I never considered Germany to be home in any way, shape or form. Ever. Unless you count the time before I knew we would move to the US for the first time. We’d gone before, but it always seemed like a vacation. Just another destination among the countless other destination we had been to.

In my childhood mind Germany was always bad and the other places we went to were good. I would do my time there, counting the days, months and sometimes even years until the next time I could break out. Until I finally did and vowed to myself that I’d never look back,

A promise I kept for about a year, because I wanted to see a friend. And also because I wanted to go there absolutely free. There is something very powerful about making your erstwhile prison a vacation destination, free to come and go as you please, emphasis on the go. That one was always important.

A decade later I was back once again and then the year after I decamped to Berlin, staying well away from the trendy parts and looking for housing only in Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Schoeneberg. Acting for all intents and purposes like I was a close associate of Klaus Mann and it was 1924.

That was ages ago, and the last time I sat foot on German soil was over nine years ago (I’m sensing a theme here in my adult life). There’s a lot I don’t vibe with when it comes to German ways of moving in society and their way of adhering to rules and regulations even if they get in the way of humanity. There’s a rigidity I find hard to deal with. But I did spend a significant part of my life there and more importantly a significant part of my coming of age years.

And like it or not, these experiences do leave a mark. Which explains the sense of nostalgia I feel when it comes to certain songs, except that some of them actually connect to Berlin , when I was already a full fledged adult, rather than the time I spent there in school (and that place was so far removed from Berlin in mentality and style it might as well have been in another universe).

But it always somehow comes at me, this nostalgia. Seemingly out of nowhere, holding me in the same vice grip the places outside Germany exerted over me when nostalgia for them hit me like a tsunami wave, without any prior warning. And when those feelings yare suddenly reversed and directed at the very place you had always seen as your prison it does give you food for thought. Especially when they seem to be coming at you out of nowhere.