Wednesday night in Berlin

Dorothee calls and says she fancies a drink. I convince her to come out to where I live in Neukölln. We meet at Hermann Platz and walk down Friedelstrasse. It’s been cold for weeks now and temperatures haven't climbed above freezing since New Year’s Eve over a month ago. The pavements are a mix of ice and grit and the old snow has been swept to the edge of the road, forming small hillocks, dirty grey, that you hae to clamber over to cross the street.

We go to Heroes, a cafe near me owned by a young French couple. A haze of cigarette smoke greets us at the door. The rest of Europe may be on an anti smoking drive but in Berlin everyone smokes everywhere. At Heroes, anytime of the day or night French artists and designers prop up the bar; usually drinking unfeasibly strong coffee or small glasses of house red and puffing hard and fast at cheap cigarettes. The place is named after the Bowie tune and they’ve painted orange, purple and gold stripes from the ceiling across the white wall in a swooping diagonal curve to the floor. Dorothee and I sit at high tables in the front room and drink Kir. She smokes, adding to the fug, and we exchange Christmas presents though it’s already February.

After a few drinks we decide to go for a slice of pizza around the corner. The place is run by Napolese Italians (it’s hard to find Germans around here, this part of Berlin still belongs firmly to immigrants) and the pizza is sold by the slice, cheap, simple and tasty. I choose anchovies and olives; Dorothee has pepperoni. A small Spanish guy propping up the front counter buys us each a glass of house red and we chat to him in a mix of Spanish, German and English, the stilted conversation of the linguistically in-adept then take our pizza through to the back room. Tables and chairs, a mix of styles and heights, sit all over the place, disorganised. It must be the German in me that wants them in rows or some kind of order.

We’re mid conversation when a diffident young woman wanders in with a large glass of tea and a small backpack. She’s the kind of person that’s easy to ignore: mouse brown hair in an indistinct cut hangs long on her back, she’s wearing walking shoes, a pale blue v-neck sweater that’s a bit too big and Levi’s cut to be unflattering. She pulls up a chair to the piano that I’ve never noticed before and sets down the glass on the floor. I’m only half watching her, my mind on Dorothee’s story. Then she starts to play and everyone in the restaurant stops for a second, disbelieving.

The notes flow from her fingers: complex sounds fill the room, too loud for a small space, too beautiful for a run down pizza joint. No one moves, talks or eats for a second or two, then business of dinner, the conversations, resume. She plays for 10, 15, 20 minutes. No sheet music, all from memory. No pause. From one to the next, long, intricate classical pieces, concert quality. Then, with the same lack of ado with which she started playing, she stops.

And, without any prompt, everyone in the room turns and applauds. Long. Loud. The little Spanish guy leading the chorus, ‘more, more, more, encore’ he cries. Even Dorothee pauses in the story she’s telling and claps. The girl looks startled, as if she’s only just realised there was an audience at all. She’s half standing, half sitting, gives a little bow and a little smile, gathers up her glass and her backpack and leaves.

Dorothee has Deutschschule tomorrow and hausaufgaben to complete so we leave too. We walk out of the door and into a snow storm - thick wet flakes blow fast and furious into our faces, drop damply down our necks. ‘Bloody hell,’ I curse the never ending winter, pulling my hat down low, the furry hood of my jacket up over it. We walk to the corner and see that the square is empty; the crossroads hidden under a soft white coat of snow.

In the five minutes it takes to walk to the U-bahn we’re completely covered in snow, white tendrils form over our heads, arms, shoulders, boots. We kiss goodbye, make plans to meet for lunch on Sunday and I turn for the short walk home. With the wind at my back the storm feels less ferocious and the streets are suddenly silent and still. All I can hear are my footsteps squeaking in the freshly fallen snow.

Winter day in Berlin...

