GLASSES & CARINA
Else Müller slid the glasses neatly into the cabinet. They stood, hidden in the shadow of the shelf above, for another year. Every September over the next three decades they were dusted off for Else and Friedrich’s wedding anniversary. In 1939, just six days shy of their 31st anniversary, Britain and France declared war on Germany. It was five years before the allies declared victory but life did not return to normal. That same year the glasses rang together only as occupying American troops hammered on Else and Friedrich’s door. Their farm had been identified as one of the largest in Reddeber and the American soldiers moved in. Over the next few weeks jewellery and silver cutlery went missing. But the glasses remained. Even as Germany was carved up and the Soviet Union expropriated land across the east, including Else and Friedrich’s, the glasses were left untouched. In 1989, after the Berlin wall had fallen, the farm and its land were returned to the Müllers, to Else and Friedrich’s son, Hans. When Hans and his wife died, just months apart in 2007, their effects were carefully packed away by their daughters, Jutta and Sabine. The glasses were stored in a barn on the family farm until Jutta and her husband, Rüdiger, brought them to London for their daughter Carina. The glasses have survived two world wars, occupation, separation, reunification and a Ryanair flight.
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