“When I meet someone with slavic roots, I often project my own experiences as a post-migrant slovakian child onto them. I assume they know what it felt like being part of my family. I assume they once felt the same way I felt, when I woke up in my babkas house in Bratislava as a six-year-old.”

A long form essay about my obsession with meeting other post-migrant slavic beings on my roadtrips through Europe.

Berlin. Saturday, October 16th

Tonight you can spot me at the first official home party since the beginning of the pandemic.

Unfortunately, I don’t know the host. I more or less tricked myself into the invitation. Now I have to spend the night with a bunch of strangers in sloppily thrown-together costumes gratefully.

My friend gives me a tour. The motto is: hell. Very “creative”, I think to myself quietly. As if we hadn’t been living in one for the last twenty months.

“Watch out, you can’t stand on that,” my friends tells me with a grin on her face as we walk to the kitchen. “That’s lava!”

Imaginary lava, of course. How else could it be. Germans, they love their fantasy worlds, hah? Happily chatting Charlottes and Martins and Annikas need their little “kinky” Suburbian-Murderer-Cosplay on the weekend to make it through five regular days of purposeless academia.

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