On the concept of ‘home’ – Part 1

I live 485.09 km / 301.43 miles from home. I was born 431.79 km / 268.31 miles from there as well. Are you wondering how this works out? All my life I had problems with the concept of home. In fact I needed to leave to finally understand that I even had one. The notion of ‘home’ basically has two meanings, which are expressed in German as two different words. ‘Zu Hause’ (literally an old German form of ‘in the house’) in German means the place where you live, the house, the flat, the city, the country, always depending on the scale in which you refer to it. ‘Heimat’ is the place where you belong, it might be a place where you lived a long time or it might be a place where you come to and suddenly you realize that you feel more at home than at your real home. ‘Heimat’ can be imagined or a place where you’ve never been, it could even be a place in a book. Obviously ‘Heimat’ is a weird concept.

Heimat itself also was a word quite frowned upon due to the German history. It was seen as nationalist old concept that wasn’t expressed very often, until quite recently. It must have been in the last 20 years that the concept became fashionable again, probably due to the Berlin’ wall coming down and a lot of people moving away from the places they were born in, in East Germany. I’m sure that there are statistics and lovely cultural studies analyses about this concept around, but I really don’t think that the use of a word changes anything about the concept attached to it. Even though people might not have called it Heimat, they still belonged somewhere or got the feeling that they didn’t belong.

For me it was mostly that: I didn’t belong anywhere. In my childhood I was treated as a foreigner, because my Mum is Russian. In secondary school I felt that I was in the wrong town. Nothing was going on, there was no way to get out of town easily and teenage efforts to waste time were quite without any culture – we basically got drunk in the park and that’s all we did, because there is nothing else to do in my hometown. My efforts to find a partner were also mainly futile: it seemed that the town really made people go nuts, no decent relationship possible. Of course this is a rather one-dimensional interpretation of things, but it helped me to understand that I had to leave my home town if I wanted to be happy.

I left when I was 17 and moved to the area around Düsseldorf. First I lived in a small town with a real lawnmower culture. My school was a conservative latin school for rich kids and my course mates weren’t interested in anything but expensive things they didn’t need. It was sickening. Additionally the people there generally are very different from the people in my home town. In Chemnitz, where I grew up, people are really into your face. If they don’t like you, they will probably tell you. In the Rhine area however people are overly friendly and talk behind your back. You can’t really tell who your friends are, because everyone is just really awfully friendly even if they hate you. I really didn’t like it and so it took me a while to adjust to that.

After I finished school I moved directly to Düsseldorf, which is a beautiful city with lots of museums, nice parks, a quite cool historic section of the town (mainly the pub area), lots of students in the south, artsy cool bars all over the place and a considerably rich area on the “other side” of the Rhine. I spent a lot of time there even before I moved directly to Düsseldorf, because the town in which I lived was just boring and Düsseldorf was only half an hour away.

Still, even there I didn’t feel at home. Most of my friends didn’t live in Düsseldorf but in cities nearby – it’s a densely populated industrial area, which is sometimes called “Ruhrstadt” (Ruhr-town), because you can’t really see where one city ends and another begins. Düsseldorf is just outside Ruhrstadt to the south. People in the Ruhr-area are honest working class type people, while people from the Rhine-area are considered to be stuck up rich conservative people. These stereotypes are generally quite true and I always liked the honest Ruhr people better.

Through work I didn’t really meet many new people in Düsseldorf and it stayed like that until I started studying and dancing tango. Düsseldorf was just a random place to live. Quite nice, but I didn’t really have any roots there. Not an awful lot of friends – I mostly had more friends all over Germany – no family directly there, I could have lived anywhere else in the area. When I started studying though, I met quite a lot of people who actually lived in Düsseldorf – they were students so they mostly weren’t really from the area and if they were they usually lived with their parents somewhere in a 150km radius around Düsseldorf. Going for a coffee with people who actually live in the same city is a lot easier! Still, I was mainly quite attached to the university and most of my social life happened there on a campus in the far south of Düsseldorf. How could you call a place like that home though?

