Good luck on being abroad
Three generations in search of a home.
Below is a read-aloud version of the entire article.
“Good luck on being abroad,” my grandfather Zenun said to his son, my uncle, in the city of Augsburg, Germany, in 1990. “I’m staying in Germany until the situation improves,” my uncle replied. Thirty years later, he is still here. Grandpa wished his son well in an endeavor he himself had embarked on in the early 70s.
At that time, Adem, my father’s grandfather, had also gone to Germany. Both Zenun and Adem were Gastarbeiter ā guest workers ā who came to Germany to help the economy recover in the aftermath of World War II.
Both of them, from DeƧan’s villages, had taken the famous Acropolis train from the FushĆ« KosovĆ« railway station to Germany during spring. The journey took them from FushĆ« KosovĆ« to Belgrade, Serbia, then to Ljubljana, Slovenia and finally to platform 11 at Munichās train station.
“When they arrived, the German police were waiting for them on the platform,” my grandfather Zenun told me. From the platform, without seeing anything else, they were taken to a basement under the stairs of the platform, along with other workers who had arrived from countries such as Yugoslavia, Italy, TĆ¼rkiye and Greece. Zenun and Adem were among the roughly 14 million guest workers who went to West Germany for various amounts of time between 1955 and 1973.
Their names were called one by one along with the places where they would work. Zenun and Adem’s names were called. It was decided that Zenun would work in Augsburg in southern Germany and Adem would work in Braunschweig in the north.
Today, not many memories of the past are left in that basement. There are just the station toilets, which stink. Above it, there is a small branch of the U.S. cafe chain Starbucks. Attached to the wall is a small plaque created by the Turkish artist GĆ¼lcan Turna, recalling the arrival of Turkish seamstress SĆ¼mer Tan in Germany as a guest worker. The text on the plaque begins āKartoffel. Ich liebe dichā (Potato. I love you), which were the only words Tan knew in German.
Besides the small plaque, a lingering reminder of the platformās past are the German police controls, especially targeting people who, according to them, look like foreigners. My whole family, particularly the men, have experienced this scrutiny.
On platform 11, discussions about belonging also began. The question was always: Is it better here or there? This question followed my grandparents, parents and it follows me today.
Grandfathers and grandmothers
Life in Germany was not at all easy. When I asked Grandpa Zenun about his memories, they were clear. He remembered every moment, every smell and every conversation, “It was very bad in the beginning. They took us to live in some small barracks. There were ten people. The place was very dirty.” Even the working conditions, he remembers, were very difficult and their complaints were dismissed. “We also worked at -20 degrees Celsius,” he told me. “When I complained, the director told me ‘either work or return home.āā Both Adem and Zenun worked in construction, a sector where many Kosovar Albanians in the diaspora still work in 2024.
Zenunās German visa and a photo of the passport with which he traveled to Germany.Ā Photographs from Serafina Ferizajās archive.
It wasn’t difficult only in Germany. My paternal grandmother, Ajmon, Adem’s wife, remained alone in the village of Strellc, DeƧan in the early 70s. She raised five children and took care of the land ā all in a fundamentally patriarchal society.
When I asked her about those years, she didn’t talk about the difficulties. She simply told me, “I wasn’t the only one. Many men left for Germany, not just Adem.” She keeps photographs from the last 70 years in a bag. I saw many photos of grandpa Adem in Braunschweig and witnessed that part of the story from his perspective.
In every picture, he was dressed in a suit, hair neatly styled, with a confident expression on his face, rarely looking directly at the camera. On the back of the photos were the date and place. One note that I can’t get out of my head is, “Taken in Germany as a memory from this distant country.” The notes on the pictures revealed something about his thoughts. They showed me that my belief that only my generation knows what it feels like to be without an identity was incorrect. Above all, these notes conveyed the longing he had for his family.
Adem always dressed in a suit with his hair neatly styled. He would always leave a note in his photographs. Photographs from Serafina Ferizajās archive.
Meanwhile, my maternal grandmother, Hata, Zenun’s wife, went to Germany in 1972, two years after my grandfather. My mother and her three younger brothers remained in Kosovo. Thus, at the age of six, my mother took on the role of caretaker for her brothers. She and her brothers lived with their grandmother, my great-grandmother, in the village of Isniq, DeƧan.
She only saw her parents twice a year during the holidays. She met them during winter in Kosovo when Grandfather Zenun had a break for Christmas. In a rare moment when she spoke about her experiences from that time, my mother told me that when it snowed, she knew that the day her parents would come to Kosovo was not far away. Every day she waited for them at the window. She spent the summer in Germany, unlike my generation, which spends summer vacations in Kosovo.
Something else that is remembered from that time was the gifts that my grandparents brought from Germany ā a tradition that continues today in my generation. Zenun once brought a Polaroid camera and a computer, both very rare items in the villages back then. In January 1998, when the Serbian militia raided my grandparentsā house to look for my uncle, who was involved in Kosovoās liberation efforts, they stole the computer and the camera. We found the Polaroid photos in the backyard after the war.Ā
Adem also brought gifts. There is still talk about an expensive coat that he brought for his grandmother, a coat that today would be worth a fortune.
Together, they brought something else with them to Germany ā food and cassette tapes from Kosovo. The sound of the Albanian language and the daily life that was sung and talked about at that time softened the longing for home. They also brought films such as “Dheu i tokĆ«s sonĆ«” and music by Sabri Fejzullahu, Sinan Vllasali and Adelina Ismajli.
I also learned Albanian with these tapes.
