The attic – for us grandchildren, when we went to visit my grandmother, it was a forbidden place. One of those prohibitions that was impossible to obey. How wonderful the awareness of the danger when we balanced over roof beams in the semi-darkness. The exciting smell of mothballs, mouse droppings and dust when we rummaged for treasures in the large farmer’s cupboard in the attic. A fox fur collar, books from the prewar period, an old gramophone – evidence of a lost era. Exciting finds can still be found in Saxony’s roof warehouses today.
–
Time capsule: from the attic to the city museum
Synnöve Wustmann climbs the narrow stairs to the attic of his parents’ house in Bad Schandau. It has to be stored here somewhere. The folding boat with which Synnöve’s father, the adventurer and travel writer Erich Wustmann, drove through Norway’s fjords in the 1920s lies beneath a thick layer of dust, wrapped in a cocoon made of coarse cotton. A pioneering act back then.
–
In the attic, the father’s stories come to life. He later became an ethnologist, lived with the Sami in northern Norway and with the Xingu in Brazil. He was a celebrity in the GDR as a travel writer and filmmaker. And the folding boat from the attic, with which it all began, welcomes visitors to the Bad Schandau City Museum today.
–
Poetry between heaven and earth
Another attic staircase, one of which is a farmhouse near Meißen. Gerhard Schöne gets his guitar from the corner of his YouTube attic studio. Because since the pandemic, the now 68-year-old songwriter has also been present with his own channel: “This is my room under the roof. Sometimes the wind sings, the rain keeps you awake.” Under the hipped roof in the old rectory in Coswig was the room that songwriter Gerhard Schöne sang about in the 80s.
–
Here it was sometimes bitterly cold in winter despite the oil radiator, and almost always muggy and hot in summer. But cozy, homely in every season. No better place for an adolescent, for lonely hours at the desk and hours of romantic togetherness. A vanished place. The Coswiger attic fell victim to the energetic building renovation sometime after the fall of the Wall. But here in the new home, the songwriter speaks about the poetry in the space under the roof: “The window to heaven, the door to the world.”
–
Speicher of the Leipzig labor movement
“The scorch marks in the roof beams do not come from the Kapp Putsch, but from a firecracker on New Year’s Eve.” Monika Kirst knows the history of the Volkshaus in Karl-Leibknecht-Straße in every detail. In the attic she has set up an incredible museum, which tells of it – as it was called when the foundation stone was laid in 1905 – “A place of enlightenment, encouragement, conviviality and relaxation for the organized workforce”.
–
The house tells the story of the imperial era, the Weimar era, the Nazi era, after 1945, the GDR era and also today. And that is again typical of the present day that they sold the house, in 2006, that is unbelievable. Nobody in Leipzig used the term to sell it, it only meant sold, sold off, hawked.
–
–
“Joy beautiful attic find“
The trade union federation was selling its silverware, it was said at the time. But Monika Kirst’s exhibition in the attic still tells the story of the house in files, photos and exciting finds, which mirrors German social history like a magnifying glass. There were also 33 boxes of Mainelken from VEB Sebnitzer Kunstblume, tables and chairs from Germany’s largest beer garden with 3,000 seats, and documents about the tenants located here: nature lovers, journeyman’s associations, poor food, workers’ education associations.
–
Monika Kirst has saved papers here that tell of a great tradition: For example, how the idea of establishing “The Ode to Joy” as a New Year’s Eve concert was born. That was at the end of the First World War, in November 1918. A Mr. Licht from the Workers’ Education Institute teamed up with the features editor Dr. Franz from the social democratic Leipziger Volkszeitung. Together they suggested the first New Year’s Eve performance of Beethoven’s Ninth in the Gewandhaus Leipzig.
–
And with the joy of such found objects it can end well, entirely in the present, in the attic of the past.
–
This topic in the program
MDR KULTUR – The radio | December 19, 2020 | 9:00 a.m.
–
–
– .
