When home is where you come from, aren’t you always away? On all your ways you want to come home again, trying to find a way. Always away on all ways home. A way away, a road abroad. What leads you on your way is memories, memories of yourself, remembering your self to be a member of something, a part of something you are apart from. You don’t know who it was, you don’t know the place. But it must be somebody somewhere in the way you talk, you think, you dream. So the way home is the way of words. My way of words is the German way, but thinking about an English way to express my thoughts about home and away I find another direction home. The German way contains the words Heim and Heimat, which is not home and at home, although Heimat seems to be a mix-up of at and home, heim and at. But Heimat leads me into a homemade confusion. It leads me to the Fatherland, it leads me to nostalgia, it makes me homesick in a sick way. It is a word made in Germany which always makes me mad in Germany. So, writing in English I find myself on a way that shows me where my self comes from. You must be away from home to find a way home.



Copyright © 2007 Dorothea Dieckmann. All rights reserved.



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