Wilhelm’s main medium was photography, although he also worked in graphic design, as reported in Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo von Pforzheim bis Mexiko, a monumental biographical study of Wilhelm’s life and career, published in 2005.
In 1890, he emigrated, leaving Germany and settling in Mexico. He brought with him a good middle-class education, the ability to play the piano well, and a love for authors like Goether, Schiller, and Schopenhauer. His collection of German books was a prominent feature in the home in which Frida was raised.
He learned Spanish and became proficient in the language, but continued to use German professionally and at home. He began to call himself Guillermo, the Spanish equivalent of Wilhelm, in social and business situations.
With his first wife, Maria, Wilhelm had three children, two of whom lived to adulthood. Maria died young, and Wilhelm remarried. His second wife was Matilde, who bore five children, four of whom lived to adulthood. Frida was born in 1907.
Some details of Frida’s life, and her father’s life, cannot be precisely clarified. Wilhelm’s education in Germany was clearly a thorough one, allowing him to navigate complicated accounting procedures in the business world, while reading Schopenhauer in his freetime. He could play the piano well, and artistic training, but historians have been unable to determine which schools or universities he attended.
Other details about the family are known, but contradict the fanciful versions which Frida liked to tell. The Kahlos were a well-established German family, and not descendants of Hungarian immigrants into Germany. Frida also liked to vary her date of birth, adjusting it to link it symbolically with the history of Mexico.
While it is routinely reported that Frida studied at the “Colegio Aleman Alexander von Humboldt,” a German language school in Mexico, no documents have survived to prove this. It is known that at least one of Frida’s sisters studied there.
In any case, Frida spoke German at home with her father, who called her liebe Frieda (“dear Frieda”). In the 1930s, she changed the spelling of her name as a protest against the suffering which the National Socialist (“Nazi”) government was inflicting upon the Germans.
Frida’s mother died in 1932, and her father lived almost another decade afterward. It was her father who introduced Frida to painting. Whether she inherited some of his artistic ability, or whether he taught it to her, is an open question.
During Wilhelm’s last decade, Frida apparently absorbed an appreciation for her family’s history. Wilhelm died in 1941, during WW2. When the war was over, Frida was enthusiastic about making contact with distant relatives in Germany — people she’d never met. When she wrote to them, she was able to give a wealth of details about individuals in the Kahlo family, going back several generations. She and her father must have conversed in depth about the family history.
Frida could speak German comfortably with her father, but her ability to write German at an academic level was never strong. After her father’s death, she didn’t use her German much, and so in a 1949 letter to her German relatives, she apologizes for writing in English.
Wilhelm and Frida had an affectionate relationship. He influenced her approach to images, cared deeply and unconditionally for her, and imparted family history to her, so that long after his death, she was enthusiastic to correspond with the Kahlo family members in Germany. A substantial part of Frida’s self-concept was German.
Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle co-edited Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo von Pforzheim bis Mexiko. The book was published in 2005 and includes essays by Juan Coronel Rivera, Cristina Kahlo Alcala, Helga Prignitz-Poda, and Raquel Tibol.
