GERMANY Nursing home sends residents ‘back in time’
DRESDEN, Germany — On a recent winter morning, Gertraude Bauer and Gerda Noack went shopping in communist East Germany.
“Here we have a lunchbox,” said Carmen Mesech, who appeared to be a sales assistant at the Intershop store, an upscale communist-era establishment where the women were examining merchandise.
“This used to be so popular,” Bauer responded with a smile.
“And the bread in it was always fresh,” added Noack, gazing into the distance.
The two 93-year-olds spent much of their lives in the former German Democratic Republic. Now, decades later, the vanished communist era appeared — at least for them — to be back. The Intershop store they were browsing in was, of course, a reproduction, and the song playing in the background, “Old Like a Tree,” had long ago disappeared from the radio.
Then a door opened and a nurse came in. It was time for the two Alzheimer’s patients’ daily nap and, for now, an end to their retro shopping tour.
Bauer and Noack, who live in a nursing home in this eastern German city, have suffered for years from Alzheimer’s, the degenerative disease that robs patients of their capacity to remember. For just a few minutes, however, they give the impression of having overcome their condition and regained control over their memories. To them, life in formerly communist East Germany, a country that merged with West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, is more vivid than experiences they may have had only minutes ago.
“People with dementia often still have a good long-term memory,” said Ursula Beer, a volunteer at the nursing home.
The Alexa nursing home where Noack and Bauer live is trying to trigger such memories by re-creating settings from the communist era as a form of therapy. While other nursing homes are also trying to help their residents remember details of their lives, what is going on here could well be the only concerted effort to re-create for its residents an entire historical era.