Germany.
I live in Berlin.
Something I would never have imagined when I was a kid. To live in Germany. The country of „the enemy“. Even though never expressed with exactly those words, this was the underlying message that was transmitted with every conversation where anything German was mentioned. Even though my father listened to a German classical music radio station, even though my uncle was married to a German woman. Germany was bad. „ D´Preisen“, that´s how we called the Germans. An even though we kids never had experienced anything negative concerning Germany or Germans we simply appropriated this feeling of antipathy and distrust … In high school I noticed that I quite liked the German language and culture, I felt bad about this for a long time … What shocked me was when in 1982 the German singer „Nicole“ won the Eurovision Grand Prix with the son „Ein bisschen Frieden“, my Grandparents, who, after all, had experienced the second world war in a rather terrible way, said: „why should´t she win, it´s a nice song …“ I could´t believe it, there I was, raised by my parents to have this anti-German attitude and then there were my Grandparents who I thought were supposed to be totally ant-German liking a German song about peace …
For me that was the first time that I realized that black and white thinking may be not appropriate when applied to real life …