The current exhibition at the International Center of Photography, “Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Scrapbook: Photographs, 1932–46” consists mostly of prints that were not intended for exhibition and includes many pictures that are far from his best. It is a valuable exhibition, however, because it gives us insight into Cartier-Bresson’s creative process, how he circled around a subject until he got the image he wanted. Similarly, the juvenilia of famous poets is often published to provide clues to their development. “Roman Vishniac’s Berlin” at the Goethe-Institut is meant to serve the same purpose, but the leap in caliber from this work, which dates from the mid-1920s through the ’30s, to “A Vanished World,” his haunting study of Eastern European Jewry in the foreshadow of its extinction, is a wonder not easily accounted for.

There are 32 pictures on display at the Goethe-Institut, drawn from about 100 that are included in the book “Roman Vishniac’s Berlin,” published in 2005 by the Jewish Museum of Berlin, where the work was first presented. The quality of the work ranges from fairly ordinary snapshots to that of a highly talented amateur, with only now and then a hint of some greater ability. The year they were taken and the occasion have a lot to do with the level of the result; as the situation in Berlin deteriorated and Vishniac turned from personal snapshots to the goings-on of the wider world, he got better.

The earlier pictures tend to center on family and bits of Berlin street life. Vishniac (1897–1990) was part of a large and unusual family. He was born and grew up in tsarist Moscow because his grandfather, a successful merchant, was one of the few Jews permitted to settle there. In the aftermath of the communist revolution the family transferred to cosmopolitan Berlin, a center of Russian émigré life. Roman and his Latvian born wife, Luta, had two children, Wolf and Mara; he failed at several businesses in which he had only a desultory interest, and he avidly pursued his studies of biology, Asian art, photomicroscopy, and a wide range of cultural subjects. On holidays and family outings, he took pictures.

“Hanukkah celebration in the Vishniac apartment” (1934) is typical of this category. Nine children stand in a line, with one adult standing behind. Mara is fourth from the left. Two of the boys are dressed as Maccabean soldiers with long poles for spears and tinfoil shields, helmets, and greaves. There is a picture of a Chinese mandarin above the mantelpiece, rich wood wainscoting, and Oriental carpets. It is Jewish, it is bourgeois, it is comfortable, but it is not an exceptional photograph.

“A march of graduate butcher apprentices near the Hardenbergstrasse” and “The famous Café Kranzler on the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrase” (both early 1930s) show an interest in the life of the city, and are competently done, as are several others in this genre, but are likewise not exceptional. “View from the entrance hall of Lindenstrasse 109” (ca. 1926) is a work of considerable charm. We look out on an ornamented doorway to the cobblestone sidewalk where a middle-class woman in heels pulls at the leash of a reluctant dog, a nice little urban vignette.

Vishniac began making trips from Berlin to photograph the ghettos of Russia, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania in 1935. He was commissioned to take these pictures by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to be used in raising funds for their relief efforts. Around the same time, a more somber cast enters his Berlin pictures. Previous pictures that evidenced the rise of national socialism had a somewhat comic cast. In some, Mara or Roman pose in front of Nazi posters and anti-Semitic graffiti as if having their pictures taken with them reduced them to mere scenery, to tourist sites, not political realities.

By the late 1930s, Vishniac was photographing the dwindling presence of Jews in the German capital as their lives became increasingly constricted. “Classroom scene at the Middle School of the Jewish Community, Grosse Hamburger Strasse 12” (ca. 1936) captures the faces of 18 12-year-olds trying to concentrate on their teacher while they are being photographed. Sweet faces. Marianne Hirsch wrote in her book “Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory” about the difficulties in looking at pictures of people who were killed in the Holocaust. As always, I find myself silently screaming at these children, “Get out! Get out!”

“Counselling Sessions at the offices of Hilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland (Aid Association of the Jews in Germany), Ludendorffstrasse 20” (1938) catches some of the mounting anxiety with its skillful handling of light, but “Kindertransport from Berlin in the spring of 1939” lacks intensity. Of course, at the time, these parents seeing their children off for England did not know they would never see them again.

A young scholar, Maya Benton, lectured recently at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on her research in the Roman Vishniac archives. Vishniac later dissembled much of his work in Eastern Europe. He said none of his subjects was aware he was photographing them, but in fact many of them were. He said the little girl in “The Only Flowers of her Youth” could not go outside because she had no shoes, but other pictures show she did. He systematically cropped signs of modernity out of his images of the shetlach, or market towns, to make them seem timeless. That’s mostly irrelevant: In “A Vanished World” Roman Vishniac created a searing vision of this civilization on the brink, and it is his vision that restores it to us, an amazing accomplishment for the man who took these genial pictures of Berlin.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until April 13 (1014 Fifth Ave., between 82nd and 83rd streets, 212-439-8700).