How everything began

In 2015, Jörn and Anke Napp purchased a rusty magic lantern from the beginning of the 20th century, which had been converted from petroleum to electricity in the 1930s.The remains of an old, brittle, dust covered filmstrip still hung on the upper film reel of the device. A quick look identified it as a travelogue about Hamburg. We had never heard of filmstrips before - as had anyone else around us. Our attempt to restore and digitize the endangered old filmstrip led us to a well-known photographer still using old school analog materials. While we were discussing how to save our filmstrip-part, the photographer casually pointed to a large cardboard moving box in his studio that he had found in front of his door that day.

A quick look inside revealed a treasure chest: over 200 rolls of filmstrips in their original boxes, plus the corresponding lecture texts from various publishers. What an incredible coincidence! Our curiosity was stirred up, and a few weeks later we purchased the treasure box. When we checked the contents, we were able to quickly narrow down the time of the their creation to the first half of the 20th century, with the majority of the filmstrips dating from the 1920s and 1930s. The themes pointed to an Evangelical Lutheran owner with strong German nationalist views. The stamp "Command of the North Sea Naval Station - Welfare Department" or "Evangelical Naval Pastor at the Fleet Command" on some of the lecture texts helped to locate the collection in Wilhelmshaven. Much of this collection was built up by Friedrich August Ronneberger, "longest-serving naval dean" since 1938, and was verifiably used until the post-war period. Later purchases and donations of individual filmstrips and holdings from other institutions complete the archive.

In honor of Jörn Napp (1945-2020), without whom this archive would not exist, it was renamed Jörn Napp Bildbandarchiv in May 2020.