Together with her grandmother, Edith Löhle, 37, founded Hey Nana – the “platform with a heart for grannies”. For five years now, the website has been bringing granddaughters and grandmas closer together.
It was, of all things, a car that sparked the idea for Hey Nana. When Edith was asked by her grandma Klara whether she had one in Berlin, that was the initial spark: “I wanted to tell her that I don’t need one because I can open a ‘Car to go’ at any time with my app, but the answer was incredibly complicated.” Grandma didn’t have a smartphone, didn’t know any apps, and didn’t speak English either. Edith realized: “Our development has happened so quickly that we have forgotten some people along the way.” And this despite the fact that our ancestors carry a huge wealth of experience with them.
“Building a pedestal like this for our grandmothers is a beautiful thing”
Edith had the desire to create a digital monument for old ladies like her grandma. She asked Klara if they wanted to share their conversations, which they had been recording for a long time, with the world. That was 2019 and Klara was incredibly proud when Hey Nana finally started. And then there are the press reports! “Grandma could hardly believe it every time I showed her another newspaper article about us,” remembers Edith, emphasizing how nice it was to give something back to her at an age when she had “no visibility” in society. has more.
The actual goal of the platform but goes far beyond that: Hey Nana wants to inspire as many granddaughters and grandmas as possible to get in touch with each other and share it with the world. Over the past five years, many touching and loving “OMAges” have come together in this way: texts, poems, anecdotes and photos that continue to grow the monument to the old ladies. A granddaughter wrote a rap song for her “Nana”; two more found each other on the platform and founded a foundation that lights up the eyes of nursing home residents at Christmas with candles and lights. “These are only very small impulses,” says Edith, “but they make people feel seen.”
Contact with our grandmothers is a great gift
By the way, it is not only our responsibility, but also a great gift to engage with our grandmothers, says Edith in the video interview with BRIGITTE. After all, we can learn a lot from our ancestors – even if not everyone knows what an app is. Edith’s grandmother, for example, was “a real boss lady,” says the 37-year-old with a laugh, her brown eyes beginning to shine beneath her curls as she talks about Klara’s life: As a young woman, she ran the heating oil business with three small children taken over by her husband, who died early, and has held her own in the male-dominated world. What did she give Edith? “Put yourself through it and don’t become dependent, especially not on a man!” One thing is certain for Edith: she gets her grit and independence from her grandmother.
But as we all know, learning is a two-way street. “I always found the moments so beautiful when grandma and I noticed that we were giving each other something.” For example, when Klara said at some point that she was touched by how Edith lived with her partner even though they weren’t married. In the past, the couple would never have been allowed to spend the night at Grandma’s house – she was a “boss lady”, but then again old-fashioned and religious. “She grew up and moments like that are really worth their weight in gold.”
Love and connection beyond death
Even now, three years after Klara’s death – Klara died in 2021 at the age of 96 – the two are still close: To this day, Edith wears Klara’s clothes that she had tailored. “She always found it so funny when her loose costumes turned into miniskirts and waist jackets!” Edith laughs, pauses while telling the story, presses her hands to the place on her chest where the heart is and says: “Now I feel Klara really clearly when I talk about her like that.”
Unsurprisingly, Klara is the name of the main character in Edith’s debut novel “Bible Bad Ass”, which has just been published, and her grandma even helped write a little bit of it: “When I was writing, I noticed very often that she was around me, I did smelled her and heard her laugh – so of course she couldn’t be left out of the thanksgiving.” The book also calls for us to open our hearts to all age groups: “We all get old and I don’t understand how you can devalue age and therefore yourself and the circle of life. That’s a very important aspect for me, that you get into a connection.”
Edith Löhle was editor-in-chief of the German Nylon Magazine and Blonde Magazine. Today her heart beats for stories that point out social injustices. Her ZDF documentary “Programmed Injustice” was nominated for the German Television Prize in 2022, and her debut novel “Bible Bad Ass” has just been published by Leykam Verlag. The Berliner by choice runs her non-profit website Hey Nana on the side.
© Vanya Janeva
More than the “Grandma-makes-the-best-apple-pie-in-the-world” stories
And because everything is in flux in the circle of life, Hey Nana will no longer just be about the “Grandma-makes-the-best-apple-pie-in-the-world” stories, as Edith puts it, because we ” “We are at a point in society where that is no longer enough.” The difficult aspects of the past should also be allowed to be included there in the future:
“Many of us have wonderful memories of our grandmothers, but it is also true that in times of war many had a reality that was not discussed in their families.”
However, such sensitive topics have to be approached with a lot of respect and every OMAge has to be written lovingly – that’s extremely important to Edith. And the “Grandmas Against the Right” will soon have a prominent place on the podium of the great old women. Grandma Klara would have liked it all quite a bit.
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Would you also like to publish an OMAge? You can find all information at heynana.de