Fixing, soldering, repairing – now for 10 years. The Wernigerode Repair Café is celebrating its anniversary. What began in 2016 as a university project has grown year after year into an independent voluntary initiative with a strong sense of community. A total of around 35 volunteers attend the monthly meetings to repair broken household appliances, tackling even the trickiest challenges in the process. As a result, alongside vacuum cleaners, blenders and suchlike, a number of unusual items have also been restored to working order. “A prosthetic leg and a large indoor fountain certainly stick firmly in my memory,” says Jeannette Israel-Schart, founder and organiser of the Repair Café, as well as the assistant for Studies and Teaching and environmental management staff member at Harz University of Applied Sciences.

To this point, the initiative has carried out a total of 771 successful repairs. “This means that at least 47% of our Repair Café guests have left with a working appliance. But alongside the repairs, the sense of community is also a key part of this series of events. People from all sorts of backgrounds and life stories come to us. The atmosphere here is friendly and welcoming. We all call each other by our first names so that there’s no sense of distance,” explains Israel-Schart, whilst at the next table Roswitha is busy fixing a broken vacuum cleaner. The pensioner and former mechatronics engineer has been coming for two years. “The interaction here in the café is lovely,” she says. She spent over 30 years developing transformers; now she uses the café meetings as a little break from the daily grind: “Every case is different, but what I enjoy most is repairing the RG28, an old mixer from the GDR era.”

At another table, Sascha is trying to diagnose a fault in an old stereo system. “The CD drive motor’s probably broken,” says the DIY enthusiast, who works as an IT specialist. He, too, appreciates the sense of community in the café: “There’s a specialist here for almost every problem. That way, we all learn from one another.”

The initiative has a double learning benefit for Alita. The student from Nepal has been coming to the Repair Café for two months. By getting involved, she is not only improving her technical skills but also her German language skills: “The Repair Café is a great place to get to know the language and culture,” says the 24-year-old.