This World Is Not My Home
Translated by the author
Inside of me there is a small animal that craves a habitat. A territory that belongs to her and that she belongs to. She doesn’t necessarily want to stay there. She wants to crawl out of her den, leave her parents, and go out into the big wide world — but to still belong somewhere and be recognized by those from the same place as one of their own. Even if she doesn’t like all of them and they don’t all like her. She wants to have an answer to the question: Where are you from?
I don’t have an answer to this question because, in the early 1970s, God called a young couple living in Dallas, Texas — she shy, poetry-loving, from a farm in Ohio, he dashing, sunny-blonde, from California — to go to Europe as missionaries. To minister to the East Germans behind the Iron Curtain. Although they had never been outside of the United States before and didn’t speak any foreign languages, they heeded the call and, a few years after they got married, left everything they had and knew. Their habitat. The only thing they brought with them was their six-month-old baby, me.
Our first stop was Brighton, England, where I learned to crawl and then to walk and my parents were trained for the mission field. We would live in the West, my father would travel to East Germany every few months, pretending to be a tourist, evangelical pamphlets and notes for sermons hidden in secret compartments in the car and inside the casing of his coffee thermos, my mother would stay home with me and the children who would follow and not write any more poems.
After one year in Sussex we moved to St. Andrä-Wördern, a small town outside of Vienna, where I learned to speak my parents’ native language, my parents struggled to learn German at the Goethe-Institut, and my father started making his clandestine trips to East Germany. We lived in a house with a yard that stretched out endlessly underneath me when I flew up on the swing, with a blue and white bathroom that had two sinks, where my brother and I stood next to each other on little stools brushing our teeth and spitting on each other’s heads. In the dark wood-paneled kitchen there was a corner bench, which we called Eckbank even when speaking English; we also called the mud room Windfang and the tiled stove Kachelofen and the bread rolls we ate for breakfast Semmel, but otherwise we played, sang, prayed, and argued in our native language. My parents told me that kindergarten was where I would learn German with other children. The shock on my first day, when I discovered that all the other children already spoke German, quite proficiently in fact, struck me dumb. I didn’t open my mouth again until, months later, complete German sentences came out of it, presumably with a Lower Austrian lilt. When we next moved, a few months before my fifth birthday, this lilt was lost forever. God had called again: between his mission trips to East Germany, my father was to attend to the students in Freiburg, a university town in West Germany: book tables on campus, Bible studies, sing-alongs. My parents again heeded the call, again pulled up stakes, packed my two-year-old brother and me and our worldly goods into the car, and set off for Germany.
I remember that trip well. Sitting in the back seat of our Renault station wagon, what we had lost resting heavy in my gut while my brother kicked his legs unsuspectingly in his styrofoam car seat next to me. That morning we had woken up at home. Then we had left. And were never going back. We had left behind our house, our yard. Inconceivably, they were probably still there now, without us.
In the front seat, my parents had other things on their minds. As we approached our destination in Freiburg, they commented on the scenery, pointed things out to each other they noticed out of the window. I wanted to be part of the conversation and piped up: Reminds me of Austria! My parents laughed the indulgent laughter of grownups. No honey, my father said. This is a different country. I didn’t see anything exotic out there: streets, trees, buildings, a city. Parked cars, pedestrians, people on bicycles, sunshine. What did my parents see that made them so sure that this was a different country? What is the difference between one country and another? I chewed on this riddle for a while before letting it go.
What did my parents see that made them so sure that this was a different country? What is the difference between one country and another?
