The 9th of November the border between East and West Germany was opened, right?
And on the 10th of November my parents actually took me to the Wall
to the Brandenburg Gate, where we are standing right now.
So this is me when I was 10 years old, 30 years ago.
I remember that I was really scared of falling down because it was quite high,
but that all these people were really happy, really joyful
and sort of I lost my fear of falling down by this whole ambience.
So now we are at the East Side Gallery.
This is a pretty touristic spot because
it’s one of the few parts where the Wall is still standing.
Most of it was torn down in the 90s.
The history of the German separation is all about dictatorship
and not really about that it’s something that is still so near us.
There is still a huge part missing on reflection of what the East actually was
and what it meant to people and what it meant to a political system.
So I was living here with my parents and my older brother.
Up there was my room most of the time, next to it my brother's room.
Like for days after the Wall came down my mum would bake this cake
and there were always strangers sitting in our kitchen.
She was preparing the cake because she was waiting for relatives from Dresden
but she had lost contact so she couldn’t really call them.
And because they didn’t show up we had to eat this cake every-day.
My dad got so sick of it that he went on to the streets
and just invited random people from the East
to join us upstairs and to have cake and coffee.
Now we are kind of in-between the border, we are behind the Wall.
And this was the part where there was a lot of military
and they protected it from people wanting to cross the Wall.
A really close relative of mine tried to cross the Wall
when she was 18 years old, so my age now.
But then they got arrested, and she went to prison.
I mean there were a lot of good things about the East, I think
but we don’t talk about it that much.
For example the role of women and work, and the right to divorce their husbands
and the right to get access to abortion.
Getting into these stories and these understandings on
how a system can be different from our system today
really influences me and my identity.
It’s the defence that I have to take when people attack the GDR
in the sense of that it was a stupid system that nobody believed in
and that now we are the united Germany again.
We are posting the story, 'The Berlin Wall crumbled and I smelt cake'
and also Ashbee's illustration of it.
So together with this library, Theodor-Heuss Shoneberg, we actually funded a project
'Media Workshop Encounters'
And one day Alvaro had a workshop for storytellers and illustrators.
In this workshop I told my story and Ashbee decided to come up with an artwork of it.
So basically I tried to illustrate the whole story in one picture.
Like a tea party on the Berlin Wall.
I wanted to make it super colourful, and to give hope and inspiration
to people who are fighting for freedom.
What we later found out when we were discussing our stories
was that actually there are still a lot of people and politicians believing in walls
believing in division, and actually Ashbee is from Hong Kong
so she lives now all these experiences of people fighting for freedom
What I liked a lot about her interpretation is that it’s so much about sharing
and this is what I lived in my parent's kitchen, sharing stories.
And then through sharing my stories, all these different connections came up.
So here we are in an area in Berlin called Prenzlauerberg, and I grew up here.
We are in front of a bar named Tomsky
and I connect a lot of things to this bar because my parents met here
and then me and my friends kind of took it over.
I see change here.
I see how everybody of the old renters
gets kind of kicked out because of the gentrification process.
It’s really interesting to see that
and also to see the places that really stay. For example this bar
which still holds ground.
I think my parents, by bringing in these strangers into our kitchen
they connected me with others.
And it somehow affected my life in a way that I was always interested in meeting others
and now this turns out to be my job actually
creating encounters between different people.
We need to look at this time more carefully, and include ideas of socialism
the ideas that I think were good, in our political system nowadays.
By questioning this process here I think it is the perfect example
of something that can impose process of reflection, and I think that is good.