Kate Camp
Kate Camp is the author of four collections of poetry from Victoria University Press: Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars, Realia, Beauty Sleep, and The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls, which won the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Award for poetry. She was awarded the 2011 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer’s Residency, where she wrote her most recent collection Snow White’s Coffin, for publication in May 2013.
Camp comments: ‘One of my favourite places in Berlin is the Museum Der Dinge—the Museum of Things. It collects tens of thousands of objects: doll’s house furniture, china, soap, cell phones, mugs in the shape of breasts, even a velvet cushion bearing a portrait of Hitler. The latter was banned under the Nazis’ “anti-kitsch” laws which forbade the use of Nazi iconography on anything perceived as tacky.
‘Among the exhibits is a travelling exhibition from the 1910s, which showed Germans how to avoid committing “home horrors” by displaying replicas of tasteless interiors.
‘It was at the Museum Der Dinge that I discovered Schneewitchensarg, or Snow White’s Coffin, Braun’s iconic white and grey record player with its revolutionary Plexiglas lid.
‘German culture places such a high value on the intellect, and in my time there I thought a lot about this: how the intellect can be such a powerful expression of your humanity, but also a powerful way to deny it.’
