Heute also Morgen

Not even the one you smashed

With a towel wrapped around your fist

In the house where you hate me,

It is warm enough for windows without panes

In the house where you hate me

The walls still have the same textures

Painted by salt and damp into the sky-blue plaster

In the house where you hate me,

The trees still hang full of figs

And the neighbor’s cow still knows,

That the garden gate won’t close properly

In the house where you hate me

The coffee grounds have dried at the bottom of our cups

And on the terrace a scorching hot July morning

Has not ended for two years

In the house where you hate me

Still lies the stone I had in my pocket

And the shard that I used to write on my skin

And the black mini dress

With which the war began

In the house where you hate me

There are cracks in the walls that speak with your voice

In the house where you hate me,

I won’t forget a single corner

As long as there are still corners in my body

That are the image of these rooms

In the house where you hate me

I sneak through the rooms as a ghost

Carefully closing crack after crack

In the house where you hate me

The window panes will never be replaced

In the house where you hate me

Nobody is living anymore

Although she now knows that she can lie, she is sure that she must not. Lying is something indefinably dirty, something she should be ashamed of if she is caught. Not to lie is a rule that is too powerful to doubt. Lying is bad.

But maybe there are exceptions?

Maybe there are lies that are less bad and aren’t actually lies?

For example, there are other things that are bad. For example, it is unfair that the adults can forbid her to do anything they want. It’s unfair that her mum can decide exactly where she can go with the dog, even though there are the most beautiful paths in the back of the forest. Leah thinks she has the right to equalise this injustice.

But if someone had asked her whether she ever lies, she would have said no with complete conviction. Because she had independently added two exceptions to the principle of not being allowed to lie:

First: Concealing something is not a lie.

After all, only things you do are bad. Eating sweets in secret. Sneaking into the neighbour’s garden. Something you don’t do hasn’t happened and therefore can’t be good or bad.

Second: If I believe it myself, it’s not a lie.

After all, when her little sister told some crazy story the other day, Mum said she wasn’t lying, it was just her imagination. Little kids believe in everything they make up, so it’s not a lie.

Leah has a lot of imagination. She thinks it’s easy to believe in almost anything. Once she has said it, she usually almost forgets that it wasn’t true before.

Leah starts primary school. The other children say with conviction: Leah never lies. At this time, it is quite simple: everything that is not a lie is true. Being wrong is something too abstract to consider. That’s why the other children trust her. Leah is proud. She thinks that once something has been said and believed, it actually somehow becomes true. Those who believe it have simply outnumbered her in the end.

Leah never lies. That works very well.

But then she turns 15 and falls in love with a grown man.

She is confused, but full of self-confidence. She thinks she is old enough to deal with it. But she also knows that her parents won’t be of the same opinion. She knows that they can forbid her to do anything. But what is even more dangerous: she knows that whatever her mum would say would be stronger than her own thoughts. She feels she would be incapable of deciding anything for herself once she had exposed this precious, confusing feeling to the judgements of adults.

So she tries to perfect the concealment.

But this time it’s completely different.

It was one thing to tell her best friend she didn’t hear the phone. It’s another to keep quiet about something that will soon be of enormous importance to her. Something she can’t tell anyone about, not her parents, not her friends and certainly not the man himself. Is it a lie to keep a secret? Is it a lie to protect something so fragile and delicate from the eyes of the world? Isn’t there a right to keep certain moments, thoughts and feelings completely to herself?

But suddenly half of her life is taking place in secret and this causes Leah more trouble than she initially thought. On the one hand, it gives her a sense of importance. The feeling of being a little bit ahead of the world. The very fact that she is now hiding something frees her from the impression of being completely invisible. But at the same time, everything that takes place only inside her and cannot be expressed loses more and more of its substance.

