On our kitchen cupboard are various preserving jars from France, in which we store sugar, rice, and cookie cutters for Christmas cookies.
With her typical attention to detail, Petra has integrated postcards from the 1990s into the lids, showing various motifs that have long since disappeared: fantastic, snow-covered views of New York buildings such as the Chrysler Building.
Or photographic documents from the transitional period in East Berlin after the fall of the Wall, before the establishment of a unified Berlin administration and “reunification.” These images show double street signs with the reintroduced original street names and, above them, the street names from the GDR era, now crossed out with a red line. Another motif shows West German security forces—not soldiers—in front of Schinkel’s Monument to the Unknown Soldier, where GDR soldiers normally performed the changing of the guard with impressive goose steps.
Or look at the image of the GDR state symbol on the façade of the Palace of the Republic, from which the hammer, compass, and wreath of ears of corn were removed shortly before reunification.
Nevertheless, for many people in the former GDR, the building was an important symbol of their connection to the “workers’ and farmers’ state”.
It has since then been replaced by the Humboldt Forum, an architectural reference to the Prussian “Berlin palace” that originally stood there.
Small glimmers of hope into the past. Captured moments of the transition period between different eras, captured in the locking ring of the lid of a preserving jar.
An everyday food container and at the same time a canvas for the representation of personally experienced history.