That first evening we had dinner in the bare kitchen under a bare light bulb in our bare new apartment. It felt strangely confined despite the drafty absence of furniture. Instead of leading outside, the front door gave out onto an echoing stairwell, whose status baffled me: did the beige linoleum stairs belong to our new so-called home or to the outside? Every now and then I heard steps out there, strangers were walking past us as we ate dinner at the makeshift kitchen table, surrounded by stacks of moving boxes. I felt exposed. My mother, six months pregnant, was exhausted to the point of derangement, my father was fidgety, kept jumping up from the table to look for something. On the plate in front of me was a horrid slice of pumpernickel bread. The word bread had never before meant something so appalling. I choked it down in dismay and I knew: not only is this not home, this is another country. I was beginning to see what my parents had meant in the car. Nothing like this existed in Austria. This nasty, black pulp that gave way without resistance between my teeth and stuck there: this must be Germany. Now I was chewing on the solution to the riddle, profoundly disappointed.
We stayed for ten years. Years that were more saturated with the world than were the toddler years in Austria, which I could have just as well spent in Dubai (with the same parents) without turning out particularly different than I did. In Freiburg I became somewhat German, and probably somewhat Freiburgian too, even if I never warmed up to the pumpernickel bread: I was given an oversized paper cone full of little gifts on my first day of school, played the recorder, wrote with a fountain pen, crawled around blind-folded on the floor with a wooden spoon in my hand at birthday parties, carried a candle-lit lantern through the streets on St. Martin’s Day, had an Advent calendar, read the teen magazine Bravo. There was a girl called Neslihan in my elementary school class, she lived with her family in the guest worker barracks across from the school and, unlike me, was singled out as a foreigner by our teachers and classmates. We had a neighbor who was consumed by hatred and bitterness left over from the war, we were supposed to be nice to him because he’d been through so much (no one mentioned what he might have done). I read the graffiti that said 1984 is now and the graffiti calling on Americans to go home and thought they meant me and saw the graffiti of the anarchist symbol and thought it meant asshole. My father found German officialese hilariously pedantic and made fun of the subjunctive mood for indirect speech when he heard it on the radio, but on the whole my parents got on very well with Germany, with Baden. They took us hiking, they loved the Sperrmüllwochen, the designated weeks twice a year when people put their bulky waste out on the street and you could rummage through it looking for treasures, they loved having the main meal at mid-day and bread for supper, they loved how tidy and clean everything was — thank the Lord he didn’t call us to France, they would say, France is dirty. Sometimes they were more German, or what they thought was German, than the Germans: my mother sent me to school in a dirndl when all the other Freiburg brats of the early 1980s wore cords and baggy sweatshirts.
Despite all this — and because of it — Freiburg hasn’t dug its way under my skin deep enough for me to claim it as my habitat. I am not made out of Freiburg like my mother is made out of Ohio and my father is made out of California. When I meet people who also grew up in Freiburg in Berlin, where I’ve lived for over twenty years, it doesn’t feel right to tell them I’m from there too. My parents were foreigners there, with their roots on the other side of the Atlantic, with their American accents, with their God-given assignment that made where they lived into a mission field, into land they were called on to cultivate rather than a place that could receive and shape them. My siblings and I were less foreign; the cultural practices of school, neighborhood, and media (back then not the world wide web but local radio stations, German TV, and the city library) left their traces in us, and as white children we passed as German to the point that I had to bring my passport to school one day in fourth grade to prove that I really was American and not just a show-off (Neslihan would have loved to have had my problems.) But we lost our status as Freiburgers the moment we moved away. We didn’t leave anything behind that could have tied us to that place, no grandma or aunt, no property that we would someday inherit, no family stories that would moor us to this particular spot because its history was also ours. We had nothing to do with its history.
So it could have just as well been another country where we moved this time, even if in fact it was only just under forty miles away. I was fourteen. Our parents had enrolled us in an English-speaking, ultra-conservative private Christian school in a village in the Black Forest. They had decided that my now four siblings and I would be better off in the missionary bubble there than at public schools in a left-wing university town. When we left, my friends cried so hard you would have thought they were never going to see me again. And they didn’t: when I turned up in Freiburg for a visit a few years later, they didn’t recognize me behind my thick make-up and my pronouncements about gays going to hell.
