Marianne was born in Berlin, the daughter of the architect Alfred Breslauer (1866–1954) and Dorothea Lessing (the daughter of art historian Julius Lessing). She took lessons in photography in Berlin from 1927 to 1929, and became an admirer firstly of the then well-known portrait photographer Frieda Riess and later of the Hungarian André Kertész, although she saw her future as a photographic reporter.

In 1929 she travelled to Paris, where she briefly became a pupil of Man Ray.[1] A year later she started work for the Ullstein photo studio in Berlin, headed up by Elsbeth Heddenhausen, where she mastered the skills of developing photos in the dark-room.[2] Until 1934 her photos were published in many leading magazines such as the Frankfurter Illustrierten, Der Querschnitt, Die Dame, Zürcher Illustrierten and Das Magazin.[3]

Marianne was a close friend of the Swiss photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, whom she met through Ruth Landshoff and whom she photographed many times. She described Annemarie (who died at the young age of 34) as: "Neither a woman nor a man, but an angel, an archangel". In 1933 they travelled together to the Pyrenees to carry out a photographic assignment for the Berlin photographic agency Academia. This led to Marianne's confrontation with the anti-Semitic practices then coming into play in Germany. Her employers wanted her to publish her photos under a pseudonym, to hide the fact that she was Jewish. She refused to do so and left Germany. However her photo Schoolgirls won the "Photo of the Year" award at the "Salon international d'art photographique" in Paris in 1934.

She emigrated in 1936 to Amsterdam where she married the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt—he had previously left Germany after seeing Nazis break up an auction of modern art. Her first child, Walter, was born here. Family life and work as an art dealer hindered her work in photography, which she gave up to concentrate on her other activities. In 1939 the family fled to Zurich where her second son, Konrad, was born.

After the war, in 1948, the couple set up an art business specializing in French paintings and 19th-century art. When her husband died in 1953 she took over the business, which she ran with her son Walter from 1966 to 1990. She died in Zollikon, near Zurich.

In just 10 years, Marianne Breslauer‘s career as a photographer had marked her out as an ambitious photojournalist of the late Weimar Republic, before emigration and the outbreak of war brought this auspicious beginning to an abrupt halt.

Educated from 1927-1929 at the renowned Lette-Haus in Berlin, Marianne Breslauer went next to Paris. Her first posting is no one less than Man Ray, who, approvingly, tells the 20-year-old that she can do everything already and warmly invites her to make use of his studio. She gladly takes up the offer, yet her intrinsic domain is the street: the quays of the Seine, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the street performers on the Rue d‘Orléans. With these photos she attracts the attention of the illustrated German newspapers, who soon furnish her with commissions. She photographs the Who‘s Who of the art world in the late 1920s in Berlin, travels to Spain with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and portrays Erika Mann‘s cabaret, „The Pepper Mill“, in Zurich. With an infallible intuition for atmosphere and compositional ingenuity, she captures the essence of life in an era coming to a close.

In 1936 she ultimately has to emigrate from Germany – taking all her photography materials in her bag. The photographer Marianne Breslauer was only around for a single, brief decade. Following the Second World War, she became the art dealer Marianne Feilchenfeldt.

Now, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her birth, the photographer is to be rediscovered anew. In this richly illustrated catalogue of works, her distinctive pictures will finally be visible once more.