Eight Years and a Dead Pigeon Under the Table
Christine and I were sitting in a cheap café on Frankfurter Allee when someone came over to remove the dead pigeon from under the table next to us. We were talking, as people do when they’ve been somewhere too long, about whether we actually wanted to stay. She’s a travel blogger, Christine, someone I’d been running into on the circuit for a while, and she said she wasn’t sure Berlin had anything left to hold her. And I realized she’d hit something I’d been circling for months without quite landing on.
Eight years in the German capital. I came from a small Bavarian town called Buchloe—which sits in the geographically humiliating position of being equidistant from Augsburg, Landsberg am Lech, and Kaufbeuren, three cities that are all more interesting than it is—and I arrived with the full conviction of someone escaping somewhere provincial. Charlottenburg to Wedding, Wedding (via a detour through Tokyo) to Neukölln, Neukölln to Kreuzberg, Kreuzberg to Prenzlauer Berg, Prenzlauer Berg back through Tokyo and eventually to Friedrichshain. I’ve done the full rotation.
I’ve slept with women from the east and west of the city. I’ve gone hard enough that the sun found me somewhere outside Potsdam, still going. I’ve taken things whose names even the pharmacist would need to Google—or maybe it was just MDMA cut with something that didn’t bear thinking about. Who knows. The point is I showed up for this city in the full spirit it demanded. And now I show up only when my name’s on the guestlist and the bar is open. Street food markets? Overpriced and packed. Hipster flea markets? Keep your junk. Berghain? If I wanted hepatitis C I’d find a cheaper way to get it.
That’s not bitterness—or maybe it is, but it’s the earned kind, the kind that comes after the enthusiasm has been completely spent. Berlin asked everything of me, I gave it, and now I’m watching someone deal with a dead bird while sipping coffee that isn’t very good.
What’s started appearing in my feeds lately are photos from friends who moved back to Bavaria. They’re cycling through meadows of wildflowers. Picnicking at lakes so blue they look like screensavers. Drinking beer that tastes like it was made somewhere specific by people who gave a damn. They look annoyingly fine. Better than fine, actually.
Everyone in Germany hates Bavaria, perhaps with reason—I genuinely don’t know. But the longer I stay away the more I think: Bavaria is actually great. If I ever have kids, I’d move mountains to get them into a Bavarian school. I failed spectacularly at that same school system, sure, but it still beats sending them to some Waldorf place in Prenzlauer Berg where they spend three years learning to make felt animals and developing opinions about sourdough. I’d burn the whole operation down preventively.
There’s a saying from home that has followed me since I left: Jeder kommt zurück. Everyone comes back. When I left to do my media design training in Berlin I laughed at it—never, goodbye, not your problem anymore, see you never. I had the complete certainty of someone who has not yet had to revise a strong opinion.
And now I scroll through photos of people who used to live in Cologne and Hamburg and Berlin and have returned to Bavaria to build whatever comes next. The blue sky. The green mountains. The yellow flowers. The terrible internet speeds, presumably, and the fact that nothing opens past nine. But those mountains. That sky.
The argument I’ve been making to myself for five years is that I have to be in Berlin because this is where the industry is—the agencies, the startups, the digital creative world I’m supposedly part of. The MacBook monks and the pixel pushers. The re:publica crowd. And maybe that’s even true. But I keep meeting people who live in genuinely remote parts of Germany, who come to Berlin once a year for a conference, and who are making exactly as much money as I am. Because they use a technology our grandparents already knew and valued: email. Is Berlin only as relevant as everyone who moved here needs it to be?
The honest accounting is more complicated. I miss the dialect. I miss the landscape. I miss the food in a way that feels embarrassing to admit. But I also know that memory is selective and that my actual hometown has no cinema, no late-night anything, and the only cool video game shop—MGM, may it rest—shut down because the kids shoplifted more than they bought. Objectively it is not a place where you creatively grow. So: Munich? Munich is beautiful and completely unaffordable and packed with the kind of affluent smugness that makes the worst Prenzlauer Berg bloggers look self-aware by comparison. The ones who currently despise me because I have something to say and they don’t. Don’t choke on your oat-milk latte, you fixie-riding fuckers.
Tokyo is also still in the picture. It was always in the picture. The two detours I took there weren’t accidents—they were test runs. Whether that’s the real dream or just another way of not answering the question I’m actually avoiding, I can’t say yet.
I miss my family. That’s the most real factor and also the one most likely to be romanticized. My childhood was genuinely good—good friends, good feelings, the specific intensity of growing up somewhere small where everything mattered because there wasn’t much else. But that place isn’t coming back. The town hasn’t changed; it’s just smaller than it used to be in my head.
In moments like this I almost envy people who work conventional jobs and live where the work is, spared this particular loop of paralysis. Every new question just adds to it. The freedom to live anywhere turns out to be its own kind of trap. I have the whole world open to me and what I’m doing with it is sitting in a mediocre café in Friedrichshain wondering whether to return to the exact coordinates where I was born. Is that stupid? Is my actual dream something else entirely? Was Berlin always supposed to be a staging post? Where does a person end up happier—closer or further? Or right here?
Christine and I sat there on Frankfurter Allee, the pigeon handled, the coffee forgettable, going back and forth over the pros and cons of leaving a city that has shaped both of us in ways we wouldn’t fully undo. We didn’t resolve anything. That felt about right. Jeder kommt zurück. Maybe. I still don’t know.