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My father Hans Himmelheber, if he were alive today, would probably have the latest smartphone in his pocket and be downloading the craziest apps. During his travels in Africa, he was always equipped with the latest technology in order to document his research findings: In the 1930s on his second trip, he brought a wax cylinder phonograph with him. Travelling without a photo camera was out of the question. Later, he also brought along movie cameras and a Butoba – a very early tape recorder with a mechanical winding mechanism. When the first Polaroid cameras became available, he bought one and took it with him to Liberia. 

I got a lot of that as a kid in the early ‘60s: I helped him cut his 16 mm films. To do this, he had hung up clotheslines in an attic room. He then hung the film strips scene by scene on numbered clothespins and then pasted the film sequences one after another. I operated the film scraper and the film splicer. 

His older brother Max had become an engineer and invented particleboard. Maybe that motivated him to invent something himself. He had read over and over again how children would drown in swimming pools or quarry lakes because rescuers could not find them in time. His idea: a necklace with a roll of thread around the child’s neck and a red ball with a string attached to it. I had just learned to swim, and on a rather cool autumn’s day we tested out the contraption. Thankfully, the only person watching was a lifeguard. I was really embarrassed about having this red ball tied around my neck. In designing such an invention for kids, my father had clearly failed to take vanity into account, but otherwise it worked. And he even went to the German Patent Office to obtain a utility model [similar to a patent] for it. 

The wax cylinders mentioned above have miraculously survived. These recordings with songs and fairy tales of the Baule people from the years 1934 and 1935 were given by Hans Himmelheber to the German Phonographic Archive in Berlin. During the Second World War, the cylinders came to be stored in the tunnels of a Thuringian mine. After the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, Germany and Russia exchanged some of their historical loot – and so the wax cylinders made their way back to Berlin. With cutting-edge technology, museum staff digitized the recordings and in 2000 – I believe a few years before his death– my father was able to hear the music he had recorded 65 years earlier. It’s now possible to listen to the recordings on the internet. 

Hans Himmelheber took the Butoba with him on trips to Liberia and the Ivory Coast, which he visited with my mother Ulrike Himmelheber. Since batteries were not easy to come by in the years immediately after World War II, the tape transport was mechanical. A winding mechanism pulled the magnetic tape past the tape heads. Magnetization was the only thing which required electricity, and this was provided by heavy batteries.  

When the two of them wrote their book Die Dan [on the Dan people], they had the idea of not only providing text and image, but also sound. The book comes with a record on which music, singing, and narration can be heard. Hans Himmelheber provides explanations of the recordings in a strangely high falsetto voice. I think that was fashionable at the time – even on old radio recordings his speaking voice was unnaturally high. 

But my father was basically a visual person: Cameras fascinated him. He usually had two Leicas with him: One was for black-and-white shots, the other for color slides. He made films with a Bolex 16 mm camera with three interchangeable lenses: Wide-angle, normal, and telephoto. One had to set the aperture and the distance in each case. Since only three minutes of film fit on a film spool – and a film spool was very expensive back then – my father considered the scenes carefully. There was one rule he always observed, and which he impressed upon my brother Eberhard and me: “Get close.” 

On a later trip, he also brought a Super 8 camera with magnetic sound. The advantage was that lip-synchronized sound was possible with it. But editing the films proved to be enormously complicated. 

The Polaroid camera mentioned earlier was clunky, unwieldy, and the picture quality nothing to shout about. Nevertheless, he always had it with him, so that he was always ready to oblige his friends in Liberia and the Ivory Coast when they wanted a picture. Otherwise, he would always have to delay: “When I come back, I’ll bring your picture with me!” While the latter often worked, it was another thing entirely to be able to produce a picture straight away. 

After his trip to Alaska in 1936/37, it would be 50 years until we were able to show and give photos to friends from back then – and to their children and grandchildren – during a joint trip to Nunivak Island and to Bethel on the Kuskokwim River in the summer of 1986. These reunions made a profound impression on Hans Himmelheber. 

Despite his passion for technology, it was important to Hans Himmelheber that it disturbed the action as little as possible. He had a tripod for the Bolex. The tape recorder, which on later trips was a Uher model, was the size of a briefcase, and the cameras hung around his neck. This is how he would rush through villages, accompanied by Ulrike or later Eberhard, encountering scenes like masked figures appearing, women cooking, or a mask carver or a potter at work. 

It must have been a nightmare trip for Hans when he was working with a team from the Göttingen Institute for Scientific Film. The film team, because of their stationary equipment, spoiled things by imposing strict rules on the dancers. Just one example: The cameramen had the idea of shooting from the roof of their VW van. In order to keep the masked dancers within shot, they marked out a square with palm branches, beyond which the performers were not allowed to dance. “When it comes to African dancing, it’s all about the feet. How am I going to film that from the roof of the VW van?” 

To be able to operate his many devices, he plastered them with small self-adhesive labels, on which he had written what so-and-so lever did or what a button was used for. But there were also rules about which exposure to use in order to minimize the potential for mistakes, or which settings it was better not to adjust. On an old exposure meter, for example, there is the following note: “According to Photo Braun, this exposure meter is defective. Not true, it only goes down 2 f-stops!”  

Hans Himmelheber was a tech enthusiast even into his old age. His granddaughter Clara Himmelheber visited him at Christmas around the turn of the millennium and had her laptop with her. He wanted her to explain the computer to him and show him what to do with it. When her grandfather saw the keyboard, he was disappointed, Clara told me: “Oh, it's just like a typewriter. I thought you just speak into it and the computer does it.” 

It was well over a decade before Alexa would hit the market...