Gutenbergstraße is a partly residential, partly commercial street in Stuttgart. Click through the image gallery to take a virtual walk. Foto: Stadtarchiv Stuttgart

In 1942, 12 000 images documented virtually every house in every street in Stuttgart, Germany – the world’s first Street View. Here’s how we built a project around this image inventory.

Stuttgart - In 1942, civil servants created 12.000 photos of every street in Stuttgart, Germany – a unique set of images that we used for our project „Stuttgart 1942“. It started in May, 2020 and includes more than 100 reports on everyday life in a German city of 500.000 back in 1942.

We soon realized that this inventory of 12 000 images is basically the world’s first Street View. The photographers of the time had neither 360 degree cameras nor automated stitching. But just like Google’s, Apple’s or others’ camera cars, they roamed through the city’s streets on foot, taking a picture every 10 or 20 meters. We couldn’t find an older stock of images that is remotely as comprehensive and systematic. Yet, we’d be happy to receive hints from the community!

The images survived in the city’s archive

It is not perfectly clear why the Stuttgart municipality ordered its civil servants to produce those 12 000 images. The most probable explanation is that the Nazis wanted to re-build Stuttgart and its partly medeival structures in a modern way after the Endsieg. Plans included a freeway on a gigantic bridge above the city’s central Schlossgarten park, a new town hall was to replace a whole neighbourhood in one of the oldest parts of the town and the city’s extensive road network should be expanded decisively – Stuttgart was and is, after all, home to companies like Mercedes Benz and Porsche.

The war went a bit differently, though. Air raids destroyed vast parts of the city and it was not re-built in an, to put it friendly, modern and car-friendly way. Yet those 12 000 images survived in the city’s archive, our partner for the „Stuttgart 1942“ project. Recently, the city’s archive had the images digitalized but did not have the means to make them easily accessible – all there is are non-standardized typewriter lists from 1942 naming the street and house numbers of the facades on the images. Machine-readability was not a common concept back then.

How we make use of the material

We worked our way through the material and catalogized every single image according to the typewriter lists. In the next step, we built a search engine to find images from particular streets. The images did not enable us to present them in a Street View way. But clicking through the images gets you quite close to the Street View experience, except that it is also a time machine that beams you into a city that existed 80 years ago. You’ll get a glimpse if you watch this video which compares Stuttgart’s main shopping street in 1942 with 2020.

Most of the stuff is behind a paywall. To get an impression of the images for international readers, we chose the partly residential, partly commercial street Gutenbergstraße in the Stuttgart-West area and accompany the photographer on its way downhill. By clicking through the images in the gallery above, you can navigate the street even without knowledge of the local context and watch people living their everyday life – whatever that may have meant in 1942 Stuttgart. Isn’t that exactly what makes Street View, Lookaround etc. fascinating?