WE NEW GERMANS

In 2012, I published the non-fiction book “Wir neuen Deutschen” with Alice Bota and Özlem Topçu. This excerpt was translated
by Daryl Lindsey for Spiegel Online. You can read the accompanying interview here.

Can there be anything wrong with the question of where someone comes from? Those who ask the question can usually answer it. They are people whose parents and grandparents have grown up in this country, whose names sound familiar and sometimes appear dozens of times in the phone book. People who ask this question usually aren't satisfied with a simple answer. Instead, they keep asking more questions:

"Do you prefer to be in Turkey or here?"

"Are you more Vietnamese or more German?"

"Is there anything Polish about you anymore?"

Those who ask these questions want to gain a better understanding of us because our names and life stories sound odd and foreign to them. We choose our answers carefully, not wanting to offend anyone. We don't want to sound as if we prefer one country over another. We don't want to seem ungrateful or disloyal. And we don't even know the answers that well ourselves, which is why we sometimes say: "I'm both" or "I'm neither." It's essentially the same thing.

When we say these things, there's something else we're not saying. The real question hangs in the air unanswered: the question of home. That's because the question of home is such a difficult and painful thing, something so filled with longing that it's hard for us to talk about, much less answer.

For us, home is the emptiness that was created when our parents left Poland, Vietnam and Turkey and went to Germany. Their decision to do so created a gap in our family history. We grew up in a different country from our parents, speaking a different language and with different songs, images and stories, ones they didn't know. We couldn't learn German traditions from them, and even less so the sense of belonging to this country. We just know it secondhand: the sense of having a homeland that our German friends feel because they inherited their place in this country -- and their certainty.

There are many ways to interpret the German concept of Heimat, or home. In Polish, it's mala ojczyzna or "little fatherland"; in Turkish, it's anavatan, or "motherland"; and, in Vietnamese, it is que huong, or "village." Despite the differences among these concepts, they all refer to the link between biography and geography: Home is the origin of the body and soul, the center of one's own world. A country's culture shapes the character of the people who grow up there. It raises them the way fathers and mothers raise their children. It makes the Germans disciplined, the French charming and the Japanese polite -- at least that's the general perception. But what does this mean for those who grew up in two countries? Do they even have a home? Or do they have two? Why is it that, in German, the word 'home' cannot be plural? 

Imagine a girl who learned how to read and write in Poland and came to Germany when she was eight. It was only here that she learned the language that she turned into her profession. Is she really Polish? Or a child that lived in Turkey for three years, and then grew up in Flensburg, in northern Germany, in a world that was half Turkish and half German. What's her home? And a German who looks Vietnamese, who lives Germany and has only visited Vietnam during summer holidays? Does she even have a native country?

The fractured histories of our families make it difficult to clearly say where we come from. We look like our parents, but we're different. We're also different from the people we work or went to school with. In our case, the link between biography and geography is broken. We aren't what we look like. We don't know what percentage of us is Polish and what percentage is German because we don't think in those terms. We have often asked ourselves whether our sense of humor, our sense of family, our pride and our emotionality comes from one country or the other. Did we learn these things from our parents? Or in our German schools? Or by watching our friends?

We wrote about the dichotomy in our diaries, asking ourselves: Who am I, if I don't know where I come from? 

We lack something that our German friends, acquaintances and coworkers have: a place that they don't just come from, but where they belong, where they can find answers to their own questions and encounter others who are like them -- or at least that's what we imagine. We, on the other hand, come from nowhere and belong nowhere. There is no place where we can overcome our dichotomy because it lies in the no-man's-land between German and foreign culture. When we're together with our German acquaintances and colleagues, we often ask ourselves: Do I really belong? And yet, when we're sitting with our Polish, Turkish and Vietnamese acquaintances and relatives, we ask ourselves the same thing.

We yearn for a place where we can simply be, without having to simulate it. But we also know that this isn't a place, but rather a state of mind.

Our attitude toward life is characterized by alienation, accompanied by the fear of disturbing others in the harmony of their sameness. We are afraid that others will perceive us as foreign objects. It isn't a feeling we talk about very much. After all, who would understand us? We want to be normal. And, if that's not possible, at least we want to pretend as if we were.