One of the foundational theories for my work relates to Place Attachment, that is how people develop bonds with the spaces they inhabit. There are several means by which one can attach: events or history; people; homes; landscapes, food, etc.
Renate’s manuscript provided several vignettes, like Home Coming that I included in an earlier post, that offer a sense of place attachment. So with these stories in mind, when we returned to Sonneberg last month, one of my objectives was to find some of these things that represented bonds.
The first that came to mind were the homes and places of work. To find these I visited the city archives of Sonneberg and they provided me with city address books from 1887, 1893, 1911, 1923 and 1929.
WIth this information, and that provided in Renate’s manuscript, I plotted the locations on a map and visited them.
From the address books, I found that my Great Grandfather, Max Hertha (parents of my father’s father) had lived on Coburger Allee, 9
His place of work was Bahnhofstr 95, which is now an empty field. The building was bombed during the war and never rebuilt.
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