Oma trauert
(Grandma’s mourning)
Autumn 2006
24cm x 17cm x4 cm
Description
Wooden box, photograph of my grandmother taken the day her daughter died in a bombing raid, black doll’s dress, a small box of Victorian mourning pins. The writing on the back of the photograph: "Trauer um unser liebes Kind Martha (mourning our dear child Martha), 30 September 1944." My aunt Martha had got married exactly six years earlier, on 30 September 1938. Her husband went missing on the Eastern front, presumed dead, and never knew that his wife had died. My grandfather who took the photograph died in a motorcycle accident shortly after the war: the leather helmet he was wearing did not protect him from fatal head injuries. I used to visit their resting places with my grandmother when I was a child.
Themes, Comments and Storylines
Grief, deep sadness, desolation, mourning, the loss of light.
"In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century, fabrics appropriate for mourning garments, were black or similarly dark in color as well as non-reflective. People in mourning were expected to wear dull and non-figured fabrics, avoiding shiny silks and reflective jewelry [...]
Before the nineteenth century most elements of mourning garb were made at home, but black pins for mourning had to be directly purchased from local merchants. [...] A widow who retired into mourning would be expected to send someone else, a servant or slave, perhaps, to make the necessary purchase rather than be seen in public herself."
Mary C. Beaudry, Findings: the material culture of needlework and sewing, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, p.26
"A great-aunt was dying, everyone was up in the bedroom with her. Sitting alone in a highly-ornamented room; heavy silk curtains looped with sashes, thick lace curtains underneath them, a huge aspidistra, gilt-framed pictures, oval photographs of old people. I knew she would be off to Heaven and sat, wondering if I might catch a glimpse of her through the curtains, ascending."
BBC Radio 4 Memory Experience 2006
"My earliest memory is sitting on the floor of the second bedroom in my house when I was 2 years old, and looking up at the bed in which my mother was laying. I ate some of her grapes. She was terminally ill. I still remember the swirling brown and white texture of the carpet, and the gold-colour curtains, and the smell and stillness..."
BBC Radio 4 Memory Experience 2006
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