Getting Ready to Leave Home Once More

I’ve been thinking about writing something on Gerhard Gundermann, one of my favorite singer-songwriters, for quite a while this spring, with his 15^th death anniversary approaching and because his songs taught me so much about home, Heimat, the non-translatable much abused phenomenon, and some special perspectives on what permanently moving away from your home or having your home removed from you can do to you. Planning a new journey is also a reason to once more think about what I leave behind and what I carry inside even far away from home. I wanted to write about my German Heimat with this word still being a symptom of our scarred sense of identity, about my reunited home country.
I started writing this text in German more than two months ago, I hope I'll manage to translate it tomorrow. One incentive to finish it in the way I did and to put it at the beginning of my blog about this year’s journey is this post Travel Fever And Moving Forward by my friend Mariella. I also highly recommend her blog to everyone who loves to read about travel, language, and especially bridges!

The text I started in May in Berlin in the middle of a time period of crazy moving around Northeastern Germany  (roughly 50 hours spent on German Railway…) and before I set out to get to know nine new countries turned into two texts, one on Heimat, strongly inspired by Gundermann and some other artists, and one introducing you to some of his songs and how they speak to me. I'm afraid I might not get around to translating that one so soon... But from now on I'll write in English again.