Ode auf den Stuhl

Das ist mein Corona Stuhl- this is my Corona Chair. It stands in front of my small temporary desk, which used to be an underused side table with a tiny work space of 120 x 40 centimetres.  Of course, this is not a professional office chair. It doesn’t turn, it doesn’t swivel. It cannot move up and down. It would probably fail any ergonomic test. Zero points. Or maybe two points for attitude. Whatever, this is now my office chair, the chair on which I sit out a large part of the Corona quarantine. 

The chair consists of steel tubes and light brown leather and was manufactured in the mid-1970s. It comes from a country and a place which both do no longer exist. The country was the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the place was the Palast der Republik. This was a kind of people’s house with a bowling alley, an art gallery, a concert hall, several restaurants and even a parliamentary assembly. Not a bad idea actually. A citizen’s house, unfortunately ruled by the Diktatur des Proletariats. 

After the Palast was demolished in the 1990s to make space for rebuilding the former Habsburg castle, the chair which once stood in one of its restaurants, ended up in the Datcha of my mother, a small garden with a shed in the outskirts of Berlin. There it stood for around 25 years as part of a thrown together ensemble of tables, chairs and other pre-hipster urban gardening essentials. It looked rather unremarkable in its original weathered beige corduroy cover. When my ageing mother gave up the Datcha last year she asked me to take the chair. Initially I refused. Why should I take this ugly chair and where would I put it? There was no space in our flat, and no space to hide it either. My mother was insistent and so I took it home. The corduroy had to go. I went to a local upholsterer who did quite a stunning job with some leftover light brown leather. The ugly chair suddenly looked like a beautiful Bauhaus swan. Still, there was no space apart from our bedroom where it stood as a transit place for clothes before finding their way into the wardrobe or the washing machine. So it was until the Corona quarantine when the chair became an essential part of my new life.

Why do I write about this chair when there are so many more important things to worry about? Because it is the place where I do my worrying and where I do my thinking of the future. Because it has a story which is also a bit of my story. Because it reminds me that forgotten things can become essential. Because it is practical, good, simple. It does its job, without cables, WIFI and software updates. For me the chair is also a reminder of a vision for a public space that no longer exists, that never really worked, but which is interesting nonetheless. This vision may deserve some upcycling, just like the chair did.

P.S. It’s actually pretty comfortable too. Here is a quick amateur portrait of the chair.