Der Schirmmacher Rolf Lippke

Rolf Lippke's family umbrella trade runs back to 1882, when Josef Müller opened an umbrella repair shop in Georgswalde, a town in North Bohemia now called Jiříkov in the Czech Republic — a lineage Lippke, its current keeper, counts as roughly 142 years and eight generations deep. He trained in the craft in Dresden in the 1980s and in 1998 took over a specialty umbrella business from two retiring sisters, Hoffmann & Bouffée, running it in Dresden until mid-2013, when he relocated to Berlin — first into the Wedding district, taking over the Metz umbrella shop, later to Steglitz.

Lippke is among the last formally trained umbrella makers from East Germany: the profession Schirmmacher was struck from Germany's official list of apprenticeable trades in 1998, the same year he took over his first shop, meaning no one after him can be certified in it the traditional way. Every umbrella is made individually to order from customer-chosen fabric, stick wood and grip, with automatic or manual opening options, and demand keeps his shop booked months out. He has described the work as more than a product — "a lifestyle" — a claim that carries weight coming from one of the very last people in the country still permitted to call it a trained profession.