My friend Pete and I are walking alongside the canal, down Paul Linke Ufer and then round the corner into the small park heading towards Schlesische Straße. It’s bitterly cold. A wind is blowing and its harsh frozen breath reminds you that Berlin is at the edge of a vast wintery continent. The snow that fell on the weekend squeaks under our feet. The canal is frozen over; a christmas tree and an old chair stand folornly on the ice, destined to float or sink when the thaw finally comes.

It’s early January, mid morning, mid week and we don’t see another living soul. The snow dampens all the sound. Berlin always feels empty; today it’s as though some terrible calamity has sucked up the entire population of the earth and the two of us, trudging through the snowy silence, are all that’s left. We tell each other winter vampire stories and it’s a relief to hit the muddy wet slush of Schlesische Strasse and to hear the traffic and see the bored Turkish shopkeepers standing in the doorways chatting with each other.


We catch the u-Bahn into Alexander Platz to meet two friends who want to visit the old Stasi prison in the north. We wait at the World Clock. The square feels bleak, even the TV Tower, a constant beacon on the Berlin skyline, is hidden from view. When the others arrive we make a run for the temporary warmth of a tram but in our hurry to escape the cold jump on the wrong one. We don’t realise our mistake till the tram terminates, in a snowy field at the north-eastern edge of Berlin.

We get off, the tram trundles away and the silence is again absolute. Around us the tower blocks of the old DDR are pastel coloured fingers surrounded by desolate icy fields; their mint green, pale pink and baby blue outlines incongruous against the frozen sky. A few old ladies walk carefully along slippery roads to the tram stop where they wait, heads huddled low into their collars, shopping bags over their arms. They wear sturdy shoes and synthetic trousers under black coats. No one speaks.

When an M5 arrives we head east. There are few shops and no pedestrians on these streets, just row after row of tower blocks and the occasional Aldi and Bäckerei. We find our stop and get off, trudging down a side street into the bitter wind to Berlin-Hohenschönhausen; a prison that was so secret it wasn’t even on the map in the time of the DDR. It was simply a greyed out square that no one asked about and everyone tried to ignore. If you arrived here you didn’t know where you were or whether you would ever be released.

Our guide shows us round the two separate blocks joined by a long corridor. In one wing are the prison cells, in the other the interrogation rooms. The cells have a bed, desk, low stool, sink and toilet. The interrogation rooms are innocuous; their grey and brown desks and chairs look like nothing so much as 60s government offices.

Guards didn’t know prisoner names and didn’t ask. They held all the power, able to deny light, sleep, food and even toilet paper at whim. During the day prisoners were not allowed to lie on the bed; at night they had to lie on their backs with their hands outside the blankets. If they moved or if they slept guards would bang on the doors, switch on the lights or come in and wake them with a shout. Sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes during the day, they would be taken to interrogation rooms to have six and eight hour long conversations about every aspect of their lives. Sleep deprivation and complete isolation from the outside world ensured that within two weeks 90% of prisoners confessed to whatever charge their interrogators suggested.

It’s easy to see why. Just two hours walking the corridors, seeing the rooms, hearing the stories is enough to make us feel trapped and edgy and desperate for escape. Outside we breathe the cold damp air, the snow swirls down around the high rise towers and the streets are still empty and silent.

We decide we need cake and coffee to help us process what we’ve seen and catch at tram to Kastanienalle. Walking down the Prenzlauer Berg street feels like stepping into another country, another time – out of the DDR and back into the 21st century. Trendy mothers pull toddlers on sleds, children are wrapped up in so many layers that they half walk, half roll down the street like colorful miniature Michelin men. Yoga studios sit beside Tuscan restaurants, cafes and bars with candles on the tables and steamy windows entice us into the warmth and light.

Just 20 years ago this was among the poorest parts of East Berlin; today it’s an affluent, gentrified suburb where few (if any) of its previous inhabitants remain. This area, along with Mitte and Kreuzberg are the face of modern Berlin - the Berlin so many people (like me) want to visit and live in. The Wall, the Stasi, the East, belong to a different world, a different time. But today, the high silent towers just three miles away, loom large in my mind. They remain as separated from this new trendy Berlin as they ever were; this time by a wall of affluence that those who live there still can’t climb.

