One does not remove anything older than oneself. – Adele Vorrath, building file, 1948
From 1889 the firm of Marsch & Tiede sailed to the South Seas, to islands whose names stand in its bills of lading and in no atlas. It traded in copra and mother-of-pearl and brought back, so they say at the river mouth, a contract no notary ever saw. Around the firm there grew up among the fishermen of the mouth a congregation that called itself the Congregation of the Deep Water. It held its devotions on the Back, sang to the flood tide and not to the sun, to a father in the deep and a mother beneath him, and in the years when it was strongest the nets at the mouth were full when everywhere else they stayed empty. In the winter of 1931 they were full as well, and nobody at the mouth would say what was in them. In February the Republic had the villages of the mouth cleared, the chapel closed and the firm's books seized; the file on it is secret to this day, and a second, shorter one lies sealed in the House's archive, under a reference the Registrar knows by heart. The firm went unde...
From the lore of Das Haus am Kanal.