Dirty work

Nearly 4,000 thousand miles away, Heike Wernz-Kaiser asked herself the same. 

As curator of the White Tower museum, located in a 13th-century building that once housed an order of Catholic priests, she served a mission that might also be called spiritual: preserving the history and culture of the Ahr Valley. Some pieces in her collection dated as far back as 600 B.C. 

When the floodwaters surged, there would be no divine intervention. But with the help of the so-called kulturgutrettern, a triage team who work to protect cultural assets in Germany, Wernz-Kaiser and colleagues swooped in to pluck what they could—approximately 30-40% of the collection—from murky water and goopy mud. For months, the group powered through heartbreak and tedium to dry, clean and restore paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and other items. But they couldn’t do it alone. 

Just as morale began to wane, Brueckner’s offer of help finally made it through bureaucratic channels and into the gloved hands of Wernz-Kaiser. By the end of May, 2022, the UD professor and a team of four graduate students (plus a recent alumna who offered her expertise) found themselves deep within the Ahr Valley, the mighty Rhine River to their east and the Volcanic Eifel mountains to their west. Waiting inside two jobsite trailers secured by the White Tower specifically for this Blue Hen team sat the history of this place and its people, reduced to a pile of musty crates.  

Brueckner and the students set up one station for each category of artifact—metals, textiles, glassware, ceramics—and they spent one week scraping, rubbing, brushing and otherwise cleaning rust and caked-on mud from around 100 items. The work required gloves, masks and a range of unlikely tools: dental instruments, Korean beauty products.

“Because we are such a small field, rarely do we have instruments made specifically for us, so we beg and borrow from other fields,” says Allison Kelley, AS22M, one of the participating WUDPAC students. “In conservation, the name of the game is finding the thing that works.”

With a handmade bamboo skewer/cotton swab combo, Kelley spent two painstaking days chipping away at the dirt and waxy corrosion of a 19th-century candlestick. Others used cosmetic sponges on the ceramic mugs that would have been 19th-century souvenirs from one of many regional spas, famous then and now for the healing, mineral-rich water that naturally springs from this earth. For clothing, like a 19th-century tennis dress, the students employed a specialty vacuum for filtering mold spores. Between this restoration work, the team conceived of a new cataloging system, since the museum’s paper archive had been lost to the water. 

Ask the students to describe this whirlwind of an experience, and they will tell you the work is what they’d hoped for and expected: a boots-on-the-ground opportunity to put years of classroom learning and theory into practice. What they didn’t anticipate? The emotional impact their trip would have on a community in mourning—and, ultimately, on themselves. 

Says Wernz-Kaiser: “The solidarity from Delaware has given us the strength and endurance to continue fighting.” 

A space for healing

Here’s the thing about tragedies de jour: When the news eventually recedes from public consciousness like water, only survivors are left to grapple with the fallout. 

Nearly a year post-flood, long after the last television crew and relief worker had packed up and gone, the UD team encountered what Brueckner calls an “intensely bizarre landscape:” homes stripped down to their bones, businesses attempting to reopen amidst the rubble, residents enduring a period of interminable waiting—waiting for insurance payments to come through, for chaos to settle, for a sign from the outside world that their suffering had not been forgotten. 

The latter, at least, the UD students could provide. 

In a series of pop-up clinics, the Blue Hens invited residents of Ahrweiler and surrounding villages to bring their damaged personal items for expert advice on how to salvage them. With Brueckner serving as translator, the locals poured in, carrying muddied sentimental objects ranging from family albums to paintings of exotic fruit. One woman choked up when the students helped her uncover a photo of her late father. Another, a widow, asked for help with her ceramic plates, a cherished gift from her wedding day. And one gentleman gingerly carried a 17th-century book that had been handed down to him by a beloved relative, and which he hoped to gift his own grandchildren someday. 

The items appeared fairly ordinary—nothing particularly exhibition-worthy or valuable. And yet, as cultural representations of what this community has endured, they became a launchpad for fulfilling a deeper human need: sharing—and processing—grief. 

“People used their objects to say: ‘Look at this; look at what my family treasures have survived; look at what I have survived’,” says Maddie Cooper, AS15, TK21, preventive conservator at Philadelphia’s Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts. “It was nice to offer guidance on preserving these heirlooms, but even more important was listening and acknowledging that trauma. We were able to tell them: ‘These things that tell your story, that you care so much about? We care about them, too.’ In this way, cultural preservation after a disaster helps build resilience.” 

But it wasn’t just the townspeople who benefited from this work.  Humbled by the trust placed in them over the course of the week, the Blue Hens also gleaned new perspectives on their craft.

“As stewards of material things, we have to remember the human stories,” Kelley says. “We can’t be some secretive group stowed away in labs or basements. You might spend an entire career studying priceless artifacts in a museum. But the things in a home—the objects that tell the story of who we are—are just as important. 

“I do think these clinics were a bit of therapy for the people who came,” she adds. “And maybe for us, too.”