Articles of daily use and home furnishings of the emigrant are described as U.

Anna Luise Schubert, Amelie Wegner (CDA)

2017, 35’

In the late 1920s, the young interior designer Rahel Bontjes van Beek (née Weisbach) began a promising career in Berlin. Her clients included several Berlin intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish. During the mounting wave of emigration in the early 1930s, she collaborated with a carpenter who reworked furniture for transportation when its owners emigrated. Rahel Weisbach also designed portable furniture. In this way, her designs left Germany while she herself did not have the opportunity to do so. In search of Rahel Weisbach’s furniture, this project attempts to follow the trail of its former owners and thereby reveal a part of the history of Jewish migration involving Germany, Great Britain and Israel. Furniture and its afterlife offer evidence of a complex history of global connections and socio-political relations. On this basis, the film questions the circumstances of migration, which involved countless regulations and constraints. Which belongings would and could one take along? What were the benefits of portable furniture, and what did it look like? The paradox between the sedentary nature of a “piece of furniture” and its supposed “transportability” as well as its meaning as a memento of a lost world reflect the underlying emotional conflict and uncertainty of emigration and immigration.