The other day in Berlin

I am back in Germany. Two weeks now, but it feels like a lifetime. I had this plan: To rediscover my roots, to find that overwhelming sense of belonging again that had come over me when I touched German ground at Tegel for the first time in eight years on the 3rd of May.

All the moves of my childhood should have prepared me for what was coming, I should have known. Feeling At Home does not come when I want it to come, and least when planned. No comforting lull of nostalgia or sense of being a part of this country – instead I was welcomed by the rather harsh reality of the onset of Berlin autumn, the sharp cold air, nothing like that sneaky mild English humidity that slowly lulls you in autumn until it reaches your core where it stays as persistent melancholy, lifting in spring when the Enlish sun, on its annual impulse of mischief, warms numbed souls and gives pragmatic spirits audacious hope – that it just might be a hot and dry summer this year.

After seven years in Britain, German reality was a slap in the face. (Again I should have been prepared by the ten-weeks of annual summer holidays in Germany during the Portuguese years). Almost desolate, the slow erosion of the German welfare state, visible and audible in the population of the Berlin U-Bahn, broke and flat. Gone the childhood- and flying visit perception of an undamaged comforting world, of home, where everybody lives in equal comfort and noone is poor or cold. Gone the summer passion for a bohemian city where superficial things were irrelevant and where I found a companion who understood, where did it all go?

I am so infinitely cold, not even German beer will help.

It was Sunday when a German curiosity took me completely by surprise (I should have remembered and appreciated): Everything is closed on a Sunday! Luckily cornershops do exist in Berlin: I feel sick when the heavyset Berliner snarls at the small foreign girl at the vegetable stand, who by the way speaks perfect German – I bet the great lump speaks nothing but his gruff Berlinerisch twang. He's pissed off: The girl has taken two tomatoes but obviously, since she’s foreign, she was not thoughtful enough and did not to replace the price tag, nobody will be able to read the price, now that she took her tomatoes. He doesn't hesitate to tell her, bullyish. Expecting an answer, he observes her, impatiently and threatening as she nervously tries to re-arrange the tag, to no avail. “I am happy to help” he spits aggressively as he already pulls the tag from her hand and puts it on the tomatoes. “So!” his satisfied grunt. I am stunned, embarrassed and uncomfortable and shake that ugly feeling - a mixture of fear and shame about that nasty senseless German pedantry paired with ignorance that has been the cause of so much suffering.