Peter Bock-Schroeder (1913-2001) was a German photographer and photo journalist. Biography Bock-Schroeder studied photojournalism at Photo-Atelier Binder in Berlin, and graduated in 1933. During World War II he served in Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps as gunner and war correspondent. In 1946, Sefton Delmer hired him to work for the German news service. In the 1950s, he traveled extensively with contracts from leading German news magazines, Stern, Quick, and Revue. In 1956, one year after the peace treaty between Russia and Germany, Peter Bock-Schroeder was the first West-German photographer to get permission to work in the USSR. In 1962, he settled in Munich, Germany, and died on February 19, 2001. Early life Peter Bock-Schroeder the illegitimate son of a dashing Russian expatriate and the daughter of conservative German burghers, was born in the booming port city of Hamburg on November 30, 1913. He never knew his father, who was killed after returning to his native St. Petersburg. His mother, Meta Bock, later married, gaining a husband named Schroeder as well as a measure of respectability for herself and for her son. In 1929, at the age of 16, Bock-Schroeder left home to find a future in Berlin, the vibrant Weimar capital then in the rapturous throes of a great cultural flowering. Along with the filmmakers, musicians, actors, architects, playwrights, composers, painters and novelists who filled Berlin’s cafes, photographers too were caught in the blooming. Encouraged by a friend of his stepfather’s family who “believed to have discovered a visual talent in me,” Bock-Schroeder wrote in a self-deprecating autobiographical sketch, the fledgling photographer borrowed 150 Reichsmark from his benefactor and enrolled in an apprentice program at the renowned Atelier Binder photo studios. The studio was famous for having nurtured the talents of such prominent German photographers as Erich Balg, Sonja Goergi, Hubs Floter, Friedrich Aschenbrauch and Joe Niczky. The apprenticeship taught him everything about the operation of a photo studio, but little about the art of taking pictures. After months spent “retouching negatives and positives, playing the peek-a-boo clown for children’s portraits and going to buy the bread rolls for the boss,” he left the studio and enrolled at the Bräuhaus school where Balg himself taught an inspirational class. “The little technical know-how I have, I owe to him,” Bock-Schroeder wrote. “One of his school exercises was to take a photo of the Brandenburg gate as no one had ever seen it