ColumnPlace matters nothing. It’s all about what you house in your head and heart.

Nine months ago and on something of a whim, I threw down roughly $300 for a one-way Air Berlin flight to Europe. I never issued proper goodbyes or otherwise indicated that I wouldn’t come back to San Francisco, and yet some small, reckless part of me already knew it was foregone. Now, I have under my belt nearly a year abroad and, even better, a German-issue work and residency visa affixed to my American passport.

This week, I’ve popped back into the States for the first time since my departure and am currently holed up at a friend’s little flat in Brooklyn. New York energizes and animates me like no other place in the world, but Berlin is a magnetic and beautiful beast that compels me to splash right back across the pond. Europe isn’t exactly home to me but, at this juncture, neither is the United States – returning to my country of origin has only confirmed for me what I already suspected: I will not remain and cannot return here with any permanence.

The absence of home, conceptually, isn’t a lack – but rather a liberation. Because I don’t chiefly belong anywhere, I by default belong everywhere. Girdled by my journalistic impulse to indulge curiosity and bolstered by my professional prerogative to document culture in real time, I don’t quite feel like a citizen of the world: Not, at least, in a blasé cosmopolitan sense nor with a corny “global village” sentiment to validate my existence and experiences.

It’s the people we meet who give us license to continue. Without them repelling or attracting us – indeed, without the mere presence of people as placeholders, markers and signposts – we cannot be free to hack off our roots and sally forth into new and unfamiliar terrain; we cannot be free to contribute our song to the universal chorus. Our allies and enemies alike provide us with belonging – whether they be present in a corporeal sense, like a lover curled in bed in slumber, or whether they be the fodder of imagination, like the memory of a lover long lost. While he might never surface again in the flesh, he remains just as real in the adventures of the mind. Within you, his is an existence of eternal return.

Home then is a notion. It’s as much an idea as a place. The figment is no less real than the physical expression – in the end, won’t both come to dust? Maybe home isn’t what you carry on your back at all, but rather what you house in your head.

Psychological projection is a powerful agent. It’s why we reflect on what has come and harness these experiences to inform what will. If you can make it up, you can make it so.

Berlin-based Abigail Wick is a contributor to The New York Times and National Public Radio. ‘From an Ex-Pat…with Love’ is her weekly EcoSalon column about cultural dislocation, romantic relationships and lifestyle choices – filtered through the lens of an American woman living and working abroad in Europe.

Author Image: Alina Rudya

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ColumnThe capital city’s own mayor puts it best: “Berlin is poor, but sexy.”

In Scott Roxborough’s How Berlin Became the Coolest City on the Planet, he writes that the 3.45 million-person city is everything Germany is not: spontaneous, open, cosmopolitan and exciting. While Roxborough’s summary dismissal of Deutschland might be ungenerous, his synopsis of its capital is unerring. The metropolis defies easy definition – dynamic and polymorphous, Berlin is in perennial state of becoming.

Pop-up restaurants, shops and galleries are the norm; sprawling former warehouses cum all-night dance clubs featuring pulsating electronic beats are open every day of the week; the city streets are a menagerie of graffiti and street art; and internet start-ups are in such abundance that Berlin has been dubbed Europe’s “Silicon Allee.” Young internationals from the creative sector flock here for the cheap rent in the East, allowing them to set-up studios and storefronts at a low cost in a globally-relevant urban center. From an all-vegan supermarket to a remarkable, Finnish-style sauna that literally floats on the Spree Canal bisecting the city, Berlin is a place where radical, even seemingly preposterous ideas have room to germinate, take root and flourish.

Mayor Klaus Wowereit – who, incidentally, happens to be gay, but whose sexual preference is a complete non-issue in this tolerant locale – provided the city with its unofficial motto when he described Berlin as “poor…but sexy.” And it is so. While the country of Germany’s staid, export-driven economy is propping up the euro zone from collapse, Berlin’s unemployment level exceeds 10-percent. It’s not a place for industry, but rather a cultural capital. Its very financial malaise is what makes it a tenable global destination for artists who might have a slim pocketbook, but whose straits energize their creativity – this is where the sexiness comes into play.

Berlin isn’t for everybody. Of all the European cities, it certainly doesn’t place first as one of the most beautiful. Far from the posh digs of Paris, Rome or London, Germany’s capital isn’t a center of high-end fashion or epicurean eats, which is precisely what makes it so attractive. It’s Berlin’s tenuousness and frayed edges that make it sparkle. After The Wall fell, there was a mass exodus from the former Socialist enclave; derelict, care-worn buildings were abandoned and young, downwardly mobile people sought out the empty shell as a playground of their own imagining.

In two intervening decades, Berlin continues to discover its own vicissitudes, to be carved out by ex-pats and Germans alike. Poor and sexy sure, but also touched with no small dose of both madness and magic. It’s a city of those who are willing to stand on ground that’s not quite solid, but that is rich with the ferment of do-it-yourself derring-do.

Berlin-based Abigail Wick is a contributor to The New York Times and National Public Radio. ‘From an Ex-Pat…with Love’ is her weekly EcoSalon column about cultural dislocation, romantic relationships and lifestyle choices – filtered through the lens of an American woman living and working abroad in Europe.

Berlin Image, Roland Anton Laub; Author Image, Alina Rudya

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ColumnJane Austen’s tomes on relationships are revisited with 21st century reading glasses.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

These words mark the opening passage of British author Jane Austen’s 1813 novel, Pride & Prejudice. Although the conclusions she draws about love and intimacy are starkly insufficient for contemporary audiences, Austen continues to be fiercely relevant because of her lightning-hot investigative process and sharp social commentary. With a forked tongue pointed directly at the landed English gentry, it’s not so much her what, but rather the derring-do of her how.

For post-modern women, Austen’s world view – with its codified rules and wax seal of matrimony – isn’t so much suspect, but simply quaint. We welcome and also balk at today’s ever changing guard, asking what will become of us in an era defined by what sociologists herald as the End of Masculinity. Boys and girls both are bereft of a compass for navigating the variegated topography of gender, pair bonding, and progeny.

In our era, plurality reigns – rendering outcomes open-ended and unhinged, rather than foregone.

For Jane Austen, the terrain of dating and desire was not simple. Austen, for instance, spurned a suitor once marriage became the relationship’s only inevitability; consequently, she spent the rest of her life alone, but transformed her solitude into a gift – harnessing her time to author Sense & Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Emma. The socially-sanctioned options at her disposal were few, but she certainly gave the finger.

For many women, it’s the sheer abundance of choices that threatens to paralyze momentum; porous lives with few boundaries have their own attendant shortcomings. The introductory statement to a current-day Pride & Prejudice would require radical revision, not least because the very concept of a “universal truth” is an untenable antiquation. Instead of staking out a man of means in want of a wife, I might re-write the text to read as follows:

“That you are wholly and utterly alone is unavoidable; that everything is causal and that we’re all in this together is also inescapable; the rub, whether it be between boys and girls or whatever relationship between two humans, is to harmonize your ultimately abject triviality with your responsibility to change the world, in ways big and small, on a daily basis.”

Berlin-based Abigail Wick is a New York Times and NPR contributor. From an Ex-Pat…with Love is her weekly EcoSalon column about cultural dislocation, romantic relationships and lifestyle choices – filtered through the lens of an American woman living and working abroad.

Image by Kameron Elisabeth

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