The first diary I found in Berlin belonged to Gudrun L. a small girl (or a grown girl) from Schöneberg who wrote almost every day. It begins in 1939 and ends in 1944. I had a hard time understanding its contents because it was written in a highly geometric Sütterlin (Sütterlin is a calligraphy that was abandoned after the war). Gudrun describes her life with annotations that seemed intended to mark the day, to place it precisely, like someone who leaves a sign so as not to lose it. In between, from time to time, she tells us anodyne facts (the food, the amount of coal they have burned, the homework she has been ordered to do), which only at the end of the diary – by accumulation and reading between the lines – acquire meaning.
She does not want to put it into words, she never makes it explicit, perhaps because it would be too much to admit it to herself, but she is afraid. As the war advances, propaganda sometimes fails to conceal the adults’ anxiety, the rumors or the intuition of a child who is no longer a child. I do not know if Gudrun kept other diaries. It is possible that it is the only thing that remains of her (Gudrun, I have your diary. I will keep it as long as I can).
The only information I have found about her is that she performed in some amateur plays in East Berlin and later worked as a teacher. Gudrun’s diary was in a box full of old books, as if someone had emptied a school library. They were among the volumes that would no longer be offered for sale, the books that scrap dealers had unsuccessfully tried to sell to antique dealers, about to be sold by weight for recycling.
A good friend of mine describes the survival of materials and works on this scale: emptying companies, antique dealers’ stores and museums. I like how she closes the loop by saying that museum collections will also end up being sold, that there are too many museums, that we keep too many things, and that the good maintenance of these collections is unaffordable. She believes that one day, many pieces will return to antique dealers, then —due to sheer excess— end up with ragpickers, and from there, it is only a short step to the recycling bin. This is the true history of art, she says.