O! How happy I am! 

After the successful release of THE NEVER ENDING WALL / THE BERLIN WALL TRAIL (Benteli Verlag, 2009), on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I would like to present a new photographic work on this website.

"O! How happy I am!" is a photo series of 52 pictures taken between July 2009 and March 2010 in an apartment of a workman’s house which was built in 1905 in the Berlin city district named Wedding. Käthe K., who labeled one of her souvenir pictures in 1939 with the words "O! How happy I am!", died in January 2010. The 1917-born Berliner Käthe K. grew up in the district of Neukölln. Already at the age of 24, she was a war widow, as the photo with the words "Christmas Eve 1942" shows: under the decorated Christmas tree there is the portrait of her husband, a soldier missing on the Russian Front - just two years after she had written in red ink: O! How happy I am! Käthe K. had no children. According to her wishes she rests in an unmarked grave in an urn cemetery in the district of Wedding.  
 
I owe Käthe K. the idea to venture the Berlin Wall Trail alone on foot, during winter. It is due to her, that I read the Magic Mountain and the Buddenbrooks in German, as she went blind several years ago. Käthe was familiar to me; she was like an adoptive-grandmother. After her death her, distant relatives acted as economically as possible: Her furniture and objects, which she had lovingly accumulated during her lifetime, were thrown out of her third-floor window. When I came back from a trip to Switzerland packed with bags, my eyes fell on the spots among the snow and granulate on the lawn: the stopper of a hot water bottle, a nail file, and an old key. In this brutal way, I realized how her death had been settled.  

I refuse to come to terms with the thought, that these paltry scattered remnants on the grass should be the remainders of her life.

"O! How happy I am!" is a tribute to Käthe K., whose remains rest under the sand of a Berlin cemetery.  
   
If you have questions for any form of publication, please contact me: do.de.rivaz @gmail.com

©: Dominique de Rivaz, April 2010