This body of work investigates the items, objects and the juxtaposition of objects (interiors) that trigger my memory about home.
Of course she wears an apron. With or without sleeves, with a huge honeycomb pattern or with small flowers, with or without pockets, with or without a cardigan over it, made of nylon or cotton (FRG) or Dederon (GDR) - but always and inevitably an apron. Summer and winter, in the house and garden.
The working clothes of many post-war German grandmothers was the apron. This "tradition" was continued by women in East Germany. Women would return home from work and slip into the apron for the rest of the day.
Women in aprons are called Oma or Mutti from all over the world, they rarely have first names, instead they hold positions within the family.
In the fourth class you became a Thälmann pioneer and received (since 1973) a red scarf as a sign of identification. You kept it until the 7th grade. Then you joined the FDJ (Free German Youth). In 1989, 98 percent of all schoolchildren in the GDR were members of the Young Pioneers.
The slogan of the pioneers was: "For peace and socialism: be ready!" That's what the teacher said at the beginning of the lesson or the chairman of the friendship council called out, e.g. B. at roll call, to which the class or group replied: "Always ready!". This was usually shortened to "Be ready! - Always ready!" The reply was greeted in the manner of the pioneers: the right hand held flat above the head with the thumb pointing toward the head and the pinky pointing toward the sky. (source)
by Melanie Almeder
There was the wind again,
the wind in the courtyard, lisping through the tables' cracks,
thrumming against the drainpipe's edges, its impatient cadence
kept at bay, by the walls, by the roof's slated insistence. . . .
and inside the house: long quiet, filled by a sleeping
yellow light. Someone had left this quotidian paradise.
The room waited. It had such patience.
The room had the gathered bookshelves of a century,
a bit of Beijing, a hutch of old dark wood, the wood of some darkened forest
of childhood; behind its doors clicked shut, surely, the piled linens,
smelling of lilac, the plates stacked. . .
Someone had hummed lightly to herself,
had snapped the apron into place, had arranged and then cleaned.
The air spun with the infinitesimal empires of dust.
The room waits, holds some light in its long fine
sprawl of day. O reliquary, what is tucked into the four corners
of this certainty? Where are those soldiers now? Who, on a day
blown high and blue, tilted their white chins towards nation?
Where, the towns saved by the idea of agrarian industry?
How prophesy, like a single pink petal lost from its blossom
and blown to the feet of a mother, whispers about them.
So Mao's been made into a million trinkets?
Someone left to who-knows-where. A little soldier drops her book bag out
of which sprawls books of instruction, books of statued histories. There are cusps
when the light unknots its red kerchief from the throat of day,
tosses it toward the horizon. . .