In truth, the man has fallen in love with her just as much as she has fallen in love with him. But he knows how young and vulnerable she is, he doesn’t want to hurt her. And he doesn’t want to expose himself to the judgements of the world. So he only tells her this fact, if at all, in poetic hints that a grown woman would have understood effortlessly, but which in Leah only reinforce an intuitive feeling of being drawn in.

One January night, when Leah is with him and it is snowing in big flakes outside the window, he takes her up to his bedroom. They lie there all night, arm in arm, talking quietly to each other. But when the snow starts to thaw in the morning, something has happened inside Leah. Something has happened that she would never have thought possible. In her romantic fantasy world, she now sees herself as the man’s secret lover. She dreams of a secret-free space, protected by a secret, in which she can express her inner self again.

This idea does not come true.

It is too much for Leah.

What she expresses on the outside and what she really believes she is have grown far apart over the last year and a half. Every day when she goes to school, but even at home with her family, she feels helplessly trapped behind a cardboard backdrop of herself. At the same time, she secretly and desperately clings to what she believes to be her true self.

Perhaps she really does have a right to remain silent.

But another thought intrudes on her more and more inevitably: That the hidden part of her being is increasingly suffocated by the part she shows on the outside, and that she is thus in the process of dying inside.

At this point, she begins to perceive the roles she plays in the world as independent beings separate from herself. Half-truths that become more and more powerful. She tries to fight them. But the more stubbornly she scrutinises every aspect and every expression of herself for lies or truth, the less of it still stands up to scrutiny. And so it becomes emptier and emptier. So it becomes less and less.

Meanwhile, the outer parts of her live on effortlessly. She has the feeling that every glance penetrates her and every external expectation urges her irresistibly to behave in the way expected. She has nothing left to counter the world, she feels dangerously fragile and lives in constant fear of someone finding out what is wrong with her. She hates everyone because she blames them for having to live like this. And she becomes more and more sure that the objects around her already see through her. Because suddenly the door frames start to snap at her and the stairs twitch under her feet, causing her to trip.

Then it happens to her. She is so far removed from the world of others that she is no longer able to distinguish between what is allowed to be said and what is not.

One afternoon, she reads out a text at a writing workshop. The sun is shining through the large window of the seminar room and a number of faces are turned towards her at the long table. And suddenly she realises that her text reveals everything. That it reveals her terrible fear, that it makes visible all the thoughts and feelings she has been hiding all this time. She begins to tremble all over. Nevertheless, she continues to read, as if under compulsion.

When she has finished, she looks up.

The sun is still shining through the window.

She thinks she can read a lack of understanding on their faces. Not the threat expected.

At this point, a spell is broken. That evening, she goes to the library and steals a book on schizophrenia. She thinks she has every right to do so.

Lying is bad.

But truth is not so easy to find.

Nevertheless, deep inside her there is something indefinable, unspeakable that is true.

Leah is now almost an adult and in her penultimate year at school. To protect her from the influence of meritocracy, her parents had sent her to an alternative school right from the start. Unlike many others, Leah has never seen being „different“ as a stigma and is proud of it. She still defends the concept of her school just as passionately as the principle of honesty. And because she is an exceptional student, her desire for freedom is only very slightly restricted. When she unobtrusively leaves the classroom during lessons to take walks in the corridors, the teachers don’t seem to notice.

At the beginning of the eleventh school year, everyone is gathered in one room. They tell them that many will drop out. Not everyone can handle freedom and self-organisation. They should make an effort. They say: half of you won’t be here at the end of the year. And another sentence that sends Leah into wild euphoria: From now on, you are here voluntarily.

She usually goes to class voluntarily and almost always enjoys it.

But what she learns doesn’t help her to cope with life. It doesn’t help her come to terms with the fact that she has left home and has to work after school until late at night to earn a living. It doesn’t help her to cope with the inner darkness that rolls towards her again in the midst of all this new-found freedom.

So she takes action. She registers for a seminar in Italy that she believes will help, gets all the documents from the teachers to study from there and goes to the headmaster to register her two-week absence.

