Communist era comes alive for seniors at German care home

“Memory rooms” give residents, who suffer from dementia, a sense of self

Residents of a nursing home in Dresden prepare a cake that was once popular as an east German snack.

 

The white-haired German woman in the easy chair has vivid memories of hardline communist leader Erich Honecker and even Adolf Hitler, but isn’t always sure who Angela Merkel is.

Margit Hikisch, 88, is a resident at the Alexa nursing home in the eastern city of Dresden where pockets of German history are being brought to life to help treat dementia patients.

Using an innovative approach, the private facility has set up “memory rooms” with the décor, meals and music of East Germany of the 1960s and 1970s which, it says, help revive old memories and, with them, the residents’ sense of self.

Surviving the war

Ms. Hikisch survived the war’s devastation in Dresden and spent what she calls her “best years” under the communist regime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) working as a bank clerk.

“Hitler was a madman and we suffered during the war, and afterwards. But in the GDR it got better little by little — we had enough to eat again,” said Ms. Hikisch, who, like many her age, has a firmer grasp on decades-old recollections than current events.

As she sat with eight other residents around a long table making a favourite post-war chocolate biscuit cake, Ms. Hikisch said she liked visiting the home’s custom-made time machine.

The memory rooms, which began in January 2016, are open every weekday from breakfast until dinnertime.

Zimmer frames and wheelchairs are parked in front of a mini replica of an East German “Intershop” where high quality products such as Western-brand coffee and chocolates were on offer.

A box contains a picture of Honecker that was ubiquitous in the GDR and play money with Karl Marx’s bearded visage on East German marks. Residents hum along to cheery old pop tunes coming from a record player.

The home’s director Gunter Wolfram, 48, said immersion in the yesteryear bric-a-brac had shown “dramatic results” in boosting patients’ spirits and mobility.

“Objects from a certain time spark very strong emotions. We are very interested in those feelings because they can be a key to treatment,” he said.

Breaking out of lethargy

“We noticed that people emerge from lethargy, are suddenly able to butter their own bread rolls, eat and drink more, go to the bathroom on their own and are friendlier and more interested in their environment.”

The original relics of East German life were unearthed on eBay and in flea markets but the care home has now begun receiving donated items as word has spread.

The memory rooms have drawn comparisons with the hit 2003 movie Good Bye Lenin! in which a son tries to recreate the fallen East German state for his ailing mother, a dyed-in-the-wool communist who has just awoken from a coma.

Andreas Kruse, head of the gerontology institute at the University of Heidelberg in western Germany, who is not involved in the Alexa project, said its approach is based on sound research on work with dementia and Alzheimer’s patients.

But Mr. Kruse, who has researched care for seniors who have lived in repressive states including Holocaust survivors and former Soviet dissidents, cautioned that plunging some patients into the past risked reviving buried traumas.

Mr. Wolfram, who himself grew up under communism, insists he has no illusions about the regime responsible for the Berlin Wall, the Stasi secret police and the shortage-plagued planned economy.

“We are all happy the GDR is gone,” he said.

“What we have revived instead is a feeling from a certain time in the patients’ lives that was marked by objects with which they have a positive association. Part of that is the social cohesion you had in a society where things were scarce.”