Besides looking like they just got pulled out of a drunk tank, these officers of the E.German secret police are holding flowers (how cute) and what look like stiff handkercheifs. I thought they were paperbackings for the flowers at first, but they look like they are some traditional item (not-so-mini mini-flags?) or military symbol. Any ideas?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Stasi_004_540px.jpg
I think they are second bunches of flowers. When I lived in Eastern Europe, every occasion called for multiple gifts of flowers, often wrapped in just such paper. Notice, too, that the flowers are carried blossoms down, something I’ve only seen in Mitteleuropa.
I think so too, it certainly looks like there’s a flower poking out of the wrapper the man left of the middle is holding.
Vye are you looking at piktures ov some colleagues ov mine? May I see your photo-looking paperz, please? PAPERZ, SCHNELL!!
Tripler
[sub]A bit of Stazi humor, at the expense of the humorless Stazi.[/sub]
Also, any significance that the flowers are being held upside-down?
(Other than they’re guys who probably don’t know how to hold flowers?)
When I’m visiting someone’s home in Germany I always bring flowers to the “lady of the house”. (it’s a custom).
Sometimes that bouquet is wrapped in conical paper.
Other than that, not a clue.
Q
In East Germany, flowers hold you!
For what it’s worth, I also hold flowers upside down until I am about to deliver them, so as not to put stress on the stem where it joins the flower as I walk around with the bouquet.
I have seen this in China too. After a singer or other performer has finished their act a little girl comes out and hands them a bunch of flowers. Now they are wrapped in nice cellophane paper but I imagine in older time it was just plain paper. As the performers exit the stage they leave the flowers there, to be used for the next performers. I find the whole thing rather tacky but I suppose it is custom.
It looks to me as if it’s a commemorative photograph after the officer in the middle (Erich Mielke, the minister of state security) has just presented the others with gifts/flowers on the occasion of some service jublilee/handing out of decorations etc. They are holding the bunches of flowers downwards because they have been presented to them - if they were holding them upwards it’d look to me as if they were about to give them to the photographer.