I was 27 when I first stepped foot in Germany.
It is kinda weird that I have always felt a special “connection” with this country. I was in 3rd grade when I first had an encounter with it when my classmate brought her aunt’s German language book to school. I was so fascinated by the language that I tried to make sense of it on my own based on the illustration (this was pre-internet, of course. I couldn’t Google things yet). I even borrowed it and brought it home with me only for her mother to dash my dream of interpreting the language. She saw that we were looking at it one day while I was visiting and she gave us a scolding. She said that we shouldn’t touch it because it was super expensive.
In university, I had this yearning that I want to do my Master’s degree in a university in Münster and I don’t even know why. Mind you, I don’t even know to this day if there is a university there that offers a master’s degree in Geology but my mind was so set back then that it would happen. Apparently, there is a word for this in German which is really fitting, “Sehnsucht”. You just yearn but as for what, no one really knows.
And when I met a German guy and eventually ended up dating him, I thought that was the clearest sign from the universe that Germany was my destiny. When he first sent me a photo of the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne, I told myself that I will stand in front of it one day. And surprisingly, not even a full year after he sent that photo, I found myself right in front of it.
It was April 2022 when I first stepped foot in Germany. My plane landed in Cologne and I felt a sense of belonging immediately. I soaked everything around me, tried currywurst and even watched ferries in the Rhine. Everything felt right and it was as if I was living the life of the many protagonists I have read about. It was as if history was flowing right through me.
I spent a lot of time in North Rhine-Westphalia. The name of this state alone gives me goosebumps to this day because it sounds so regal, so official and European to an Asian like me! I have come to love the very romantic city of Aachen with the Aachen Cathedral serving as the domineering backdrop of the city and of course, the Rathaus itself. I couldn’t believe that I was able to walk the very same street that Charlemagne once roamed. I have been to Bochum, Essen, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Bonn and of course, Hattingen. The latter being a place that was once quite dear to me.
I remembered how I travelled across Germany in the summer of 2022. Deutsche Bahn introduced the €49 ticket around that time so I took the opportunity to make the most out of it. I travelled from Stockholm to Copenhagen for 10 hours via FlixBus and spent another 4 hours travelling from Copenhagen to Lübeck. We crossed the Fehmarn Belt and it was kinda surreal seeing the Danish flag behind and looking towards the fast approaching German soil in front of me. I felt so alive during that trip! I met interesting people along the way, one of which was an Afghan national that escaped Afghanistan with the Danish embassy personnel when the Taliban took over again after the US left their country.
That FlixBus ride dropped me at the heart of Lübeck, a city in Schleswig-Holstein. My mouth was agape when I first saw the Holstentor! This imposing gate would be the first thing one would see upon arriving at Lübeck. At that moment, I knew I made the right decision despite travelling for that long. I fought so hard to plan this trip because everyone thought that I was being ridiculous travelling for 14 hours from Stockholm just to spend two days in that city. But my mind was set, I wanted to see Lübeck. I wanted to see the “capital” of the Hanseatic League in the olden times.
Around this time, I already knew that I was going to Bergen, another Hanseatic “city”, so I have this desire to tick off all the main cities (key historic cities such as Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, Gdańsk, Riga, Tallinn, Visby, London, Novgorod, and Bergen among others). I am quite whimsical like that.
I spent two days in the historically-fulfilling and gorgeous-looking Lübeck. Afterwards, I have spent another 18 hours or so travelling across Germany. First it was from Lübeck to Hamburg, then Hamburg to Bremen, then Bremen to Osnabrück, Osnabrück to Dortmund, then Dortmund to Düsseldorf and finally Düsseldorf to Aachen. That was a painstakingly long ride but my eyes were satiated by the things I have seen and experienced along the way.
The last time that I set foot in Germany was the summer of 2023. I did a tour in Koblenz then as one of my main activities on that vacation. It is a city in Rhineland-Palatinate and I have really wanted to see it for quite some time. I walked across that city as if I belonged there and took a lot of photos at the Deutsches Eck. There, I was trying to memorize all the 16 Bundesländer of Deutschland which were gracing the wall of the Memorial of German Unity as I need to know it for a future citizenship exam.
I remembered how I was surrounded by friends and loved ones at the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn. They took me to one of those screens where you can try out some questions from the German Citizenship Exam. I only got 3 mistakes then and everyone was cheering me on. When the time comes, they laughingly encouraged, I will definitely ace it.
That summer, I was so sure of my life path. I love and enjoy Germany and I know that I can thrive and even grow there. I was readying myself for the final move after Norway since the former has always been the final destination. But while hiking in Stolberg, I saw one of the final cracks of this illusion. Sometimes, even when someone claims to love you, they would still do things that make you realize they actually don’t. They wouldn’t watch their words and there will come a time that you would just feel numb and dream that everything will be alright in the end. But that was just a dream, an illusion of a life you want to live and so you are forced to move forward.
Germany is now a distant dream. I know I can always go there to relive a past self that longed for it but I am now a different me. This current self still dreams about travelling the Romantic Road and visiting Trier, walking across Berlin and having a day tour in Chemnitz. I am still Aileen but no longer that self that dreamed about belonging in Germany.
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