Digital Transgender Archive

Actors performing at a prisoner of war camp in Münster. Photographic postcard. 1916.

Many characters, some in drag, are in a crowded scene within the detailed domestic stage set. A melodrama being played out on the well-improvised set of the camp theatre at Münster prisoner of war camp, circa 1916. The 'Father' figure wears Flemish wooden clogs, and the 'daughter' being ejected from the family home is obviously the 'Bad Girl of the Family' in a melodramatic potboiler of the type popular with working class audiences all over Europe in this period; this one apparently entitled 'Blanchette'. It might be the play Blanchette by Eugeǹe Brieux (1892), which was a serious didactic play about the benefits of education for girls of the working classes. The card was sent home to Brussels, where it was bought in the fleamarket for 1 euro almost a century later

Part of James Gardiner Collection: photographs of military, naval, and prisoner-of-war camp drag.