Apart from this kind of brainwashing, living in a missionary bubble meant that we didn’t live in the Black Forest and we didn’t live in Germany, but in the insular space of Black Forest Academy, where my classmates, whose parents were scattered all over the world as missionaries, didn’t know where they belonged or where they came from either. We weren’t allowed to hang out with the locals. My German got rusty. My world shrank back into the private realm it had been in St. Andrä-Wördern: the school was like an extended family and there was nothing outside of it. My parents were comfortable with this; it kept us away from dangerous influences, from temptations to stray from the true path. We weren’t supposed to feel at home in the world anyway. For this world is not our permanent home; we are looking forward to a home yet to come it says in Hebrews, so pulling up stakes again and again wasn’t a problem. What was lasting was faith and family, and that ought to be enough to ground us. Or to heaven us.
We weren’t supposed to feel at home in the world anyway. For this world is not our permanent home; we are looking forward to a home yet to come it says in Hebrews, so pulling up stakes again and again wasn’t a problem.
At the same time, my parents sensed that we also needed an earthly place, a spatio-socio-cultural territory where we could feel we belonged. Maybe because of their own homesickness for America, which overcame them periodically, despite the prospect of the home yet to come. So they put on America Nights for us, where we listened to Johnny Cash and ate hamburgers and Dad said, This is America, kids! This is where you’re from! We celebrated the Fourth of July with sparklers and red-white-and-blue balloons, and in February, Mom baked a cherry pie for George Washington’s birthday like the housewives in her childhood had done. She didn’t know that hardly anyone in the US did that anymore; she had been gone for decades and had in some ways become more American than the Americans. And so my parents mothballed their earthly home and offered it to us, shrink-wrapped in rituals taken out of context. It was a given that we would “go back” to the States after we graduated from high school.
This attempt to artificially create a sense of belonging to a faraway place failed utterly. Despite their efforts, my siblings and I did not feel like we were coming home when we moved to the US for college. We felt like we were moving to another country. One that was foreign to us, repelled us even. Without us feeling German in return. When, one after another, we then rejected our parents’ faith, our homelessness became complete.
A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside her skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life — the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives — as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them, Annie Dillard writes in her memoirs.1 The English word home — as well as the German word Heimat, which resonates on different registers — is derived from the Indo-European kei, which means “to lie.” Home is where they lay us down as children, the setting that is given to us and that we as children cannot yet grasp as something specific. It is this very ignorance in which we go about our days as children that allows this setting to shape us. The moment, however, I arrived in the only place that could have become something like a hometown for me — Freiburg — I was no longer merely preoccupied with my own foggy inner life, with my body, with the things in my immediate surroundings that gave me pleasure and fear and occasion to play, but had already woken up to a world of cultural differences. Together with my parents, I encountered Freiburg with the comparing eyes of a tourist. The pumpernickel bread wasn’t just gross, it was German, I knew already at four, and this meant that I was at a remove from my world from the start. I was never unconscious enough in it for it to permeate me and make me. I didn’t gradually wake up in Freiburg, in Germany, in a bed warmed by my parents and grandparents, and realize, ah, so this is where I’m from, how boring or how lovely or get me out of here.
Instead I woke up in white American evangelicalism. Get me out of here. I rejected this faith and all its cultural trappings as a young adult; I will probably be at the task of eradicating it from my mind and body for the rest of my life. If I’m from anywhere, I’m from this religion, which I have intentionally and actively turned my back on. But “from Christianity” is hardly a satisfying answer to the question Where are you from? It lacks all the spatiality, the psychogeography, the everyday domesticity of the den that the animal in me longs for. This homeless animal longs to be embraced by a place as tightly as my more rooted friends, as my parents, are embraced by their places of origin.
My elderly parents are back in Ohio now, looking forward with unwavering assurance to their true home in heaven.
- Annie Dillard, An American Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 74 ↩︎