One man meticulously documented affair with his secretary in 1969: Here are his records
The story would be dull—clichéd even—without the voyeuristic thrill that comes with the intimate details: a married German businessman and his married secretary, Margret, have a brief affair from 1969 to 1970.
There’s something uniquely grim and thrilling about finding someone’s private belongings in a thrift store suitcase. Not a diary of dreams, not poetry, but a forensic archive of betrayal—precise, passionless, and sealed in plastic sleeves. This isn’t love. This is admin. What we’re looking at isn’t an affair—it’s an inventory of desire, guilt, and German efficiency, typed and timestamped like war correspondence. Imagine if Werner Herzog directed a porno, but all the sex happened off-camera and everyone was quietly furious the entire time.
Everything you see here came from a suitcase purchased at an estate auction 30 years after the affair, and it’s an utterly engrossing collection of artefacts.
Inside the suitcase: Kodachrome snapshots of Margret, eternally mid-affair. She reclines in white lingerie, posed with the stiff theatricality of someone who knows this moment is being preserved—for him? For herself? For no one? She smokes in bed, sits poised behind the wheel of his Opel, eyes unfocused, lips pursed into a proto-dual-exposure of lust and detachment. One dress, gifted and documented like museum contraband, is photographed in three stages: hung, worn, and finally discarded, crumpled on the sheets like a punctuation mark.
It gets stranger. There’s a loose birth control blister pack—emptied like a ritual object—taped beside a typed card noting the date it was finished: “27.12.70”. Below it, a photo of Margret on a hotel bed, on the phone, legs curled up like a bored housecat waiting for room service. And of course, the clinical paper trail: notes, receipts, clippings, lists. One envelope ominously marked “2te Pillenschachtel”. It’s not just that he saved everything—it’s that he arranged it all like a bureaucrat of longing. Nothing breathes. Nothing escapes. It’s like watching someone commit adultery in Morse code.
Not only did the unnamed businessman photograph the intimate moments before and after sex (including shots of dresses he bought for her—on the hanger, then on her, then on the bed), he kept keepsakes, including a lock of hair and an empty birth control blister-pack. The strangest part, though, is his “journal,” a series of typed, dated, wholly factual and completely emotionless entries—more of an impassive record of events than a log of romantic musings.
On their own, the photos seem to hint at a tender, maybe even loving time together, but the details reveal a much darker, volatile side of the tryst. At one point, the man’s wife confronts Margret, accusing her of disrupting a happy marriage. Margret is furious, and so the businessman then forces his wife to apologise to her. As delusional as she appears to be, it is this unseen wife who feels the most human, and one wonders if any guilt was felt on the part of the businessman or mistress Margret.
We know this story because, some years ago, the collection was curated in its entirety as Gallery Margret: Chronicle of an Affair – May 1969 to December 1970, at the White Columns gallery in New York’s Meatpacking District.
See a selection of the images below.
