2023-07-31 09:56:02
Even Angela Merkel claimed that ironing wrapping paper was an old trick from the GDR. There’s even a little-known photo of her doing it. She was Minister for the Environment then. The picture is from 1994, the photographer’s name is Michael Ebner. He took the picture in Merkel’s office, behind her is a Christmas tree decorated with red ribbons and baubles.
And now the story of the GDR as a model for recycling has been taken up again by Katja Hoyer. She is a historian, comes from Guben, lives in England, where she does research at the renowned King’s College, and has just published the highly acclaimed book “Diesseits der Mauer”, with which she wants to tell a new history of the GDR, one that also dedicated to the relatively large area of private life, “in which one could shape one’s life without coming into conflict with the state,” as she said in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung.
Katja Hoyer just has a text on her blog „Zeitgeist“ published, in which she addresses the recycling system in the GDR, it was called Sero, short for secondary raw material collection. She begins her text with a description of how her grandmother opens a present, carefully removing the tape, carefully folding the paper and setting it aside before examining what is inside. Later she carefully ironed the paper on the lowest heat setting.
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In Germany, too, people stuffed, mended and ironed wrapping paper
As a child, she thought this was one of her grandmother’s strange behaviors, writes Katja Hoyer. Looking back, however, she believes that it was a product of her grandmother’s life in East Germany. Just like Angela Merkel.
You are both wrong, even if Sero is really a role model and there was no such thing in Germany. But I, born deep in the west in 1962, can say that darning, patching and wrapping paper were ironed on my side of the wall too. My grandma, my mother and – yes – I also collected and collect paper bags from the bakery, which can be useful if you want to pack a sandwich, we collect plastic bags. After my grandmother died, we found drawers full in one of her closets.
Okay, I don’t iron used wrapping paper, but I have to admit: there’s a big cardboard box under my bed that’s full of them. Good paper, folded nicely without the ugly white rips that cheap ones get where you fold them. I just can’t get it out of me. And that 78 years after the end of the Second World War.
#case #GDR