Welcome to Berlin...

‘Tourists fuck off,’ says a 4m long banner hanging outside a squat in Mitte. I’m in Berlin, looking for somewhere to stay. I’m not a tourist, I tell myself; I was born in Germany. So it’s hard to explain why this sign makes me feel mildly offended, unwelcome even.

Perhaps it’s because the day has been full of similar messages. While looking for a place to live, I meet a 37 year old woman in Prenzlauer Berg who has a bedroom to let in her large, stylish flat. We chat in English and I tell her I like Berlin. She shrugs. ‘It was a better place before so many foreigners came here,’ she says. Over breakfast, a friend tells me Berlin is ‘lucky not to have the same problems with immigration that London has’.

The attitude that foreigners are a problem perplexes me. Berlin has aspirations to be a global city; achieving that without welcoming citizens from around the world seems implausible.

Tourists are annoying, it’s true. They walk too slowly and stop suddenly causing human pileups on the pavements; they huddle in the middle of the U-bahn exit consulting maps and blocking everyone’s path; they can’t speak the language and, if they’re English speakers, probably assume you can speak theirs. They moan about how much things cost, they ask predictably stupid questions (‘is this the old East or the old West?’) and they love all that is naff and unfashionable (Checkpoint Charlie stamp in the passport anyone?).

But, they bring a host of benefits too. Tourists help fund Berlin’s museums and galleries, they keep a swathe of cafes, restaurants and hotels in business; they add verve and buzz to the bars and clubs and they help pay the rent on expensive Prenzlauer Berg apartments.

Immigrants bring even more. Look at any global city and you’ll see how immigrants have helped it prosper, from Jewish filmmakers in Los Angeles, to Melbourne’s Greek population, which transformed Australian eating habits within a generation. In London, where a curry is now the national dish, everything from Bangla music to literature, art and film are testament to Asian immigrants’ talents.

The way foreigners are encouraged to interact with and influence a city is a key differentiator between global capitals and their parochial cousins. New York is a vibrant melting pot of many nationalities. In contrast those places that cling too hard to traditions, places that are frightened of change, come to feel as though they have been dipped in aspic, forever looking back to a past that was more glorious than the future (places like Rome, like Vienna, like Zurich).

Berlin has a strong culture and a distinct identity and there is much that makes the city unique: the creativity, the spirit of rebellion and the straight talking nature of its people; the Brutalist beauty of the city’s buildings; the history that’s visible in public places and in private corners; the enormous Fruhstucks that you can eat till 5pm in the evening, the worship of the curry wurst to name just a few.

But these traits can live side by side with a multi-national population. I see that in evidence later the same day. I’m at the Mauerfall celebrations by Brandenburg Tor. As I listen to the conversations taking place around me it feels as though the whole world has turned out to help Berlin celebrate. Alongside Berliners are Spanish, Turkish, Italian, French, Japanese, Scottish, English, American and Australian visitors. Despite the rain that falls all evening there’s a sense of celebration, of joy and of excitement at being part of a city that is making its mark on the world. And I think that surely there are very few who would prefer that this party was exclusively German.

Going home...

The next leg of my journey is more personal. When I was seven years old my family emigrated from Germany to Australia. My dad is German, my mother Australian. Dad had gone to Australia in 1960 to make some money and have an adventure. He met, fell in love with and married my mum in a wild outback town that she was only visiting on a working holiday after finishing university.

It was spontaneous and unplanned; two strangers they dragged in off the street were the only witnesses to their wedding. They spent their earnings on a flight to Germany to meet my father’s family and discovered something else unplanned: my mother was pregnant with me. They stayed, my brother was born, time passed and my mother’s holiday turned into an eight year sentence.