Her request is not approved.

Leah is perplexed. She didn’t think there was anything to approve at all.

She goes to the headmaster’s office again. She cries with rage and says: I thought I was here voluntarily.

No, says the headmaster. You chose to be here voluntarily and obey the rules. Where would we end up if everyone wanted exceptions like that? How can you be so selfish? You also have to do your bit for the school community.

Leah goes home exhausted and thoughtful. She has the feeling that something has broken away that has protected her the whole time and obscured her vision. It seems to her that in this one afternoon she has understood the way the whole of society works.

You’re just in your no-bulls-against-everything phase, says her tutor. Leah laughs at it, but she knows it’s not true. She wants so many things. She wants to go away and learn something that will make her a happier, more mature and more stable person. And she will go. Can leaving a system really be described as selfishness? Can a system really be a purpose in itself?

All those years, she was taught to think for herself and take initiative at school. And it wasn’t a problem that she left class as long as the teachers could pretend they didn’t see it. It’s just a problem that she demands to do it openly and honestly.

Lying is bad.

But telling the truth doesn’t earn her recognition. Instead it gives her the reputation of a defiant, unreliable rebel.

Leah leaves, writes an impassioned letter to the headmaster from Italy that is never answered, misses two exams and comes back. She masters her new life. She is almost never absent from class, only cheats at one exam in her entire school career (which is noticed but kindly tolerated), takes a voluntary additional course and finally finishes school as one of the best in her year. Nevertheless, the teachers keep telling her younger sister, who is one year below her, to not become like Leah.

The system in which she has now grown up doesn’t really care whether she follows its rules. The only important thing is that it always looks as if she does.

For nineteen years, Leah has defended the principle of unconditional honesty in countless discussions.

For nineteen years, she also had to invent exceptions and excuses because she failed to do so.

And she always assumed that this was what other people and society expected of her. The right thing to do. Now that she has experienced that telling the truth is neither intended nor desired, she has come to the conclusion that no office, no authority and no institution is worth the effort and inconvenience that she would have to put up with by being honest. But is it really that simple?

She will trick herself into state benefits, work under the table and later invent stories for her whole life to avoid having to repay any debts. She will understate her income and overstate her expenses, she will register in places where she has never lived, underpay health insurance contributions, fill out forms, write emails, make phone calls, employ authorities, forge certificates, she will never live completely legally, she will always move in the grey area. She will exchange the best tricks and ways with all the other people who, just like her, will spend their whole lives trying to keep up the appearance of living the way the state wants them to.

Perhaps she will get used to it. She will lose her youthful indignation and replace it with routine and the insane pride of the tricksters. But she will never succumb to the illusion that she has left the system. She will always know that what she does is the system.

And she will never make it to university. Instead, she will write a book called „The Liar“. She will travel around and sit in bare hostel rooms, she will occasionally talk about it and sometimes someone will ask her in the evening: So, how was it in the city? Did you find any liars?

Then she doesn’t know what to say. It doesn’t really matter, because someone will start telling her straight away the whole long plot of their own book called „The Poop Eating Pool Monster“.

Maybe she could have said: She doesn’t need to search for liars.

I’ve stowed my work clothes in a black bag; I’m just me again. I’m sitting and reading a book called „Collective Trauma Healing“. The man on the other side of the aisle is also reading. His book is called „Ego is the enemy“.

The train is filling up, some people are already sitting on the floor in the aisle, an old woman takes a seat opposite me. „The trains never used to be this full,“ she says. I nod and reply with a random train experience, a universal greeting between travellers who can’t or don’t want to avoid noticing each other.

It is Sunday. A peaceful day. Even at Stuttgart station it was somehow more peaceful than usual. It took me a few moments to realise why: someone had switched off the human-sized screens. No more images of meerkats alternating with news of child abuse, no more pulsating, penetrating horror that draws the eye and the consciousness out of the body. The whole atmosphere had changed completely.

