How Can I Call It Home?

Wie kann ich Heimat sagen

zum Land, auf das mein Schatten fällt? 

(aus „Wo bleiben wir?“, Gerhard Gundermann, 1955-1998)

How can I call it home

The land I lay my shadow upon?

(from „Where Will We Stay?“, Gerhard Gundermann, 1955-1998)

 

It’s Saturday before Pentecost in Berlin, finally it got a bit warmer and it’s raining. Silence in the apartment, my flat mate sleeps after her night shift, the cat is out of sight, too. Three floors below, there is the street, Brunnenstraße, less silent.

In the old days it used to be very silent, always – people who’ve been living here this long remember those times – as less than 500m from there was the end of this part of the world. Today there is the subway stop Bernauer Straße and you can just go on and on, underground or above, up till the park Humboldthain to the train station Gesundbrunnen, even further, trees, apartment houses, Turkish infrastructure.

At Bernauer Straße there is a metal band inserted into the pavement that marks the place where the Wall used to be and pictures and explanations all over the houses on this side of the street tell about its history, remind of the victims. If you don’t know or if you’ve been walking up and down this street on a daily basis for a longer time you still might not notice, I guess, especially walking from the East to the West, historically speaking, geographically South to North is more appropriate. My own position is not only determined by marking it in a frame of reference, but by the choice of the frame already.

 

View South (or East) at Bernauer Straße

I close the window to block out the increasing noise. Silence. The marvelous high room in this old building is my home for this month. After many short visits to many parts of Berlin I am now here to spend a whole month. It’s my first clinical internship. During the first days the psychiatric clinic of the Charité supports my recent doubts about becoming a psychiatrist only to fully disperse them later on. Might have found my professional home. Not by coincidence it is a specialization that, in my understanding, centers on helping patients who have trouble to be at home in the world, their lives, themselves.

The city doesn’t feel like home yet. My father was born here, at the Carité. In 1954 they walked away, without permission, but before the Wall was built this was still possible, taking along the whole family and a few belongings. I do feel at home, though, even without my own pictures on the walls. When I first went to a new city for an internship six years ago I took some photos and postcards with me. Now I notice I have enough home soil stuck to my feet to feel at home by the second night in any place. I can move around because I know where I come from and where I can return to. I am not a nomad, though, as my home is a place, or two or three by now.

 

Returning to Greifswald from the garden

(Nomads also don't have gardens, by the way)

In German there are two words translated as “home”. One is “Zuhause”, mostly referring to where you live and feel at home, this one can be used without much caution. The other one is “Heimat”, (you can see the same root as in home in it) this difficult, still slightly poisoned term, having been over-used by the Nazis it still carries implications of possessive and reactionist thinking which is actually a shame because it should be meant to stand for something positive… The Latvian translation is “dzimtene”, sharing a root with birth and clan, descent.

It is determined by birth, the Heimat, too, independent of my choices. There is a grammatical plural, but it’s hardly ever used, although during times of German emigration people used to talk about “old and new Heimat”. The collective thinking of the majority of people living in Germany still conceptualize it as a singular. Only recently the laws were changed to under certain circumstances grant children born to non-German parents in Germany the right to German citizenship. Descent still matters more than the place and allows the aborigines to deny others their feeling at home, seeing Germany as their home country. Double citizenships are not politically appreciated although this would be an adequate way to reflect many people’s realities of having more than one “Heimat”.

Heimat, home, is more than a place, it’s belonging. Belonging with people, a landscape, an atmosphere, expressed in language, music, smells, not-having-to-think. A person can have that in more than one place, even without having been born there. As I never moved to another place before I started university I experienced this for the first time during my exchange year in Latvia. There I also learned a lot about the difficulties of new freedom. It’s been only in the 20^th century when Latvia first became independent, for a short time between the wars and then again after the fall of the USSR. Music kept the Latvian culture alive and vibrant throughout centuries of occupation, now tens of thousands of singers celebrate it in a festival taking place every five years.