Eventually she’d had enough. ‘We’re going home to Australia,’ she announced, and that was that. My brother and I nodded and then promptly forgot all about it. We were going to Australia, it might have been to moon for all it meant to us. If I thought about it at all I thought that we would go for a visit and then, naturally, come back to our home in a village outside Frankfurt.

For, whatever Mum might say, this was home. Our friends were here, our school was here, my grandparents and aunts were here, the garden, the rabbit, the streets where we rode our bikes after school it was all here. To leave it forever was unimaginable.
But on a cool May morning, a pale grey overcast spring day, we do leave. We catch a train that speeds us south. We pass the Alps where my brother and I crane our necks and push our faces against the window to try to see the impossibly high peaks, snow covered and awesome.

We arrive in Genoa, alien and exciting. A vast harbour is filled with huge ships. We take a ride on a row boat with an Italian guide and this time crane our necks to see vast walls of steel as huge cargo ships tower above us, dwarfing our tiny boat with their grey, blue and red sides. We walk through narrow alleys, with houses that rise high above us on both sides, the sky almost hidden by washing strung between them. We crane our necks again for glimpses of blue among the heavy flapping wings of white sheets. We eat unbelievably crisp rolls that crumble when you bite into them, filled with ham and pungent, veiny blue cheese. We soak up the hot sun and the incessant tooting of scooters, cars and trucks on the roads and roundabouts by the hotel.

One afternoon, my father takes our cases and we all follow him up a shifting gangway on board one of the metal behemoths that squat in the harbour. We run squealing down corridors, identical and endless, deeper and deeper till we find our cabin: two bunk beds, one for Mum and Dad, one for us, in a tiny windowless room. Then with the sound of a deep blasting horn that makes the steel walls of the ship tremble, we hurry up and to the rear of the ship.

There we throw streamers of paper to a crowd of people gathered on the wharf. We don’t know any of them but it feels as if they are here for us. They catch the streamers and wave as they holding on to them. It’s like a carnival and I’m smiling. It takes a while to realise the ship is moving.

Slowly, inch by inch, it draws away from the land and slowly, inch by inch, the streamers break and we lose our connection to Europe. We stand there for a long time, long after everyone else has gone. We stand and watch the land, slowly, inch by inch, fade into the horizon. I’m still clutching my end of the paper streamer, my hand is pale green where the dye has run and it dawns on me, slowly, inch by inch, that this is it. We are leaving. We’re not going back home.

Standing there, watching the land slip away, I make a promise to myself: I am coming back. I’m filled with rage and sadness and powerlessness so I say it again. ‘I’m coming back Europa. Wait for me. I’m coming back.’

I carry that promise with me over the next 16 years in Australia, through good times and bad, and when I’m 23 I pack my bags and I come back. I live in England, some reason I can’t explain keeps me away from Germany.

But now, 35 years later, I’m finally coming back. I’m moving to Berlin for four months to find out a little bit more about the German side of me and to see if Germany can still feel like home.

A Greek Australian poet

Thus perched on a pillar of darkness
I rehearsed Byzantine devotions
under the Southern Cross
(from Three Night pieces by Dimitris Tsaloumas, published in Falcon Drinking, UQP Poetry)

From my first day in Greece I make it a habit to go swimming each morning in the tranquil bay of Alinda, a curve of a beach a mile or so long. Behind it, up the mountainside, climb a few streets of cottages. Goats, their bells tinkling in the heavy air, claim the rest of the hillside as their own. A narrow road runs the length of the bay, home only to a few sleepy cafes and a small supermarket.

It’s here that I first notice Dimitris.

Brown as a walnut and deceptively frail, he arrives at the beach at around 11am. He hangs his towel on a tree and stands, stretching for a moment or two. I watch him surreptitiously from under my sunglasses. He has the fragility of very old age, (I find out later that he celebrates his 90th birthday next year) yet there’s a grace and flexibility about him that’s compelling.