The war we can think of

I notice the restlessness of the woman opposite me, put down my book and wait quietly to see what happens. She soon starts talking to me and tells me what it was like to emigrate to Canada. How friendly the people are there. Unlike in Germany, she says. Why, I ask, what’s different? She looks at me, a little puzzled, as if no one had ever asked so precisely before or as if it were a matter of course. „The people here,“ she finally says, „are so angry.“

I want to talk about the anger, but then we talk about the war. The evil Russian dictator, the hesitant German government, the suffering of the poor Ukrainians. One of the narratives that people use to talk about political developments as if they had nothing to do with them.

I’m still listening. Today I feel no outrage at this simplification. Today I am just a space into which she speaks. The longer I listen like this, only occasionally asking questions or giving an impulse, the more connected I feel to her. After a while, she begins to react to my impulses in unexpected ways. Every time I say something, she finds something in her own perception that confirms or supports it, even if it is in complete contradiction to her previous statement. Suddenly she is no longer talking about evil Putin, but about the men, Russians and Ukrainians, who are being sent to die in this war. My eyes get moist and so do hers. And then it comes from deep inside her: „I just don’t WANT any more war!“

At that moment, the train pulls into Karlsruhe station. Neither of us has realised how much time has passed. We say goodbye between people frantically packing up. I walk to my next platform with a pounding heart. Could it be that when we’re not awake, we’re constantly thinking the thoughts of the field we’re in? Thoughts that don’t even belong to us? Could it be that the space of presence I have created has enabled her to come into contact with her own experiences and the underlying pain and fear in the first place? Or is it that a person who thinks the thoughts of the collective simply starts thinking my thoughts when my energy is momentarily stronger than the energy of the space?

One thing is certain: when I am present, when I am fully there, keeping my focus only on the present moment – then I change the space I am in.

About human spheres and the power to awaken desire

Three days earlier, I’m standing in front of a shop in Rosenheim advertising a game of luck. My job is to appeal to passers-by. To awaken a desire. It’s as if the offer I have – to play this game, to want this new mobile phone – is a signpost I’m throwing at people. An offer to change their direction. To redirect their focus towards me, into an interaction that they didn’t have in mind a moment before.

It’s a sunny, unusually warm day. People roll past me like balls on their way somewhere. But they are balls with holes and that’s where I throw my greeting, pulling them in my direction. Sometimes my focus is stronger than theirs. Sometimes I dock and trigger joy or curiosity.

But there are also people I can’t approach. My decision is made in seconds. Intuitively. There are people whose own energy is so strong that the comparatively weak impulse of this game would never stand a chance. There are a few people whose focus is so conscious that I could never create a willingness to meet them if it wasn’t already there.

I speak to a young man in an expensive suit. He looks at me curiously and asks me to explain the functions of the mobile phone. Then he asks: „But do you really like it?“ All the thoughts I’m secretly thinking – all the reasons why I’m not as good at this job as I could be – all want to come out of me at the same time. But all the preconceived ideas come to a standstill inside me. Because this man has clear, blue eyes and something in his face, something like a painful line around his mouth, tells me that he has access to a kind of perception that is worlds apart from that of my other customers. I want to ask him why. I want to ask him many, many things. But at that moment, a seat becomes free with one of the employees and, as if remote-controlled, I pass him on. I do what I’m supposed to do. Later, he has to move on quickly and doesn’t realise that I’ve been thinking about him for half the day. I am. I am. I am the field that I embody. And hardly anything else at this moment.

The threat of a telephone contract

Next day, next city: Regensburg. The people here are completely different again. Most people are really just like the place they are in. I think: they don’t realise which collective they are part of. And precisely because they are not aware of it, most of their behaviour is an expression of a pattern that does not belong to them and is hardly within their control.

People are more afraid here. Some raise their hands in front of their faces when I speak to them, as if they were expecting a slap in the face. Or as if they would think that as soon as they’ve spoken to me for two minutes, they have a phone contract in their pocket that they didn’t want. It’s irrational, but their fear is physically palpable, right down to my own cells.

