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Erich Rüba has set up an office like before in the Weßlingen community gallery - with a typewriter and inkwell.
© MICHÈLE KIRNER
Those interested can currently experience everyday office life without computers, printers and video conferences in the Weßlingen community gallery.
“The analog office – office equipment from times gone by” is the name of the new exhibition that Erich Rüba has put together.
Weßling
– In the exhibition “The Analogue Office – Office Equipment from Bygone Times” in the Weßlingen Community Gallery, Erich Rüba takes visitors on a journey into the era of inkwells, card index boxes, slide rules and mechanical typewriters.
It can be seen until the end of April.
On the cradle of the bulky telephone there is a receiver with a speech and earpiece, the connection is made via a rotary dial: The younger generation probably won't remember these dinosaurs of telephone systems with unpretentious names like "W 48".
Equally unthinkable in the digital age are the small accounting books with company figures meticulously entered by hand.
Relics such as slide rules are also presented, which even for Rüba are “a closed book”.
Other exhibits bring back memories for the now 70-year-old of his early career in the “Line and Drawing Department” of the German Federal Post Office.
He says he can still vividly see “the musty furniture in the offices of his older colleagues” as he felt it back then as a 21-year-old.
On the clunky office tables “the screw-on pencil sharpener, the old stapler, the letter opener and the inkwell were scattered around.”
None of the exhibits that can now be seen are musty.
Not the antique desk on which the mechanical Continental typewriter sits, flanked by an unpowered letter scale, an office lamp, a fountain pen and a rollerball pen.
These days, hardly anyone dips the fountain pen into the “Pelikan 4001” inkwell, which is displayed in a display case next to delicate compasses and sharpened pencils and colored pencils, without making a mess.
The typewriter symbolized progress at the end of the 19th century - and Erich Rüba still remembers the laborious use of this device.
Of the carbon copies that had to be carefully filed into folders.
And alas, he made a typing mistake and then the typing process had to be repeated.
Most of it comes from a Weßlingen publishing house
Many of the items on display are discarded office materials from the “Kunst- und Verlagsanstalt Krause, Grämer & Co.”, which sold 3-5 souvenir and mourning pictures on Main Street until the turn of the millennium.
In 2008, Margrit Grämer bequeathed the rarities to the community gallery, including index cards with addresses from Belgium to what is now Sri Lanka to Canada.
The international bestsellers were kitschy images of saints in which angels watch over two children, a nun reverently holds the Bible to her heart or believers kneel in despair before the crucified Jesus.
The pictures were cut using the “Zeiss Ikon” cutting machine from 1940 – although “machine” is almost an exaggeration, because the knife had to be guided by hand with great care and the paper placed precisely.
With telephone conferences from one end of the world to the other and the convenience of typing on a computer with deletion, insertion and copying at the touch of a button, the exhibition transports visitors to a truly different life.
“The analogue office – office equipment from times gone by” can be seen at Hauptstrasse 57 until April 28th.
It is open on Fridays and Sundays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
(mk)