I grew up in Berlin, East Germany. My parents, both stage designers by profession, spent most of my childhood talking about leaving East Germany for West Germany.
This was a crucial decision, because there was no way back. Once you left East Germany you couldn’t return home. We were subject to the most severe travel restrictions. We weren’t allowed to travel to Western countries, which made it nearly impossible for people to cross the border.
I witnessed my parents wrestling with this. Numerous times they claimed that they’d made the final decision to stay or to go. And then I would watch them change their minds for various reasons. Even as a child I was able to tell that this wasn’t easy for them.
I wasn’t convinced that the predicted paradise truly existed on the other side of the wall. But I began to replace my parents’ escape fantasy with one of my own. I too began to focus on something in the West, but way farther west than my mother and father were aiming. The first word I wrote, at the age of five, wasn’t my name. It was “Canada.”
My East German kindergarten teachers were not amused with my growing admiration for a land that was considered part of the evil West. They confronted my parents and asked them why their son was writing “Canada” everywhere he could: in the sand, on the wall, on the table, even on the skin of my palm. My parents couldn’t explain it; they had no clue where it came from. They suspected that my aunt, who worked at the public library, may have given me a book with the alluring maple leaf on the cover.
At school I was more familiar with the shape of the St. Lawrence River and Hudson Bay than with the geography of my own country. I begged my mother to stitch maple leaves onto my clothes.
My parents were still thinking about how to escape our socialist country. In early 1989 they made their most serious attempt. They used a fake invitation to an exhibition in West Berlin to apply for an artist visa. As soon as they received the permit to cross the border, they packed the car with exhibits. The documents they would need for the new start in West Germany—like birth certificates and proof of their degrees— were hidden underneath the costumes of the fairy tale marionettes. The plan was that my father would “officially” escape, meaning he would announce to East German officials his desire to stay in the West after he became a registered refugee there. Afterward, the rest of the family would apply for permission to follow him.
This was one of the known procedures East German people used to leave the country illegally.
My father ended up in a refugee camp in West Berlin. He was anything but happy. He had to live with four other men in a narrow shipping container. He missed his family and his house.
He’d never been convinced that leaving the East would be the best idea. The situation he found himself in made him feel even more doubtful. When he implied this in several phone calls with my mother and then told her that he was close to returning, she decided to mount an attempt to rescue the plan.
If the guards would let her cross the border with her own visa, she would visit my father, cheer him up, and convince him to stay. With this intention she left my sister and me for a day trip to the western side of the Berlin Wall.
She achieved the opposite of what she’d hoped; my father’s yearning to be reunited with the family grew even stronger when he saw his wife. It began to dawn on my mother that the plan was failing.
She made two more trips to see my father. After the third visit she realized it would most likely be her last.
She walked through the streets of West Berlin in despair. East German officials would never allow them to travel again after this illegal escape attempt. In her resigned mood she thought it would be the very last time she could be in the West in her entire life.
Lost in thought, she reached Kreuzberg, one of the Turkish neighbourhoods in West Berlin. She stopped in front of an antique silver store and spotted a silver birdcage in the shop window. It was tiny—made to be worn on a necklace. There was an even tinier bird in it, sitting on a bar. She bought the necklace for me as a gift. When she gave it to me she told me that my father would soon return. She said that they’d never be able to leave the isolation of East Germany, but that, one day, I’d be leaving alone. If they had to stay forever, at least I should go and see the world outside the cage. I decided then and there that that little piece of jewellery would be my lucky charm. I would wear it as a symbol whenever I crossed the border.
In the fall of 1989 political change came. I was eighteen years old when the boundaries of the Eastern Bloc were pried open. All of a sudden it was possible for us to travel the world.
In the following years I visited many countries. Out of an inexplicable hesitation I didn’t go to Canada. Maybe I shied away from my own expectations—which were, I figured, connected to the fantasies of that difficult time so many years ago.
I finally did make it, however. I am, like my parents, an artist, and a couple of years ago I was invited by another artist to an exhibit in Toronto. I remembered the lucky charm my mother had given me fifteen years earlier. I wore the birdcage on a silver ring in my ear when I passed the Canadian border control.
I had only twelve days to discover my “promised land.” It was long enough for me to fall in love with a Canadian woman. She made me want to stay in your country forever. I did have to leave, on that twelfth day, but I left part of myself with her. As we said our goodbyes at the airport, I handed her the birdcage, hastily telling her the story.
In the past two years she has shown me much of Canada’s beauty and introduced me to many wonderful Canadians. Modern Canada is different from the one I dreamt of as a child. But the Canada I love now is real.
Berlin, Germany