As I grew older I also realized that politically Germany was just doomed in my eyes. The country was ruled by conservative stuck up idiots, who tried to save their reputation with leaving all the problems for the government coming after them. Our pensions aren’t safe, but nobody talks about it. In contrast to England Germany didn’t have Thatcher and therefore coal mining is still subsidized. The country is really in debt as well and there hasn’t been any decent effort to reduce it since the re-unification. Education is not financed properly and the recent introduction of tuition fees at universities so far hasn’t made any change to the teaching quality, which is generally quite poor, because university lecturers are picked for research and not for teaching.

Politics just make me sick, because a single person can’t even hope to change anything. When I was a teenager I thought: 99% of humanity are stupid, therefore democracy lets the stupid people rule. There might be some truth to it, but I mainly am not interested in politics anymore, so I haven’t really given this much thought in the last few years. My vote can only make a difference if there are parties out there that realistically want to change things for the better. Our center parties, who claim to be Christian conservative or socialist both don’t differ in there politics, they make the same decisions to be elected again. It all becomes a matter of election and as a politician you mainly have to realize that realism doesn’t get you votes and election centred politics can’t make a difference. I just gave up on politics. After all politics doesn’t really change anything immediate in my life. They might decide how much unemployment money I get, but I don’t even want to go down that road, so why bother?

All that time I didn’t really feel at home. A random city, a random country where I happened to be born in. I hated my home town passionately and the place where I moved to was just any old city where you had good opportunities to spend your free time. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I had lived in Berlin instead. I even still consider going to Berlin, if I ever come back to Germany! Discussions in cultural studies seminars about the concept of “Heimat” showed that I wasn’t the only one, who never felt at home anywhere. Of course you have your flat and your city and places where you go to, but it wouldn’t really make any difference if the university and the people where somewhere else. Why did I feel so lost all the time, so out of place and not really part of the place where I lived in? I was always observing, always judging, always finding things that I didn’t like.

All that time I just wanted to leave Germany for good. With one of my friends we made a lot of plans about going to England, because of more realistic politics and less stuck up conservative people and whatever we thought England was all about. I was 18 at that time and our plans didn’t really make any sense as long as I didn’t have a real occupation. A few years later when I was studying, I knew that I could try it out, go abroad for half a year and see whether England was really the place to be. There were no Erasmus partnerships with any university in England which had all my subjects so I had to organize it on my own, look through the university guides, find out about fees and stuff like that, organize letters of reference, meet deadlines for applying, make some money for the high rent prices, finish a lot of courses that I couldn’t take in England to graduate in time. It was a huge effort, but everything worked out.

By the time everything was organized I started dancing tango. I met a lot of new people, who lived and danced in Düsseldorf and after a while I also knew every tango spot in town, had memories of cycling to south Düsseldorf to dance and about sitting on the front porch of some random building in Düsseldorf after tango in the middle of the night talking to a tango friend for hours. I also fell in love with someone I met when dancing tango. He wasn’t very flexible about leaving the country just to visit me in England and everything started to get complicated. Tango had transformed Düsseldorf into something with a lot of meaning to me. Almost every street in Düsseldorf was suddenly occupied by all this meaning, all the fun memories with friends and tango and cycling to and from tango. And then I had to leave.

Just before I left I realized something. It was something important, impressive and life changing. It was something that I never had before and it was a delightful feeling when I finally understood why I was so reluctant to leave after putting myself through so much stress to get the opportunity! I had found a home! Finally after years of feeling lost and treating every place the same: namely as just some random place where some friends or family happen to live, I found a home! I didn’t pay my tuition fees for Sussex and I didn’t book the Eurostar until two weeks before I had to leave, because I wasn’t sure whether I really wanted to go after all. I knew in advance that the relationship that I was trying to establish wouldn’t survive the distance. I knew that I would be completely alone and that I might not find any friends in this strange country. I knew that there was only little tango. Two weeks before I had to leave, I said to myself: “Verena, there are things in your life that you just gotta do! Come what may!” Sometimes you just have to stand strong and not let fear paralyse you.

Do you want to know what happened when I came to England and how you can transform a seemingly random place into your new home? Read more in Part 2 tomorrow!

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