut Square. But when they awoke in the morning to find their bedroom full of cockroaches, the boys divided their money (each received $70) and parted. Although Buckley said he was returning to Binghamton, Wentzel rented a room in the Lafayette Square townhouse of Roosevelt aide Thomas Gardiner Corcoran.

Wentzel soon moved to West Virginia. While staying at Corcoran's home, he met German-born architect Eric Menke (who had come to D.C. to work on a proposed Municipal Center), who told Wentzel about a burgeoning artists' colony in Aurora, West Virginia. The colony offered to pay Wentzel $2.50 a week to care for the cabins and studios on the property; he accepted, and moved to Aurora in the summer of 1935.