Father in a Suitcase: Willi Gött, 1919 - 1992

2005

30cm x 40cm x 8cm

 

Description

A small brown suitcase, cardboard with worn fake leather finish, bought in a charity shop as a container for a life story told through objects and images

 

Collection of photographs and documents, a sleeveless sweater in cable stitch, a brown jumper with Norwegian pattern, both knitted by my mother in the late 1940s, two silk scarves for best, two white handkerchiefs with embroidered monograms of him and his father. Photographs of his life chosen and arranged in a leather bound album, the images partly covered in tracing paper.

 

Themes, Comments and Storylines

Homage to a person who if family myth and my own memories can be trusted, was insignificant and marginalized in his life time.

 

Unfolding the garments, their smallness touches me.

 

My father was the youngest child in a large family and according to my mother exploited and taken advantage of by everybody. One of his tasks at the parental home was to look after a sheep. My mother insisted that he should at least get the sheep's wool to reward him for his troubles. The wool was duly taken to be processed and my mother received it ready for knitting. She made a tank top in cable stitch for my father that he wore from before I was born until close to his death. While the tank top shrunk with repeated washes, my father expanded as a result of the 'economic miracle' in Germany. My father never got rid of that sheep and my mother never lost her tightly knitted grip over him.

 

 

“A French sea-army jumper which used to belong to my first boyfriend. I remember wearing it and borrowing it from him, sleeping with it and smelling it (the smell was very important!). I like wearing other people’s jumpers. It is like a second skin. The strange thing is that my father had a similar jumper which had been given to him by an English sea-army man who rescued him from the sea in Dunkerke, when the boat my father was on was bombed and sunk into the Channel. My father started swimming towards England (he was the sole survivor, with the captain of the boat) and was rescued by a small English boat and given a dark blue jumper to keep him warm. For years afterwards, my mother had to mend this jumper until it fell apart completely.”

 

From my correspondence

 

 

“I've kept his most loved cardigan. He had simple, almost monastic tastes. He hated clothes, especially new ones. He only got to love the cardigan as it grew old and threadbare so I darned the holes and mended the ragged cuffs so it would last a little longer. He died soon after. The cardigan lies in my jumper drawer rather like a transitional object in reverse, reminding me of his permanent absence.”

 

 Attfield, Judith (2000), Wild Things: The Material Cultures of Everyday Life, Berg, Oxford, pp.149/150