Home had long been a meaning-Patina – kind of like the father of the country: Somehow of yesterday, a little old-fashioned, at least for some German. Migrants see the different. Because they have two homelands.
Home – not a place, but time
Home for me is the Childhood, the warmth of the family, my street, at that time, with the different smells, the light, the taste of the plums in the backyard.
They say: home is where my family is. Home is where the friends are. Home is where it is at home and feels comfortable. But my extended family lives in five countries, my closest friends are everywhere in the world. And I’m home in four cities and in three countries.
As is the case with the passport. To put it bluntly, the Pass is a driver’s licence of a higher class. With the Pass, it assumes certain obligations to the state and, in return, receives a certain level of security. With the identity that has little to do with loyalty, with the rule of law and law-abiding.
The Pope has three passports: Argentinian, Italian and the Vatican. How this fact reflects his identity? He is Argentinian, Italians, or citizens of the Vatican? Or is it rather the head of the Catholic Church?
Alexander Andreev, DW-Bulgarian
Nowadays, in a complex and globalised world, one has necessarily multiple identities. For example, I am by birth a Bulgarian, from the Pass of German. I am, however, strongly identical with my journalistic career. A further identity, which is very important, with my family and the members of this family living in four different countries. Other Sub-identities, which are important for me: I am a literary Translator and writer, Bicycle rider, Smoking, classical-lovers.
In Germany I have never experienced everyday racism. Maybe it’s the fact that my appearance is average and that I speak the language. When I started, but before more than 27 years as an editor at Deutsche Welle, were not the employees with a foreign Background, in principle, as a journalist, but rather as a Translator. And for many years, at the level of the head of Department, not a single colleagues with a “migration background”. This has, thankfully, changed.
“Home is where you do not need to explain”
This spell herder’s hung for years in our garden gazebo and in my birth town of Sibiu. A medieval town in Transylvania, a Central European Multicultural Region, for 100 years, to Romania, and before that about 1000 years part of the Kingdom of Hungary.
And we had to explain to us there certainly. Neither Mihai, the Romanian neighbor boy, or the Hungarian twin sisters Emese and Enikö, Anita, a Transylvanian Saxon girls, or Matthias, a German-Hungarian-Jewish Boy in my age. We all lived in the same street, played together, we struggled and got us back, we celebrated our feasts in the families, each Fixed to its time – and we celebrated often. Easter, for example, the Evangelical and Orthodox Easter fell mostly on the same Sunday there was, therefore, twice colored eggs and lamb roast with potato salad (in the case of the Protestant German), or Mama’s League, the delicious corn porridge (in the case of the Orthodox Romanians). In the case of our Hungarian neighbors, the fine flour were dining after Budapest’s recipe on the table. And in the case of Matthias, it was Passover matzoh.
Robert Schwartz, DW-Romanian
And later when we were larger, the sweet Carmel wine. The almost as sweet as the banana liqueur, the us Emmi-offered aunt secretly, when we splattered you on Easter Monday with our cheap perfume from a small vial “,” an old custom, when the boys drizzled all the girls and women in the neighborhood gently with scented water. Sparingly, so that it was enough for all. And nobody asked whether we could, as a Christian, matzoh meal, or as a Jew, Easter eggs. We ate everything and it was nice. We lived in parallel worlds, each one in his family, and his language and identity – and yet, again and again. “The only Parallel that overlap, as we are here in Hermann city,” nursed my father to say.
This was home for me. A world that had seen our parents for us after the horrors of the Second world war? An island of bliss, far away from the painful reality of the Communist dictatorship in which we lived? It was my Macondo? My Yoknapatawpha? Maybe. And yet – I don’t want to miss the time and the friends from back then that are still my friends. The home that I carry in my soul with me, not as a burden but as a source of Inspiration for new homes, which I conquered in the decades since then, or have conquered me. And to me allow to be able to say in Germany: homeland, here I am. Without the need for me to explain.
The familiar taste of common traditions
In the so-called Old Europe, also known as the EU, the outdated term “home” a little fatigued. Thank God, because in the past have been waged in the name of the home, wars on our continent. Today, you will feel at home, as in Athens, in Cologne or in Porto. Everywhere, the familiar taste of common traditions.
I, as a European, a Greek Background and a German Patina. It is so wonderful. Greek, the everyday culture of German in professional life. If you pick as the Best out, where to find it. This is not arbitrariness, but the reorganization of the order of life in a larger context.
Advantages I have with the double nationality. Somehow the Greeks to claim exemptions for themselves. As a result, I have two passports. In Tunisia, I don’t show my Greek passport, then the dealer pull me over the table, a small, poor Nations to walk together in solidarity. I am in Turkey, I show my German passport in order for my To get any ideas. Am I predisposed to opportunistic? No, I think I’m well established in two nationalities.
Spiros Moskovou, DW-Greek
And then the question of Identity. Who am I? Greek or German, Christian or Atheist? My passport, with its tight terms seems to know exactly. The identity is for me not a fence, in which one feels safe, but is the result of a life-path that passes between an origin and a destination. In the meantime, the origin of Flash, and the destination of charisma loses. Ultimately, my identity from what I did, and left. But who wants to know already so well?
At the end of the experience. My German fellow-citizens to think, I was because of the pronunciation of Dutch, because of the black hair, Corsican, and other times because of my fondness for Grappa Italian restaurant. Is not bad. The main thing is that you don’t give me the feeling that I was discriminated against in this country, or discriminated against. And they don’t do that literally for thirty-five years.
My finest hour came but with the Greece crisis of 2010. I was suddenly all over the neighborhood to a true object of curiosity. I was approached on the street, at the Baker stopped, even by otherwise distinguished neighbors invited to dinner. Only One thing: the solution to the Greek puzzle, a valid explanation for the crisis wanted me to do. I have not solved until today, even for me, this puzzle definitively.