S for Sex is used as a biological category for filling in forms as male or female or other and is confused with gender identity. Understanding gender identity as a social and cultural construction is my journey towards a sense of self where I feel at home. I want to avoid the traps of polarisation or reaction. My sense of self is based on a sense of belonging which is more than a label. Age, history, place, and expression of my bisexual nature merge in a non-binary sense of self.

Sense of Self in Berlin Cityscape

In Berlin, I wake up to the whirring hum and chuntering halt of the S-Bahn – a reminder to buy by weekly pass to give me freedom of the city. S-bahn is my favourite form of transport here because it is overground, fast and gives an insight into the “backside” of Berlin with graffiti art, back gardens and allotments. The transition from my Ulster Heimat to Berlin is a reminder of the early significance of the word Heimat in Germany when those who had to leave the countryside or small villages to work in cities expressed their loss as a longing for their Heimat of origin with regional dishes and customs. There is no equivalent word in English for Heimat, which is rooted in a sense of belonging to place and to a culture.

Ideas about Heimat have shifted in this century with the speed of  travel, global economics and the internet. Hopping on and off public transport in another life in Berlin is a far remove from the isolation of rural Donegal where we have no trains and no trams. The bus from Donegal town to Dublin Airport – a journey of three and a half hours – takes me through the polarisations of my Ulster identity as I cross the border with the UK between Ballyshannon and Enniskillen and then come back into the Republic at the border between Fermanagh and Cavan. Brexit has revived the border and potential for conflict in Northern Ireland.

Over breakfast in Berlin, I salivate over brochures for Theatre and film.  I welcome the exchange of ideas, the challenges and insights of other perspectives. We have a rather unorthodox living arrangement. My German life partner, successfully pursued by me in 1998, lives and works in community development in Mitte and is my guide through German literature, landscape, cityscape and Heimat. He has been in a V.G. (V.G. or Verein Gemeinsam is the shorthand for a group of people living together) with our friend Sabine for thirty-seven years.

Even in plural Berlin, the V.G. is not typical as the term is more common among students in temporary collective living arrangements. Reinickendorf has been a “home from home” for me for twenty-five years. Belonging to a group of people with some sense of being an “insider” rather than an “outsider”, I feel part of the cultural shorthand. I find a Heimat in Berlin.

Schorse passes me a page from Tagespeigel with yet another article to feed my obsession with belonging to more than one culture. Heimat often calls up some real or imaginary image which marks it as “home”. My Berlin Heimat is signalled by the village green with the small church – the main landmark for our neighbourhood in Reinickendorf. But Heimat is less and less about home as a specific place. . In the 21^st century with mobility from village to city, from country to country following work and family diversity, movement as workers, families, refugees or economic migrants brings diversity of cultures to every corner of the globe.

The core of Heimat is more the sense of belonging but belonging to what? When I spot a rainbow flag, I ask myself if LBGTQ+ a sense of belonging to a Heimat of identity. When I ask Jannis, Sabine’s son and a member of my Berlin extended family, he quotes someone saying Heimat is where I don’t need a password. His comment is a reminder of the speculations that the strong emphasis on Heimat in Germany today is generated by globalisation and digitalisation with its huge cultural shift reminiscent of the mighty changes engendered by industrialisation. Jannis  has also a spatial sense of belonging to Berlin – a certain feeling which is generated by his sight of  a significant landmark –  the television tower at Alexanderplatz – when he returns to Berlin after an absence.

In Berlin there is a sense that everything is possible. The launch of my first novel Bone and Blood. was in a cemetery, Alte St. Matthaeus Kirchhof, where Schorse gave us insights which took us from the Brothers Grimm, to early feminists, the German Resistance, a Gay collective and many more buried activists, whose energy vibrates there. Our next-door neighbour, Uta, wrote music to accompany the old English poem which inspired the title of my novel, Members of her choir, La Voix Mixte, performed it at the launch and later at another concert in Berlin. Sabine is also in the choir and did a Masters in Music Therapy, while working full time.

