We spent a few hours at the antique postcard shop last weekend and amongst a haul of ~200 cards I bought this one:
It’s a lovely bird card, probably 40+ years old, and it would have gone into my ‘generic animal’ stash for future Postcrossing use. While I make a concerted effort to not buy used cards, this time I missed this one. Here’s what is written on the back:
A message from Elfriede to Ruth, written July 27 1989. It’s typed and not stamped, and this with the lack of address shows it must have been mailed in an envelope. It’s a nice message, if a little terse, but reading between the lines we see these women were very familiar.
I love the last line, an evocative glimpse of life in Berlin in those days: In Berlin is all the same with the wall and I think so long I live it will not be other.
Only 105 days later, The Wall was torn down. I wonder what Elfriede thought on that day, and whether she wrote a followup to Ruth?
And as for the postscript on the side, a Grünfinken is a greenfinch. Not exactly a canary, but not dissimilar, which explains her choice of card 🙂