After a moment he walks into the water and begins to swim; not the gentle, head out of the water breast stroke favoured by Europeans but an Australian style front crawl, pushing through the water, head down, arm over arm against the gentle waves. He swims for 15 minutes and then clambers out, the land rendering him immediately more insubstantial. After a moment drying in the sun, he’s gone.

The next day I’m wavering at the water’s edge. The water isn’t cold but I always prolong the transition from land to sea, from air to water. I hear a shout behind me. It’s him. ‘Go on,’ he cries, ‘get in, it’s lovely.’ I smile and nod then, prompted by his instruction, dive in, as always enjoying the liberation of the water the second I’m in. I swim out as far as I dare, stretching my arms, kicking up a spray behind me, then turn and, with tired arms, swim back to the shore.

Dimitris has waited for me and we start to chat about our love of the sea, of swimming. He asks me where I’m from and I hesitate as usual. The scent of Eucalyptus on the air sways me and I say, ‘Melbourne, Australia’. It’s partly true. Even though I’ve never lived there it’s my mother’s home, it’s where my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins live. It’s where I’ll go if I go back to Australia.

Dimitris laughs, delighted. ‘That’s where I’m from,’ he says. ‘You must come for coffee, we’ll chat some more. Come this afternoon, anytime after three. It’s the house opposite the church, you can’t miss it.’


And so it comes that I’m sitting on his terrace later that day and discover that he is Dimitris Tsaloumas, Australia’s pre-eminent poet, winner of The Patrick White Award among many others. We sit on the terrace and we chat about swimming, about writing, about the Greek classics and about home.

Born on Leros in 1921, Dimitris studied the violin in Rhodes, along with the classics. During the war, the island came under German occupation and his studies were halted. Things didn’t improve post war, when the Greek civil war took its toll. ‘It was terrible, terrible,’ he says. ‘In Athens people were starving, there were bodies in the street. No one starved on Leros but it was terrible.’ Persecuted for his political beliefs, he left Leros in 1952, making his way to Australia. ‘It was a shock arriving there in the 50s. I wanted to buy olive oil and they sent me to the chemist. He brought me a vial of olive oil no bigger than my middle finger. When I asked for more, he wanted to know why. When I told him it was for salads, for eating, he couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d said I was a cannibal.’

Telling this story he laughs, long and loud. He loves to laugh, especially at his own jokes, giggling mightily. He has a zest for life, a twinkle in his eye and I’m sure he’s a terrible rogue for the women.

For the last 25 years he’s spent six month in Melbourne, six months in Leros, a life of perpetual summers. He writes in Greek when he’s in Australia, in English on Leros.

So where does he consider home? Leros is number one in his heart but ‘Australia’s been good to me,’ he says. The long flight twice a year is taking it out of him and he thinks this will be one of his last trips to the island. His brother has recently died. He doesn’t have family on Leros anymore and, though he knows many people here, in the end he’s chosen Melbourne. ‘I love Leros but my friends are in Melbourne, my sons too,’ he says.

At the end of the day, it seems, home comes down to people.

Two is better than one?

I’m officially homeless. I’ve rented out my London flat to a lovely Chilean couple, been out for goodbye drinks with all my friends, taken a long, last, nostalgic walk round my neighbourhood and said a sentimental see you later to the routines of my life: goodbye favourite pub, ciao delicious deli, auf wiedersehen Hampstead Heath swimming ponds.

And then I jump on a plane and head off to Greece. I love Greece. Randomly, I choose to go to Leros, a tiny island at the end of the Dodonoese in the far south east of the Greek archipelago. It’s just a few miles from the Turkish coast and one warm sunny day with deep blue skies and azure sea blends into another and another and another.

I find an apartment on the hill in a small town called Alinda. The rooms are surrounded by a garden lush with bougainvillea and seductively scented flowers. From the balcony a riot of colours frame the sea and I have views across the bay to the capital of the island Agia Marina, which tumbles down a steep mountainside to the water below.

