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A remote corner of the SPIEGEL headquarters on Hamburg's Ericusspitze.
There are moving boxes and office furniture everywhere.
I'm supposed to sort out all my things from my former office here.
From now on there are no more offices, at least none of their own.
The hybrid workplace future is suddenly becoming a reality.
From now on I have to book a desk for myself using a »tool«.
We were assigned a “keyboard to go” in the “starter package”.
We'll soon be moving from desk to desk like nomads.
There is no place for personal items.
My nine boxes are at the very back.
I stare at the accumulated work of thirty years in the SPIEGEL Group, wrapped in cardboard.
I carefully open the first box.
Two men from the moving company are waiting next to me, impatiently stepping from one leg to the other.
I am probably not the only one who has to part with your files, data carriers and memories.
I ask for a container for disposal.
The moving people create a container on castors that can effortlessly accommodate two hip bathtubs.
Then leave me alone.
As slowly as a funeral, if you leave a relative alone at the coffin for a moment, they withdraw.
I'm supposed to call when I'm done.
Christmas party photos - the colleague is no longer alive
In the first box there are only files. I don't know why I dragged this around with me for so long. I throw them in the aluminum container. Then I open the second box, it smells a little musty. I fish out a small poster from the very bottom. It has the signatures of students on it. It was a difficult class with precarious circumstances that I followed with the camera for over six months during rehearsals for a piece by Schiller. I even won a prize for this television production. But that doesn't really count. I remember every single face of the young people and their sad life stories. What have become of them? You should be around 30 by now.
When I started working there weren't any computers in the office.
We wrote our texts on typewriters, we talked a lot on the phone.
Interview requests were still sent out by letter.
TV crews were still stared at back then.
The first radio telephones also attracted a lot of attention.
When the Wall came down, all of the journalists suddenly carried these things around with them.
My iPhone is buzzing.
I have to laugh when I think of the heavy cell phones that people carried around like backpack radios back in the war.
If someone had told me that we would work from home with these tiny devices because of a pandemic, that we would communicate via an "app" via video switch that could be attended by more than a hundred people, I would have it as dystopian nonsense dismissed.
In the next cardboard box I find photos from a Christmas party.
We all wear festive white tuxedos.
At that time there was still our company band, I was the singer.
The guitarist sits next to me, we laugh into the camera.
About a year after this recording, he committed suicide.
I carefully pack the pictures in the box with the things I am taking home.
In the future, I will no longer be sitting in the same office with the same colleagues.
It was very funny on my last station, also because I really liked the person I was talking to.
It wasn't always so fun in the course of my eventful professional life.
You didn't want to meet all of the office mates for a wine in the evening.
Some of them smelled strong, but most were nice.
The moving people accompany me to the car
The next box is damn heavy. From this I lift a thick steel plate: a demonstration object from the German Aerospace Center. It had melted in the Andalusian sun; For our scientific contribution to alternative energy sources, the researchers bundled sunbeams with a parabolic mirror in front of our camera and thus made the steel drip. I put the steel plate in the box with the photos from the Christmas party, plus a red hard hat. It comes from a demolition expert whom we accompanied for a report. Unfortunately he had miscalculated, and the skyscraper he was about to blow up did not fall as calculated. It collapsed a meter from the house next door, in which a colleague of ours was sitting. He recorded five small cameraswhich the demolition engineer had blown up along with the skyscraper. Nothing happened to my colleague, but we were very worried about him at the time.
I realize that I've been sorting for a long time and throw a lot of things into the container in a fitful manner.
I have to break up now, otherwise I would spend days here with my memories.
The moving people gracefully accompany me and my two remaining boxes to the car, nod again in appreciation, gently close the tailgate and then leave me alone with my misery.
At home I first put the boxes in the cellar.
From now on I am completely in the home office due to the pandemic.
Perhaps I will open it at the end of this dark omicron winter, when light can be seen again on the horizon and I can look into the bright, new future.
Without crying.
