Berlin has always had its visual chroniclers, but few worked the streets as steadily as Willy Römer, a press photographer whose career tracks almost exactly with the rise of photojournalism itself. Born on New Year's Eve 1887, the son of a master tailor, he picked up a camera early — by 15 he was apprenticed at the Berliner Illustrationsgesellschaft, the city's first press photography agency, founded in 1900.
That timing mattered. Photography and newspapers were colliding in a way that would change both industries: new printing technology meant images could finally run alongside text for mass readership. The old word 'illustration' was on its way out, and the modern job title of press photographer was born. The agency operated from Königgrätzer Strasse 62, now Stresemannstrasse, near Anhalter Bahnhof, and was run by three former schoolfriends — Karl Delius, a Berlin Academy of Arts-trained artistic director; commercial head Martin Gordan; and Heinrich Sanden, the money man thanks to his shoe-merchant father.
Under Delius's mentorship, the teenage Römer learned the trade alongside other young hopefuls like Walter Bernstein. And he was shooting constantly from the start: his archive holds negative plates dating back to 1903–04. What's telling is that even then, he wasn't waiting for assignments. His earliest work shows a personal fixation on Berliners themselves — a man commuting to work on skis, ice-sailing on the Müggelsee, children sledging at the Gendarmenmarkt around 1906, a street knife-grinder surrounded by fascinated kids in 1904.
That instinct — documenting ordinary city life rather than staged events — is what makes Römer worth a traveller's attention. His pictures from Berlin's 'world city years', the subject of a 2012 book edited by Enno Kaufhold, capture the Weimar capital in all its scrappy, restless energy. For anyone walking Berlin today, his images work as a then-and-now companion: Gendarmenmarkt, the Müggelsee and Stresemannstrasse are all still there, transformed but recognisable. One caveat for the curious: much of his work sits behind copyright walls, so archives like those holding his originals are the best route to seeing it — Slow Travel Berlin's profile handily links to many of his photographs via the institutions that own them.
If you're the kind of traveller who likes to read a city through its history, tracing Römer's Berlin is a rewarding thread. Stand at Gendarmenmarkt with children still sledding in winter, or walk from Potsdamer Platz toward what was Anhalter Bahnhof, and you're moving through his frame. Museums and photo archives across the city, from the Staatsbibliothek to specialist photography collections, hold his work — a quieter, more textured way into Berlin's past than the usual Cold War circuit.
