Autobiographical Fiction: Dagmar and Dietrich’s Tapetenwechsel

By: Christine Sweeney

You lived here with Dietrich for sixty years. Dietrich was the first to go. Two years later, you died. The average life expectancy for German males is 78.7; for Frauen like you, it’s 83.3. You were both 80, more or less I imagine. 

You lived in my apartment on Reuterstrasse, by the canal but not on the canal. It’s 50m2 with a large room suited for a living room or reading room or writing room for a single person, or a bedroom for a couple. A teeny shoebox-shaped room sits next door with wooden floors and wooden ceiling, that is styrofoam. It is suitable as a spare room when one half of a couple needs solitude, or a single bedroom, the width of a double bed for a single person. The kitchen is spacious enough for a host and two guests to share a simple meal that requires no more than two pots.

When I found your apartment, each room had two to three bunk beds and an aged pizza in a mini-fridge that was top-of-the-line when you bought it in 1987. Empty cans of energy drinks were smashed and left in a hurry next to unused cleaning supplies. The ravers moved in after you died. “We moved here for the techno”. Gordeon, the upstairs neighbour told me he misses you. He helped you with your squeaky linen closet door. It still squeaks. “It’s a dump, but with the rental freeze, the landlord won’t touch it. Take it or leave it,” Vincent the broker said. 

I paid a man with bleached hair and a 60 year old machine sander to strip your oxenblood (Ochsenblut) floors bare. Then I steamed and peeled away 60 years of wallpaper. A man I knew helped me. But he wanted to be clear, “I will peel this wallpaper with you everyday until it is gone. But I don’t love you.” He said that. Unprompted.

Each day we arrived at dawn and worked until he tired of peeling wallpaper for someone he did not love. “No one has shown this apartment any love in 60 years, unless wallpaper is a love language,” I thought. Peeling wallpaper is not a love language, but perhaps putting it up ... was a love language.

You moved here with Dietrich after the wedding, just before the Wall went up. There were no children. You cared for your own walls, with new patterns by the decade. First, you lived with the floral left from the fifties, a modern but dusty displaced toile. But I didn’t find that layer until I steamed off the avocado green graphics from the seventies, before reaching the flower power print from the sixties. I peeled each layer off, decade by decade. Rauhfasertapete was the textured, tasteful top. Rauhfasertapete. A popcorn-patterned stucco simulation.

One night before I moved in, I stayed until 2:00am peeling on my own. I collapsed on a smelly couch left in my living room, but your bedroom. I heard a noise and saw a flicker from my bedroom, but your living room. Was it you? I assumed it was.

I imagined you and Dietrich putting up a new layer on the ones– 1961; 1971; 1981. Did you both enjoy putting up the wallpaper? Did you agree on the patterns together? I found threads in the baseboards. Did you have carpet or were you a seamstress, or both? Did you have plants on your balcony, could you keep them alive? I saw the drawing of an owl taped inside a kitchen cupboard. It said “Liebe Tante.” I sent a photo of it to my friend with the caption, “Look Hoo I found.” The joke doesn’t translate well in German. Who drew this for you?

Deutsch is familiar enough to me that I am no longer charmed, but I still don’t understand. A stale but steady but static love. 

Tapetenwechsel, change of wallpaper. The process of changing the wallpaper. When you stay in the same place, within the same walls, can you change them? Can you change while staying within them? Ich brauch Tapetenwechsel I need a change of wallpaper. It’s an idiom for needing a change of scenery. Oh you were so literal.

I don’t want to redirect the conversation towards myself, Dagmar, but my family and our homes have always been very transient. We never stayed anywhere long enough to be bothered to change the wallpaper. Do you know, I moved seven times before the age of seventeen? The first thing my mother did whenever we moved to a new house, a new school, a new town, was put up the drapes she had hand-sewn to match the armchair she hand-upholstered. “Drapes make a home,” she said. My mother’s mother, she was about your age, moved all over the place for my grandfather’s job as an engineer or a spy or whatever he was. She had a knack for knowing the difference between what she could and could not control. She moved so much that she refused to move anything at all. She insisted on buying an Airstream trailer.

“I’d rather keep my own space clean than live in strangers’ houses,” she’d say, “you don’t know what they do in there.” Fair enough.

A static space for her copper pots, lapel pins, and aluminum Christmas tree. On the road. It’s not easy to hang wallpaper in a trailer, I imagine. But you see, they didn’t need wallpaper to change places. Through the changes of coasts and houses and parking spaces, my mother kept my father. My grandmother kept her spy. A steady but static but sturdy love.

Advice columns say experiencing change together keeps relationships alive. Does changing wallpaper help? You stayed on Nansenstrasse all those years. Were you content with Dietrich, or content with your apartment, or both? Content enough that you didn’t need to change anything but the wallpaper?