 

 

Berlin, the huge open air museum put up an exhibition in remembering the destruction of diversity by the Nazis who came to power 80 years ago. Artists, opera singers, actresses and actors, writers who made Berlin the 1920s’ world metropolis it was were cut out of their home, often their lives. I am grateful and glad that now, a relatively short period after this barbaric time and after a surprisingly peaceful reunification a new diversity has emerged. Many people from different places find a new home here, I work in three languages and hear a fourth one every day. I am also most grateful that my feelings, my present and my legal situation are congruent with each other. My home, Heimat, is Germany, Northern Germany, Ahrensburg, a suburb of Hamburg. And also Greifswald where I study and in Latvia where I spent my exchange year and where I have a second family. All these places exist and I can go there without a visa and recognize them.

Parts of the Exhibition "Destroyed Diversity"

I think back to my last visit to Berlin, shortly before New Year’s Mariella and I went to a concert to hear a group called Randgruppencombo play songs by Gerhard Gundermann. A large part of the audience sang along with every song, word by word. Many of them sharing the experience of the musician from Saxony who sadly died 15 years ago already. He loved his home country, he fought with it and finally it disappeared right underneath him. I wrote a small introduction to his work in German on this blog.

 

 

Gundermann: Wo bleiben wir? 

(Music by Tom Waits - Downtown Train)

 

"Wo bleiben wir?

So viele Jahre unterwegs

Und immer nur durch Feindesland

Wann haben wir uns zur Nacht gelegt

Ohne ein Eisen in der Hand?

[…]

Wie kann ich Heimat sagen

Zum Land, auf das mein Schatten fällt?

Doch du hast schon vom Wagen

Die Räder abgeschlagen.

Wo sollen wir hin?

Wo bleiben wir?

Ich kann doch nur zu dir herein

Und du zu mir"

"Where Will We Stay?

So many years on the road

And always in the enemy's land

When did we ever lie down at night

Without a Hand on the gun?

[…]

How can I call it home

The land, I lay my shadow upon?

But you already took

The wheels off our wagon.

Where shall we go?

Where will we stay?

It's only you I can join in with

And you with me"

 

 

When the internship in Berlin is over the city has started to be a bit of Heimat, too: I feel welcome and at the right place the moment I get off the train when I come back some weeks later to visit a friend – my journey will end with a visit at her place in Baku in September – and to apply for the Azerbaijani visa. There are just a few other applicants at the embassy. Azeris who after obtaining German citizenship now always have to apply for a visa when they want to see their family in their old home.

On the next day I take the cheap train to my old home. I only give the former border a short thought here, I’ve come to be used to it… When shopping groceries in the market square I delight in the old folks talking in Northern German dialect. I didn’t notice I missed it in Berlin, it’s often like this, I’m not prone to get homesick. But now the rolling ‘r’s and drawn out pronunciation put a big smile on my face. My second internship starts, a pediatrist’s practice in Hamburg Wilhelmsburg. The professional home I found is questioned a little once more. Should I be a psychiatrist or should I rather work with the new little humans…? I haven’t really settled here yet.

Hamburg seen from the Metro heading South to Wilhelmsburg

My ability to quickly feel at home more or less everywhere also brings up some questions, force me to think about which decisions have to be made, and how and sometimes “all this sitting between chairs gets a bit too much and I consider myself with mixed feelings” as Samy Deluxe puts it. The rapper from Hamburg whose Sudanese father left him with differing looks and many unanswered questions wrote a lot of texts that describe up Germany and the German language as the modern home of many different people and open up the stubborn old term Heimat for the future, for This Is Where He Comes From.

 

 

For me many of these questions only emerged through the eyes of the musicians I quote here and many other people I met and most importantly when living in other places and travelling as my first home made life very easy for me. I could have avoided these questions, but I am more alive when I look for them – and sometimes even arrive at some answers. Changing between my homes, Heimaten, the music connecting me with them and the freedom to always return there and live there freely also give me the opportunity to set off for a new journey now. Hoping for new questions, different answers and certain to be even more at home in the world, in my and in other people’s Heimat.