A Mandate and a Lamp
Where People Find Shelter

• Text zum Nachlesen

  The Mandate and the Lamp about Themselves

  We are a former mandate and a lamp. One might think there couldn‘t be more disparate objects than us. She is a piece of paper, printed, stamped, and signed, and I am a lighting device, best suited for illuminating desks. Yet we have found a common theme. We both recall the challenging housing conditions in the post-war era in the Siegerland region. Many homes were destroyed at the time and the arrival of many people, particularly from the former East German territories, exacerbated the housing shortage.

  However, our perspectives on this were quite different. The mandate authorized the inspector Wilhelm Fries to allocate living space in vacant but also occupied houses to the forced migrants – without the consent of the owners. The mandate was thus presented to seize housing.

  For some, it was coercion, but for others, it meant not being homeless. Like for my former owner, I, the lamp, belonged to her deceased husband, and she took me along on her flight from the Red Army – I was in her suitcase when she arrived in Weidenau and was eventually assigned such a dwelling.

  It was the room of a missing soldier. And it would turn out that she would live well and long with his parents, beyond the acute housing shortage. So, I wasn‘t discarded when she passed away in her eighties. No, I am even, as the family says today, „honored“, now in the fourth generation.

  Above all, I am glad to be able to tell the former mandate about it. Because she naturally only remembers the moments of confiscation. She never experienced how good neighborliness, and even friendships, arose from it. She was not a welcome thing. She carries the burden of having done what was necessary – whether one wants or not – because of the housing shortage at the time.

  Zusatzinfos

  Inspector Wilhelm Fries was tasked with using this mandate, issued in Weidenau on December 8, 1948, to provide housing for forced migrants, and he was authorized, as the document states, to exercise „immediate coercion“.

  The lamp had moved into a similarly confiscated room in Weidenau with a refugee from Zittau. She shared the kitchen and toilet with the couple who already lived there. However, the forced cohabitation harmonized, she became a member of the family, and was later called „Grandma“ by the couple‘s granddaughter. She lived there until her death.

  The Upper Castle („Oberes Schloss“) to the Mandate and the Lamp

  I am not a single object; I am an entire castle, the Upper Castle. I am currently offering space to you, the mandate and the lamp, and also to you, dear guests, I offer space for walking around, staying, and simply being. I have been doing this since the Middle Ages, and people have stayed in me at various times.

  The exhibition „The Upper Castle: Architectural history drawn“, which you are currently standing in, informs you about my construction history and various uses throughout the centuries. However, you, mandate and lamp, remind me of something else: After I became a museum in 1905, apartments were soon set up inside me for employees. Then, after the war had left Siegen in ruins, some of my rooms were temporarily converted into emergency accommodations. This was for people urgently in need of housing, similar to those you mentioned.

  Fundamentally, I am a house, and so I gladly welcomed all these people. For us houses, there is nothing better than keeping people warm and dry, and protecting them. It is through this that we also come alive.

  However, that is just my perspective as a building. I cannot truly empathize with the affected people.

  Can you? And do you believe that today, in the worst-case scenario, it would still be conceivable to arrange housing for people in the living spaces of other people?