Leipzig's answer to the 'Mary Celeste' provides a ghostly echo from the period of communist dominance, writes Derek Scally
THE WALL calendar is from 1988, as are the bread rolls in the shopping net. On the kitchen table is a bottle of East German “Hit” cola and “Marella” margarine, on the sideboard some letters and the ID card of a 24-year-old man.
It is Germany’s answer to the Mary Celeste: an apartment abandoned when Leipzig was still in East Germany and completely untouched – until now.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in 20 years of renovating apartments,” said architect Mark Aretz who stumbled upon the 40m square apartment in the Crottendorfer Strasse while renovating the block for its new owners.
“It was completely untouched by the West and smelled of old East German cleaning fluid and brown coal.” It was a very basic apartment even by GDR standards with a melamine-top table, a 1960s washing machine and a 1950s dresser with aluminium cutlery and two potato peelers in the front drawer.
The apartment had no bathroom and the tenant bathed in a zinc tub. Clothes still hung in the wardrobe, bedclothes covered the bed.
The architect declines to name the tenant, but documents found in the apartment suggest he had regular run-ins with the East German authorities and served two jail terms.
In a letter a woman, possibly a sister, writes: “What is it you want in Potsdam? Are you going to start your play-acting again? You might as well register right now for your new prison cell.” “From what he left behind, it’s clear he had no intention of coming back,” said Aretz.
“I gather he refused to toe the line in the GDR and disappeared the first chance he got – some time in late 1988 or early 1989 – when people were fleeing through Hungary or to the West German embassy in Prague.” While some East Germans abandoned their apartments in the months before the Berlin Wall fell, most homes were later reclaimed or had a second life as a squat.
After documenting the contents with a photographer, construction workers moved in to break the 20-year spell in the dusty apartment last occupied when there were two German states.
“The individual items in the apartment weren’t particularly interesting for museums; what was interesting was the untouched ensemble,” said Mr Aretz. “We’ve renovated the apartment for a new tenant, this time with a bathroom.”