Olympianista

By the early 1940s, the United States was ready for war. The attack by the Japanese Empire on the Pearl Harbor base had a serious impact on public opinion, and the USA entered the Second World War with all its might on 7 December 1941. At the same time, the propaganda machine was set in motion and the fight against Hitler's Germany became a general mobilisation in all walks of life, such as film, literature and mass media. And everyone was pressed into service: Hollywood directors such as William Wyler, who dealt with the bombing of Wilhelmshaven in February 1943 in the 1944 documentary "The Memphis Belle", writers such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, actors such as James Stewart. Even the comic book heroes Superman, Captain America and Donald Duck were sent to the front. And Wonder Woman also dedicated herself to the fight against the Nazis in her strips. Vogue also saw its national task in propaganda. The US fashion magazine commissioned Lee Miller to report on...

3 November 1964 was a gloomy, cold day in Berlin. For a good year, since JFK's assassination in Dallas, the world had additionally been in turmoil, and in the divided front city anyway. A little distraction was good, and what keeps the masses as busy as football? The following afternoon, the qualifying match for the 1966 World Cup between Germany and Sweden was scheduled to take place in the Olympic Stadium. The Scandinavian team was accommodated at the Berlin Hilton in Budapester Straße, one of the top addresses for accommodation and, in a way, a bulwark against communism. For on the very day of the opening of the hotel in the western part of the city, on 1 December 1958, Nikita Khrushchev had issued his infamous Berlin ultimatum. In the noble Berlin Hilton, all the material advantages of the West were demonstrated to the guests. There was no shortage of things to do in the frontline city of yesteryear, which a good 15 years earlier had still had to be supplied by the Americans vi...

The mail art scene mourns the loss of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. The pioneer of conceptual art and visual poetry passed away on February 26 at the age of 92. Together with her husband Robert Rehfeldt (1931-1993), she used the mechanical typewriter as a cultural technique and built up an international network from the GDR. She retired after the fall of communism in 1989, but was rediscovered in the 2010s. To mark her 80th birthday, the Weserburg Museum in Bremen exhibited her typewritings in 2012. Wolf-Rehfeldt was a hidden champion of typewriter art for a long time, but she never went away. Anyone who could and wanted to see her knew about her typewritings, prints, collages and paintings. She remained hidden from many others outside the GDR for a long time. Yet the artist, who was born in Wurzen in 1932, had an extensive body of work to offer between 1960 and 1990.  It was only in the present that she received attention. In 2017, she became visible as part of "documenta 14"; in spri...

Monica, Erika and Gabriele are not old hat: Everyone is confronted with a mechanical typewriter - in the heyday of analogue office work, the manufacturers named the models one with their main users - at least once.  You discover one of these bulky Olympia, Torpedo or Triumph-Adler machines in your attic or cellar, and you don't really know what to do with it: pick it up, put it on your shelf as a decoration, type on it for fun - or throw it out with the bulky waste? The likelihood of such a machine being found is quite high in north-western Germany, where more than 20,000 people were employed in this highly productive industry in the Olympia factories over 50 years ago. The typewriter reliably handled all correspondence by hand. With the advent of digital typing at the latest, the triumph of the computer was unstoppable and the typewriter gradually disappeared from offices, bureaus and editorial offices.  Generally speaking, the new cultural technology also changed its users. ...