About asbestos, decay, and memories

By Romy de Vos – “Look, a piece of slate from the roof,” I say to my hostess Iris*, as I hold out a thin plate of darkish-grey material for her to see. “Nope,” she says, taking the plate from me, “this is asbestos”. Seeing the disturbed expression on my face, she adds “don’t worry, it’s not really dangerous unless you break the plate or drill into it. It’s asbestos dust that you need to worry about, not so much these solid pieces”. “Right,” I say, not a bit reassured.  Everything in this attic is covered in a thick layer of dark grey dust. Who is to say that this dust isn’t full of trillions upon trillions of asbestos particles from plates that have already disintegrated? I adjust my face-mask to fit me better and make a mental note to look up ‘asbestos exposure’ later this afternoon.

“Have you come across any other old, potentially dangerous, building materials in the five years you have been renovating this building,” I ask, scanning the floor below me for more asbestos pieces, “led paint perhaps, or something else?”. “Oh yes,” Iris says, “all the doors had led paint on them. But we just made sure to have plenty of ventilation when we burned and sanded the paint off”. For the first time since arriving in Germany for my master’s research (which I am combining with volunteer work), I’m glad to join this project at such a late stage. My research takes place in a former train station that is being renovated by a Dutch couple. The last train came through this station in 2003, and from that moment, the station stood abandoned, decaying, until my hosts – Ed and Iris – bought the station in November 2019 and began renovating it in February of 2020. I am here to study the ways in which the lives and biographies of people and decaying buildings become entangled with one another.

With added caution, I get back to work. We are taking old loam out from between wooden beams in the floor. Underneath the loam we find small logs, and underneath them, it’s a true treasure trove. In one afternoon, we have found newspapers from 1914 and 1919, a coin from the 1960s, a vintage playing card, two-thirds of a gramophone plate, a child’s school notebook from his Russian language classes, some bottles, and lots and lots of small pieces of paper that crumble apart the moment you touch them. I have always been fascinated by history, and I am really excited about these finds; but as a non-archaeologist, I feel entirely unequipped to handle them. All of these traces of human lives lived in tandem with the building, left to decay, much like the building that held them. I wonder how we can preserve the things we find, and how much of it is too far gone for anyone to save. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

In many ways, this former train station has been shaped by generations of people, and in turn, it has shaped their lives. You can see it in the worn-down tiles in the entrance hall, or in the thresholds underneath the doors that have eroded down by the footsteps of passengers, hurrying to catch their trains. I hear it when people come to the café that Ed and Iris are running from the old waiting room; as they talk about using this station every day to travel to and from work before Die Wende (reunification of Germany). And hidden in the walls, are the names of all the people that have worked on this building from the 1890s to today. I also added mine 😊.

I wrote the text above about a month ago. Since then, the room I described has been completely transformed. With every piece of loam Iris and I took out from between the beams as we opened up the floor, we made our work there more and more dangerous. One small misstep and we would fall right through the beautiful fresco ceiling of the room below, and plunge five-or-so meters to the ground. Luckily, that did not happen. Now, a few weeks later, we have put in new insulation material, and just this afternoon, Jochem (another volunteer) and I have finished installing a new wooden floor.

Such material changes are brought about quickly, but I have noticed that it takes much longer for people’s habits to catch up with the building’s changing function in the town’s community. As it changes from a public, or semi-public building to a private one (with the exception of the café), many people still interact with the building as if it were fully public. On a daily basis, I see people try the handle on the front door. If it opens, they let themselves in and wander around; curious about what has become of the old train station. On several occasions, Ed and Iris have found people sitting at their kitchen table or on their sofa, seemingly unaware that they have just entered someone’s home.

With only a few more days of fieldwork remaining, incidents like these have made me rethink the focal point of my research. When analysing the intertwining of biographies of people and decaying buildings, I now want to pay specific attention to processes of transition and transformation (mentally and spatially) that are being brought about through the symbiotic relationship that people develop with the buildings they live amongst. Leaving the field will not be easy, as I am very curious about the ways in which this building will continue to change in the months to come, but I look forward to trying to capture all that I have seen and all that I have heard in what I hope will be a nice thesis that I can give back to Ed and Iris, who have been so very kind and welcoming to me in the past three months

*I am using pseudonyms in this post.

Romy de Vos is a Master student in Anthropology at the VU.