I only ever went walking on Sundays. In 1985, my husband Rolf and I were running a wholesale cheese shop and a market stall. It was hard work – six days a week, from morning to evening. Sunday was our day off, so, with our two children grown up, the two of us would catch a bus and go for walks around the city. I would wear my fur coat. I had my everyday clothes for work days, but my coat was special. Nobody wears real fur any more, but we did back then. It was cold; you can see the snow on the ground.
Essen is an industrial city. I’m standing on a road bridge that spans a motorway – it cuts Essen in two, north and south. We lived on the edge of the city in a leafy garden neighbourhood called Margarethenhöhe. At the time, the photographer, Rudi Meisel, lived around the corner: his flat overlooked our balcony. He was a student, and we had got to know him a little from our market stall. Yet I never knew he’d taken a photograph of me that day, and neither did he.
Many years later, when we had become friends, he dropped a get-well card for Rolf through our letterbox; he had just come out of hospital. It was a postcard made from one of his own photographs following an exhibition years earlier. To my utter amazement, there I was. It was a total coincidence. The picture was just a passing snapshot, a reflex, Rudi told me; he took it quickly, spoke to no one and moved on, not knowing if the light or the composition were any good.
It’s such an ordinary scene that I sometimes wonder why people care. But this sort of spontaneous “street” photography depicts real life, and that’s always interesting. It tells you what everyday life was like back then. I often think I should know the two girls in the foreground, but I don’t recognise them. And I’ve always wondered about the case with the American flag on it: it was a real icon in Germany then, so it could have caught Rudi’s eye.
The picture was part of a project he was doing, photographing people in West and East Germany, and comparing the two. We weren’t particularly interested in East Germany then – it seemed so far away, and my main impression of it was of a country whose people were suffering. But many East Germans will tell you otherwise.
We did visit once, in the 1960s: a distant uncle in East Berlin. We took a bus from West Berlin across the border, just for the day. My abiding memory is of no flowers, no colour and no fun. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, we visited the former East often, particularly cities such as Dresden and the northern lake district of Mecklenburg. The people and the scenery were wonderful.
We still live in the same flat in Essen, and have now been there for 50 years. We retired a couple of years ago, but still go walking.
- Rudi Meisel: Landsleute 1977-1987 – Two Germanys is at C/O Berlin until 1 November.
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