Sunday Morning: The Bamboo Blinds | nd-aktuell.de

The bamboo blinds have been standing behind the disused coal oven for 20 years, as long as I have lived in Wedding. There is no better place if you want to forget something within your own four walls. I could have seen them from bed, but I have put a table in front of the oven with a pile of packaging on it that I don’t want to or can’t throw away because you need it for warranty reasons.

I recently read that the Berlin city cleaning department organizes so-called neighborhood days. Citizens come to a nearby intersection, are greeted enthusiastically by BSR employees with a handshake and a pat on the back, and hand in their bulky waste. That’s the theory. In practice, it remains questionable whether anyone will find their way there, because for many Berliners, “down the street and then left” means a trip around the world. When it comes to furniture disposal, most people just make it into the yard, into the hallway of the front building or onto the sidewalk and then they run out of strength and drop what they are carrying.

Frank and Julia have a car, one whose dimensions suggest that it is suitable for transport. They help me carry the bulky waste from the hallway to the car, and while I’m doing that I call out to Frank: “Look, we carried the blinds in when you were filming the documentary and now we’re carrying them out.”

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Back then, Frank was on his way to becoming a filmmaker in a class of his own, and his first project was a documentary about my move from Friedrichshain to Wedding, with interviews and atmospheric music. A great idea, but the other moving helpers saw it as an “excuse” to “make art” so they didn’t have to carry anything.

In any case, I saw it as a sign of commitment to his project that he had a stair lift built and, wearing a peaked cap and equipped with a megaphone, drove up and down from the ground floor to the second floor and constantly shouted “And action!” ‘ shouted while the others carried up the refrigerator or the bamboo blinds.

Frank doesn’t respond to my sentimental exclamation. Maybe he doesn’t want to be reminded of the film project because it wasn’t a success. I watch the car drive two streets away to “Kieztag”. I have no idea what will happen to the bamboo blinds now. Maybe one of the BSR employees can do something with it and take it home with them. It’s quite possible that they will be burned because no one wants such old, dusty blinds, not even regular visitors to the NochMall department store, where the BSR successfully sells bulky waste. This is a devastating prospect. For a moment I consider taking her back, but what to do with it? I have now put something else behind the oven. For the next bulky waste tour. Sometime.

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