I have lived in Berlin for six and a half years and it has never quite felt like home. At this stage, I’ve accepted that it might always be this way; it could be a feature of my personality or just what it’s like to live in one country while being from somewhere else. It’s impossible and, I think, suspect to completely identify with a place in which you haven’t grown up. But it is home.
Berlin has been incredibly good to me. It’s the city where I met my now-wife, Gina. Our daughter (name, unfortunately, still TBD) will be born here in a couple of weeks. Since arriving to Germany, my life has taken such a strange, positive turn. I have managed to build a life here. At times, this engenders a weird existential vertigo and I almost struggle to recognise myself: experienced mostly, but not always positively.
Overall, I have not missed life in Ireland. I was pretty miserable in 2018, and it was an ideal time for me to leave. But I do miss my family and the familiarity of the place, and the comfort of navigating spaces that are already known. After a summer holiday last year spent between Galway and Donegal, Gina remarked that I am a different person in Ireland. I move with an ease that’s still inconsistent here.
Of course language has a huge part in this. Though my German is fluent, I am oddly resigned to the idea that I will never occupy it in the same way that I do English. Again, I did not grow up in it. In a brilliant TV interview from 1964, Hannah Arendt, who wrote in English, talked about keeping a “gewisse Distanz” (certain distance) to other languages. She explained it in these terms:
There is an enormous difference between a mother tongue and all other languages. In my case I can explain this very clearly: In German I know quite a great deal of German poems by heart. They are always somehow in the back of my mind (Arendt says this in English). That can never be achieved again.
Sometimes, I think I am attached to the distance that Arendt talks about. Any mention of akzentfreies Deutsch (accent-free German), for example, makes me angry, because I think it is nonsensical, at best, and at worst, exemplary of a deep intolerance of any deviation from the norm. At this point, for a person without German citizenship I am about as integrated as they come, but the thought of further, inevitable integration feels uncomfortable.
Over the last fourteen months, this discomfort has become decidedly more pronounced. Observing German politicians and media contort themselves into such inexplicable shapes as they defend the indefensible. As a person who did not grow up in Germany, it continues to be an incredibly alienating experience. As I see it, nothing about Israeli aggression is kompliziert — save for the depth and endurance of German guilt.
Speaking in Berlin a while back, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock doubled down on her government’s support for Israel, claiming there was no evidence of genocide and defending its attacks on civilian targets. These could, she said, lose their protected status under international law. After more than a year, Germany is basically acknowledging war crimes but saying they are not actually war crimes. In effect: I know what you think you’re seeing, but that’s not what’s happening at all (Yes, we’re firmly back in “unknown-knowns” territory…).
Most Western countries are upholding this charade, of course, but the German political class is now in full denial of reality. By defending Israel at all costs, it is also conflating the actions of the Israeli government with the Jewish people. Through this conflation, it undoubtedly feeds the anti-semitism it is ostensibly trying to stamp out. At the same time, it makes Germany vulnerable to those who would attack it because of its unwavering support of the Israeli government.
I am not a fan of Irish politicians. In the main, I would say that there is a pretty much total lack of imagination in the Irish political class. But when I said I didn’t miss Ireland, I meant until this year. I think Leo Varadkar is basically heinous. But even his condemnation of Israel’s actions made me homesick. I heard Simon Harris talk recently about Ireland breaking with EU to enforce sanctions and I almost teared up. I never thought the comparative (if largely performative) superiority of Irish foreign policy would be make me homesick.
Keeping a certain distance and semi-outsider status is however somewhat difficult after having a child here. I am not a citizen, for one thing, and – as a woman in a same-sex marriage, with the fascist AfD gathering steam – applying for citizenship feels more and more like a wise move. Perhaps I am naive, fatalistic, or both, but I feel having a German passport might mitigate some of the associated risks.
Problem is, becoming a German citizen seems predicated on staying silent on political matters and atoning for someone else’s guilt. Since March of this year, anyone who wants to become a German citizen will need to “declare their commitment to Germany’s specialist historical responsibility for the Nationalist Socialist (Nazi) regime and its consequences, in particular for the protection of Jewish life; to peaceful co-existence among peoples; and to the prohibition on conducting a war of aggression”.
Hastily added to citizenship requirements, the addendum is vague and does nothing but coerce would-be citizens into accepting an ill-defined ‘historical responsibility,’ which, as we’ve seen over the last year, is only serving to allow politicians to bullishly defend Israel’s war crimes at all costs. All the while, actual Nazis are on the rise. But the government does little to curb the growing, and increasingly salonfähig anti-immigrant and (especially) anti-Arab sentiment. For whatever reason, this is entirely unrelated to the historical responsibility of Germany’s Nazi past.
I was at an event recently and heard the Irish artist Andy Fitz talk about how their activism in the face of the German government’s complicity in the ongoing genocide — and its ever-more brazen silencing of critical voices — has made them more committed to Berlin. And it made me think about my own relationship to the city, and what it would take for me to leave. Those thoughts are not quite worked out. Despite everything, I still think the answer is, quite a lot. But preserving a sense of distance — and certainly, instilling it in our daughter — is urgent work.