Most people are just like the place they are in.

And no one is as scared as the women my age. I realise that there is a bit of arrogance in me, something that doesn’t want to admit how much I too – as a young woman – live in constant expectation of danger. Now I see it: in the averted, mask-like faces, the anxious smiles, the nervous no’s and the way they quicken their pace afterwards. The world tends to be a threatening place. Any engagement with something foreign could be penalised.

This job is not the ideal solution, I say to myself. Only the best I’ve found so far.

The beauty of windows in unknown rooms

But in the evening, I’m sitting in my hotel room in Erlangen – a small, old hotel right next to the railway station – reading the laminated piece of paper with the house rules. The English version, probably from a time when digital translators weren’t good enough yet to disguise human incompetence, makes me laugh. „Failure to comply with the night’s sleep can lead to immediate dismissal“. I wonder if I’ll be thrown out of this hotel if I don’t sleep well. Will they check my level of exhaustion at the entrance to the breakfast room tomorrow?

I also read that for safety reasons it is forbidden to lean out of the window and use the window sill as a seat. I read it and feel sympathy for all the strangers who, like me, put a chair under the window as soon as they arrived and climbed onto the ledge to watch the trains arrive and depart, listen to the announcements from the platform and let the cool air blow around their noses.

The crescent moon lies bright in the sky, a perfect silver bowl. The same crescent moon that I saw the night before, in Regensburg, in one of those lonely hotels in the industrial estate. I have seen the same crescent moon, nothing else outside the window to catch the eye, the pure wasteland of human life reduced to the functional, the regression of civilisation to the zero point of meaninglessness, and in the morning I sit alone at breakfast and think about things that are so meaningless that I could almost claim to have reached a meditative state of non-thinking.

None of this has any meaning. It is aimless liveliness caught up in itself. But sometimes that’s enough for me. I am easy to make happy.

Nazis, demons and smiling horses

On Saturday evening in Erlangen, the work is done and I now have enough money not to bother with it for the next two months. I go alone to the pub next door and have a beer to celebrate. Of course, I’m only alone for about two seconds. Next to me, a man tries to find the hole in my sphere. Offering me something I might desire. „I can’t do that,“ I say. „I’m probably the luckiest person in this bar. I’m like someone sitting on a hill of gold. What else are you going to give me now?“

I have someone tell me why a game of chess is a sign of friendship, I give style advice, I throw beer mats. I ask: Why? Very, very often that evening. So often that two old lefties get angry with me and accuse me of being a Nazi. I look into a strange, damaged face, blue in the light that falls through the window onto the street outside. We smoke. The man tells me about Bali. „The people there live with ghosts and demons,“ he says, „it’s just part of the reality of their lives.“

„Have you ever seen a demon there?“ I ask. „No, not me,“ he says. And then – these words seem to fight their way up through a thick layer of cotton wool: „But sometimes I’ve felt it.“

Around two o’clock, just as I’m about to leave, one of the old lefties comes up to me and says: „You’re smiling like a horse.“ Then he pulls up his upper lip to imitate my smile. It doesn’t even occur to me to get angry at that moment – this attack is too bizarre and awkward. I just laugh and say goodbye. But before I leave, an Irishman standing next to me takes me aside. „You’re smart as hell,“ he says, „and your smile is gorgeous by the way.“

The thought of hunger

I still have to think about that the next day. This simple act of kindness. The way people feel responsible for other people. Like the shop manager in the shop in Rosenheim, who I observed talking to an old woman. „I don’t understand this smartphone,“ said the woman, turning it back and forth in her hands, „I’m too stupid for it.“

„You’re not stupid,“ said the store manager with firmness and warmth, „you’re just learning something new.“

Later that day, he explained to me that he had changed the entire team in his shop a few months ago. „Why?“ I ask. „They weren’t trying anymore,“ he says, „they weren’t hungry.“

Hungry, I think later. Hungry for money. But I’ve seen clearly how he smiles at the customers coming in. How he is happy with his employees about their successes and how he never gets impatient with the older people. Hunger is not the right word. Hunger is not the basis for his behaviour. Hunger is what the sales coaches and area managers demand of him. Hunger is not his feeling, it is the feeling of the company he works for.