February was my favourite time in Berlin because of Sabine’s birthday and the Berlinale, the Berlin Film Festival. When the days were damp and cold, cinema bridged the dark days of Winter and Spring sunshine with a screen view into so many cultures. It was often my task to collect the group tickets for films selected by our V.G. I saw films from other continents as well as other European films, which may never reach general distribution or even film clubs. Changes in the Berlin Film Festival run parallel to changes in my relationship to Berlin over the Covid years and uncertainties about the future.

I first visited Berlin in the 1990’s when it was under reconstruction – leaving only remnants of Berlin’s wall between East and West. Like many visitors to Berlin, my first questions were about the location of the wall beyond the symbolic status of the Brandenburg Gate. Schorse and I tramped through building sites which were later to become landmarks of modern Berlin – the Sony Centre, the memorials to some of those killed attempting to cross from East to West along the riverbank between the border crossing point at FriedrickStrasse and the cupola of the Reichstag.

With my V.G. partners as guides, I have crossed and crossed former east and west and gradually realised the border also wove around Reinickendorf, which is a large borough in the North west of the city including Tegel lake. Tourist images in the style of Checkpoint Charlie or the remains of a high wall are supplemented by everyday stories of people once cut off from each other by strict borders between the capitalist west and communist east. Sections of Reinickendorf’s Berlin wall have trees, lakes or River Havel as boundaries, and are now replaced with cycle paths or footpaths. Schoenholz – the S-Bahn station a couple of stops from ours had a piece of the Berlin wall for over twenty-five years but even locals did not register it as part of the wall because it was part of a no-man’s land-boundary with neighbouring Pankow. Some years ago it was identified and verified, it is now protected as an official monument.

As Berlin’s S-Bahn leaves Bernauer Strasse with its chunk of wall, museum and church of Reconciliation constructed on the site where once a church was blown up,  I listen to the sound of Berlin’s past when the trains would dim their lights as they travelled under what was the “East” and the Western passengers could see the ghostly outline of Eastern guards at stations closed during the years of the wall. I revel in hopping on and off public transport in another life here – a far remove from the isolation of rural Donegal where we have no trains, underground or overground and no trams. Buses have replaced a once extensive railway system which can now only be seen in Donegal Town’s Railway Museum.

From Reinickendorf to Mitte has been a frequent journey by bike or public transport. For twenty-five years, my life partner, Schorse, has been a mainstay of Sprengelhaus – a neighbourhood intercultural and social centre in Sprengel Kiez. Sixty organisations rent offices and activity rooms. I live and breathe the exchanges where the diversity of origin is celebrated and where democracy projects link past and present. Sprengel Kiez  has become part of my sense of self in a fast-changing world.. When Comic Opera staged a musical in Sprengelhaus, the mix of refugees, migrants and locals enjoying opera pieces from a range of cultures symbolised a sense of unity in diversity where I could feel at home.. I marvelled at how this highly professional opera company can bring a treat reserved for the elite in Ireland to such a mixed group. As we connected, laughed and clapped together.

Heimat is place and people, solidarity in sharing food and learning more about each other. I have sampled cuisine from many African countries, from Iran, Afghanistan and regional Germany. Once it was my turn to cook Irish stew, In Sprengelhaus I have enjoyed meals cooked by politicians , whom I now see on the German news. Back in Reinickendorf, the V.G. cooking group chops vegetables for the evening meal, Sabine arrives back in Reinickendorf from Marzahn, a borough in the former east of Berlin where she works with participative planning. Marcus, Sabine’s partner has arrived and installed himself at his laptop. He tears himself away from an article on the ethics of human rights to join the cooking group. We are tempted into discussion on the state of the world over a glass of wine.  

Back in Donegal I leaf through memories. Berlinale brochures or Theatre programmes for Gorki theatre a Hans Fallada adaptation for stage with English translation above the stage or watching Brian Friel’s play adaptation of Turgenev’s play, performed in German. My sense of self struggles to understand the polarisation of North-South-East-West which explodes around us. The renewed threat of fascism, the conspiracy theories, on-going racism, threats to LBGTQ+ identities,  war and climate change undermine our fragile democracies. I refuse to let the uncertainties undermine my sense of self. I belong to a Heimat where we connect to diversity in our human nature and cultures and where we connect to the natural world wherever we are.