My Journey to Berlin: The Presence of History

by Gabriela Mendelsohn

Gabriela Mendelsohn is 25 years old and lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has an honours degree in psychology and is currently working at a school for children with special needs. In 2016 she visited Berlin and met up with a long-lost cousin. In aktuell she shares her story.

Gabriela Mendelsohn (links) und ihre Cousine - Gabriela Mendelsohn (left) and her cousin

My journey in Berlin started many years ago, before I was born in fact. My journey in Berlin started when my grandfather’s ended, when he left Berlin in 1936 on the Stuttgart – the last boat out of Germany that did not require documents, which docked in Cape Town, South Africa, allowing him and many other Jews a life.

When my grandfather’s father put them on a boat to South Africa, his brother went to Israel (then Palestine) and started a family of his own there. Many years later, and a few generations later, some members found their way back to Germany, and so I have a long-lost German cousin with not only our age in common …

Touching down in Berlin was like touching down on the rawest and most emotional part of me. I arrived with my German passport, my blonde German features and not a word of the language, having never been there before. It was the strangest sensation to arrive in Germany as a German but under this pretext. Hearing the bus driver speak to me in the harsh yet comforting language and looking at my reflection, noting my blonde hair, in the window made my eyes well with tears due to a connection to the place that was not overtly explainable nor tangible. I was overcome with emotion as the tears eased down my face and I thought of “what if” and all the possibilities in life that never were. Seeing my grandfather’s home city made me connect to a part of myself that could only be brought out through seeing a part of him – where he was born and where he lived till the age of four.

Vor dem Brandenburger Tor - In front of Brandenburg Gate

The culture and the past experiences of the city were on the surface, easily explored by anyone, showing dramatic contradictions between the modern, funky Berlin of today and its past. The city did not only draw me in but my long-lost cousin as well. Having met up in Israel a few months prior, we knew we were destined to have a meaningful relationship, having so much more in common than just our blood. We joined up in Berlin again, to experience the city of our predecessors, and bonded on an even deeper level. We saw and learnt about the stories of others, but also had a special and unique story of our own – our grandfathers left at the same time but separately 80 years ago, and here we are, all these years later, reunited and exploring the city that kicked them out.

This is a testament to the notion that history is a fallacy, it doesn’t exist. Anything that happened in the past has the power to change the present … and keep changing it, bringing together family from all over the world. History is not history if the grandchildren of the persecuted can come together and reunite in the same city that expelled our grandfathers. History is not history if cousins can bond in an instant after 23 years of ignorance of each other’s existence. And history is not history if wondrous, deep and special relationships can be formed 80 years on. History may be something that happened in the past, but it is something that is forever present, influencing the way we are and the way we act with the world. My grandfather’s past is my present, and that is how we make history!

Gabriela Mendelsohn
Johannesburg, Südafrika