But if he were distant and silent and that word were acceptable in this context, then perhaps he would say: love.

The simple, gratuitous, impersonal love that people feel for other people, just because they are both human.

As you can see, I have time. My research in Albania is over – even if I am still conducting two interviews on Chat – and in a few days I will board the ferry in Durrës and return to Naples.

„Thank you for what you are doing for my country.“

Over the past four weeks, I have spoken to many different people. Those whose parents held high positions under communism and those who come from persecuted families. People who emigrated and others who stayed or returned. They all experienced hope and disappointment in those few years after the end of communism, and they were all shaped by these experiences for the rest of their lives. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that the stories we tell ourselves about our lives are powerful. And they not only determine the past, but also the present and the future.

Many of the people I spoke to seemed to see it almost as a gift to talk to me about it. Aneta Mihali Xhiku, a woman in America with whom I had contact, wrote to me: „Thank you for what you are doing for my country.“ It was a sentence that almost overwhelmed me, that I didn’t know how to respond to and that stayed with me for a long time.

But as the conversation progressed, I understood why she felt that way. Aneta became quite famous in Albania a few years ago, simply because she posted a text on Facebook in which she wrote about the suffering and uprooting of many Albanian emigrants. She broke a taboo in the Albanian public – and went viral overnight. The belief that things are better anywhere else than in Albania is deeply rooted in the people here. After all, the „last free country on earth“ ended in 1991 with the abrupt realisation that the rest of the world pitied rather than envied the Albanians. This humiliation, together with the disappointment of the civil war in 1997, has led to a widespread disdain for one’s own country of origin. The fact that I, a foreigner, come here now and am interested in precisely this history seems to really touch some people.

Lines of memory

The intensity with which the people I have spoken to access their memories varies. I have learnt to feel this: Lines that connect people back to their own past. For some, they are thin threads that quickly become numb. For others, this memory is a kind of life’s work. These lines of memory are inner roads that connect us back and make us capable of acting in the present. And in all of these conversations, there are moments when people stop being present. Points where their consciousness does not want to go.

How our brain processes the past and future

The fact that our memories and the intensity with which we can remember influence our ability to form a personality and think independently is actually confirmed by neuroscience. The hippocampus is the area in our brain that is responsible for autobiographical memory. If it functions properly, we form neurones that store new experiences and feelings well into old age. This enables us to develop further, integrate new knowledge and remain mentally fit and present. This process is called „hippocampal neurogenesis“. If it is disrupted, states of mental exhaustion and depression become more frequent and the ability to think creatively and independently is impaired. Alzheimer is also the result of inhibited neurogenesis.

The area in our brain that is responsible for storing what has been also influences our ability to create something new. This finding from neuroscience is consistent with what Thomas Hübel writes about collective trauma: If our memories, especially our traumatic memories, are not integrated, we are doomed to constantly repeat the old because we have limited access to our ability to actually evolve. The doctor Michael Nehls says in an article on the subject: „The sum of all index neurons (the neurons in the hippocampus, editor’s note) represents our personal wealth of experience. However, they are not only used to remember past experiences and thoughts, but are also crucial for maintaining our psychological resilience and developing our mental resilience. The latter is based on the ability to reflect critically, plan and implement new goals and is closely linked to our creativity, which in turn is fuelled by our individual wealth of experience.“

The superimposition of our personal experience

The interesting thing about this is that our personal experience can actually be overwritten by collective narratives. This is particularly true when these are highly emotionally charged, as is the case in news communication in our media, for example. The capacity of the hippocampus unfortunately is not unlimited.

