Lothars Wohnung (2011/14)

There I was, standing in this empty apartment, where nothing reminded me of its old occupant. Contrary to expectations, without all the furniture and with these brightly painted walls, the apartment seemed smaller than before, not bigger. I was supposed to take a few quick photos of the renovated state - for the workmen, for the search for a tenant. It turned into several days, the lens focused on the no longer existing motifs of the past.

My father-in-law was a hermit in busy Reuterkiez, Quarter of Neukölln in Berlin. The fact that the world outside his abode was changing so rapidly seemed uncanny to him. Shortly after I photographed him in his apartment for the first time, I drove Lothar to a doctor's appointment. On the way back, we got to talking about the division of the city, which had been overcome for more than 20 years, and it turned out that he had not visited the eastern part of his city even once in that time. I offered him a little jaunt there, but he declined. Not out of modesty - he just didn't want to.

He left the third-floor apartment in the backyard only to go shopping and, as long as his legs still allowed it, to ride his bike to his allotment. Otherwise, he preferred to spend his time alone at home in his apartment, which had hardly changed in the thirty years he had lived there.