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The first diary I found in Berlin belonged to Gudrun L. a girl who wrote a few lines each day. It begins in 1939 and ends in 1944. I could barely read it because it was written in a handwriting that was no longer used after the war. She described her life with annotations that seemed intended to pin down the day, with the precision required to leave a mark so as not to lose it. From time to time she described anodyne facts (what she had eaten, the amount of coal they burned, the homework she had been given at school), which only at the end of the diary made sense, by accumulation and reading between the lines. She does not want to write it down, perhaps because it would be going too far, but she is afraid. The only thing I have found about her is that she participated in some amateur plays in East Berlin and later worked as a teacher. Gudrun’s diary was in a box full of old books, it looked like someone had cleaned out a school library. They were part of the rejects that scrap dealers have failed to sell to antique dealers, about to be sold by weight, to be recycled. A good friend of mine describes the surviving of materials and works on this progression: flat-emptying companies, antique stores and museums. I like it when she also closes the cycle by saying that museum collections will also end up being sold, that we store too many things and that good conservation is beginning to be unaffordable. Someday many museums pieces will return to the shops of antique dealers, the overstock will be sent to scrap dealers and then, the dumpster is very close. This is the true history of art, she says. I don’t know if Gudrun L. left other diaries. It could easily be that they are the only things that remain of hers.