People often reach a state of ego depletion (self-exhaustion) towards the evening in particular. In this state, for example, if we watch a news programme about a shocking topic that is charged with fear, autobiographical memories are overwritten. The brain no longer has any capacity, but perceives the narrative as more relevant than its own memories due to the associated feeling of fear. The individual experience is thus partially superimposed and never enters the long-term memory.

The revolutionary power of storytelling

Reading this explanation was very exciting for me. Because it provides a scientific background for a phenomenon that I have been noticing for some time already. In particular, I remember a theatre project by my friend Martin Kroissenbrunner from Graz, which I took part in last autumn. It was a narrative theatre entitled „Take22“, in which a wide variety of people performed and shared their personal memories from the year 2022.

In the discussions about the performances, I noticed that both the participants and the audience kept saying that they found it difficult to remember the year 2022 at all. One artist said quite directly that she had simply given up at some point, first Covid, then the war in Ukraine, at some point she had given up and just endured. Her own memories were much less accessible to her than the news she had consumed during this time, which had preoccupied and frightened her emotionally. It is an effect that many people in Western Europe seem to have experienced to a greater or lesser extent. It was as if their individuality disappeared behind a collective narrative of fear that almost made personal perspectives impossible.

Telling personal stories: It seems so harmless and nice. But reconnecting with our own experiences and memories has enormous collective relevance. A collective in which the majority of people are no longer able to maintain their memory lines becomes dysfunctional and extremely manipulable. Without subjective touchability, we are also unable to recognise and heal trauma. We always interact with the collective from a subjective perspective and always in a mode of direct encounter. If we are unable to do this, we are simply pulled along by the collective and whatever is present. Our ability to think our own thoughts and consciously take a position is no longer there when subjectivity is overwritten by collective narratives.

Without subjectivity, there is no connection

Both in Martin’s storytelling theatre and in my interviews now, I have observed how sharing and activating memories creates connection. When someone tells me a story and I listen intensely and in absolute presence, a we-space of understanding and compassion is created. What’s more, I perceive it as if the memory systems of different people are connecting through storytelling and listening. I then enter a state of heightened alertness and presence, in which my brain makes lightning-fast connections between things that previously seemed separate. I will remember these people, who gave me access to their wealth of experience as part of my research, for a long time to come.

Some people’s consciousness also jumps and they can hardly concentrate. When I listen sensitively, I realise that there are points in my counterpart’s memory that increase their presence when they are touched. And then there are others that feel numb, to which the connection is not properly established. No-go areas. I suspect that these are the memory lines that lead towards unresolved traumas that we have cut the conscious, feeling connection to. Telling and listening to our stories as an ancient human cultural technique and a conscious practice in remembering could increase mental and emotional capacity and help to re-establish these connections.

The beginning of the story

It is now almost eleven o’clock in the evening and the hotel bar has been closed for a while. The glass of wine that the hotel owner gave me – presumably because he was sorry to send me away – is also almost empty. In a few days, I’ll be boarding the ferry to Italy, full of other people’s memories. Reconnections to a past that isn’t mine at all and yet somehow is. As Emiljano from the Archaeological Museum in Sarandë puts it: „History doesn’t belong to me or you. It belongs to all of us.“

I hope that I can make this tangible for others too.

That someone stops finding their own little life unimportant.

That someone will lie in bed at night and consciously practise remembering their day.

That one person asks another about their story and then listens with everything they have.

History, as a larger framework, actually consists of many small stories. Only when we hear and feel these small stories can we gain access to a greater understanding of history that is more than the remnants of state-supporting, purpose-bound narratives from several centuries ago.

Note: Of course, impaired hippocampal neurogenesis has more possible causes than I can mention in this article. This is yet another topic in its own right – and a very relevant one, given that depression and Alzheimer’s diagnoses in Germany are at record levels.