I sit for hours in beach side cafes, the water lapping gently against the sand, watching the sun set, drinking cold beer and eating smoky grilled squid, mopping up olive oil with crusty bread.

Leros turns out to be a friendly place.

On the bus into Agia Marina I meet Ingrid, a beautiful German woman who’s about to celebrate her 70th but looks 15 years younger – bright blue eyes, amazing cheek bones and white hair, stylishly short. We chat on the bus and then, when the journey is too short to contain our stories, sit outside a cafe with coffees and keep talking.

She tells me that she lives for six months of the year on the island and spends six months in Zurich. She speaks Greek, has numerous friends on the island and considers it her second home. She invites me to dinner with a big group of her friends, all of whom like her call Leros home, at least for the summer. Swedish couple Bo & Margaretha (who has the most amazing red hair I’ve ever seen) have been dividing their time between Sweden and Leros since 1976; they are not short term second homers. We drink wine and Retsina and eat too much.

I get talking to another Swedish couple, Christian and Lise, who are both talented artists. Lise tells me she needs both places in her life. She spends the summer in Leros, then, in a dramatic counterpoint to the sunshine and light, heads back to the Swedish winter. ‘I need the dark too,’ she says, it feeds her creative spirit and is just as necessary as light.

I start to realise that home isn’t always fixed, it can be in two places at once.
Later in the week I meet a group of British ex-pats drinking beer and eating lunch on the square in Agia Marina. They love it here, they tell me. They spend the whole year here. ‘It would be perfect if only it weren’t for all the Greeks,’ says one. He’s only partly joking. They all nod and start what sounds like a familiar litany of the difficulties negotiating Greek bureaucracy. This leads on to a moan about England, which has ‘gone to the dogs’.

They’re not at home here but, after years away, they’re not at home in England either. They long for a time and place that doesn’t exist anymore. Their self-imposed exodus has made them into exiles. And now I’m confused again.

What’s the difference between these two groups? One has acknowledged that they belong in two places, has embraced aspects of both. The other has rejected ‘home’ but finds the alternative equally unappealing. Is it just mindset or is it something more?

Maybe it’s good to belong in more than one place. Maybe it’s good not to know exactly where home is.

Home is where the cat is...

Please don't ask me where home is. It's a question I just don't know how to answer.

For the last 18 years I've lived happily in London. But this year, for some reason, I'm feeling confused. London is a home but is it home?

Maybe home is where my Mum and Dad, brother, cousins, nieces and grandparents live in Australia. Maybe home is Germany; where I was born, where my family come from. Maybe home is the UK, where almost all my friends live, where I work, where I feel connected. Maybe home is somewhere else completely, with someone I haven't discovered yet? I don't know. I only know I'm confused.

In a bid to find out what home means and where I belong I'm taking a year out. I'm going back to all my homes. I'm going to talk to friends and strangers about home and what it means to them. I want to find my space in the world.

So I rent out my London apartment. I put my furniture, my paintings, my favourite bits and pieces, everything that makes a house a home, into storage. I pack some clothes into my backpack and I'm ready to go. Everything is sorted, everything except my cat Guinness who has lived with me for 14 years and who is sitting in my nearly empty flat, watching me pack with suspicion in his eyes.

Three days before I'm due to leave my ex-husband comes round with a cat basket and a promise to look after Guinness for better and for worse, in sickness and in health and this time round I believe him.

I put the cat in the basket. 'A lovely new home, my sweet,' I tell him. 'You're going to a lovely new home.' And in the blink of an eye he's gone.

The next day I come home from work and put thekey in the door. I'm looking for Guinness waiting for him to come purring around my legs, ready to be picked up, be petted and fed. But of course he's not here.

The evening draws to night. I potter about but all I'm conscious of is the fact that the cat isn't where he's supposed to be: round my legs while I'm cooking dinner; on my lap while I'm watching TV, on the edge of the sofa looking wide-eyed into the night as I'm getting ready for bed.

And it dawns on me, slowly, that home, at least in part, is where the cat is.