It’s silly to make broad conclusions about human beings from a single frame. Sander himself noted of his subjects, “I freeze one moment in his movement, a mere five hundredths of a second of that person’s lifetime. That’s a very meager or small extract from a life.”

Still, I can’t help but imagine the moments before and after. I wonder what they talked about as they walked. I wonder if they had a good time, how late they stayed out, who they danced with. We know it was Saturday, summertime. We know they were out of the mine, in the light. And we know that it must’ve been one of the last dances they attended together, because the war was only weeks away.

Soon, all three boys were called to serve in the German armed forces. Otto and August were placed in the same regiment and sent to Belgium to fight. In January of 1915, only a few months after the Young Farmers photo, August Klein sent home this picture from snowy Belgium: Klein stands fifth from right; Krieger kneels beneath him.

The boys look different now. The future, which had been just over the horizon, has come into view. But even then, August and Otto could not know. They couldn’t know that August Klein would be killed in the war that March at the age of twenty-two. Otto was wounded three times—including a serious injury in May 1918—but he survived the war. Ewald was also wounded, but he eventually made it back to Dünebusch, where he lived into old age.

Alice Walker once wrote, “All history is current,” and I think that’s true in so many ways. History presses into us, shaping contemporary experience. History changes as we look back on the past from different presents. And history is electric current, too—charged and flowing. It takes power from some sources and delivers it to others. Sander once said he believed photography could help “hold fast the history of the world,” but there is no holding history fast. It is always receding and dissolving, not just into the unknowable past but also into the unfixable future.

I cannot remember precisely how that picture of kids tangled together felt before a global pandemic rendered it so strangely voltaic. And I cannot imagine how it will look to my future selves. All I can see is that picture, changing as time flees away from it.

August Klein was twenty-two years old when he died. He had around a year to live when he posed for that famous photograph. Anything might’ve happened, but one thing did.

I give Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance four and a half stars.

POSTSCRIPT

THE GERMAN TRANSLATION OF THIS BOOK is called Wie hat Ihnen das Anthropozän bis jetzt gefallen? I can’t read German, but I find that title wonderful just to look at. I’m told it translates to something like How Have You Enjoyed the Anthropocene So Far?