Adem before he went to Germany (left) and Adem and Ajmone (right). Ajmone is wearing the coat Adem had brought for her from Germany. Photographs from Serafina Ferizajās archive.
My parents
Zenun and Hata have a rare story ā both were in Germany while their children remained in Kosovo. Throughout this time, they constantly tried to bring their children to Germany for a better and safer life. My mother objected adamantly. Before becoming a student, her grandfather tried to persuade her about the quality of the German education system, but she still enrolled in the Faculty of Economics in Prishtina. Even during the tense period of the 1981 student demonstrations, where students demanded that Kosovo have equal constitutional status as the other republics of Yugoslavia, she did not leave.
“I hated Germany,” my mother told me. She grew up homesick, experiencing the pain of being separated from her family due to migration early on. This separation continued for a while, and Hata and Zenun became strangers even to their homeland. When I asked my grandfather if people in the village talked about the Albanian diaspora like they do today, he said “Yes, of course, they used to say, ‘Look at them, from Germany.'” It seemed he wanted to convey how difficult it was for them, as only they knew the true extent of their struggles.
As the situation in Kosovo worsened, in 1993, my mother finally moved to Germany. In those years, one by one, Zenun and Hataās children all relocated. Today, they all live in different cities across Germany and Austria.
Grandfather Adem returned to his village of Strellc in 1979, seven years after he had gone to Germany. However, the 90s found him back in Germany. In the spring of 1999, Adem, Ajmon and the rest of the family ā except my father, who had gone to Germany in 1993 ā became refugees in the country that Adem had once helped rebuild. It was one of the few times that the whole family was together. During these times, they stayed at our house.
After the war, some family members returned to Kosovo and started a new life. The German authorities also repatriated Adem and Ajmon to Kosovo, where they still live today. Their three sons remained in Germany, continuing to send help to their extended family in Kosovo.
Meanwhile, Zenun and Hata live between Milishevc in Kosovo and Augsburg in Germany. They spend spring and summer in Milishevc, in the Dukagjin mountains, while autumn and winter in Augsburg, Germany.
After so many years in Germany, it never became their home.
My parents never returned to Kosovo. They were engaged and married before coming to Germany. Today, they live in the city that grandfather Adem helped build ā Braunschweig. They are still haunted by a question my mother once said to a family member after our summer vacation in Kosovo: “Is life really worth living out of a suitcase?”
Me
When I was a child, I didnāt understand why my parents did not return to Kosovo. My mother absolutely hated Germany, and I was angry because she hated the country where I was born. I wanted to go back to Kosovo, I wanted to go to my grandparents, Adem and Ajmon. When I expressed this wish during the summer holidays, my friends in Kosovo did not understand ā they had to wait for months for a visa to travel to my hometown. Meanwhile, children in Germany excluded me because of my background. “Go to Kosovo and don’t come back,” was one of the things that was said to me.
I could not find access to my family history in any language, neither Albanian nor German. To this day, I don’t like to remember my teenage years ā I felt very lonely.
I was jealous of my parents, who had grown up without an identity crisis. I was even angry that my German passport did not list Kosovo as my birthplace. I envied them because they were born in Kosovo and were able to clearly answer the question about their birthplace, without having to explain themselves. They were able to say “we are from Kosovo.”
Perhaps my parents were never asked: “How did you learn German?” My answer to that is that I was born here, because my family, my grandparents’ generation has been in Germany since 1970.
As I grew up, I began to understand the identity crisis experienced by me, my parents and my grandparents. Only now have I realized that after the war, my parents found a completely different home than the one they grew up in. I realized that my impression was not only wrong, but also selfish. After all, greetings and goodbyes have been an integral part of my family history for generations. They didn’t start with me.
Unlike their fathers, my parents did not leave Kosovo for economic reasons. Their departure was not quiet either. Their lives were in danger, I came to understand this through glimpses of news and faint mentions of their activism and participation in protests during 1989-90. My mother told me about how tanks had reached her student dormitory.
The irony is that my mother describes those years as the happiest of her life. The “bad phase,” as she calls it, started when she saw my father off on the bus that took him to Germany in 1993. I began to understand their fear when my brother and I started speaking German, my father strictly said, “Speak Albanian.” Today, I am grateful to my father because I clearly recognize the enrichment of speaking another language and gaining deep knowledge of another culture.
I now understand the time when I wanted to escape from my roots, to become like other girls in Germany, to be one of them. I have often asked myself where I will find home, in Kosovo or Germany.
But I always returned, without fail, to the mountain by our village, Strellci Peak. Today, I can understand why my parents still spend their summers in Kosovo, even though they can travel all over the world with a German passport. Unlike in the past, today they no longer have to worry about being taken to the police station for no reason and disappearing without a trace. Today, they can enjoy a free Kosovo, something they dreamed of and wanted when they were young.
Today, I visit Kosovo in spring and autumn, when the weather is still warm. I return and search for clues ā I seek out the spot near the bus stop, photograph the walls of old houses, observe old women in white scarves and listen to elderly men singing traditional songs with a Ƨifteli ( double-stringed lute).
I aim to document everything that reflects the times of my parents and grandparents. I want to restore to my grandparents their individuality, their nuances, their stories that were stripped away when they arrived in Germany. To others, they were just part of a group. There’s little discussion about this, even in Kosovo. Their stories deserve to be told individually, their dignity restored from the days on platform 11.
My parents left a piece of me at the bus stop in 1993, even before I was born. I’m not sure what it is, but I must find it.
About the author:
Serafina Ferizaj was born in Braunschweig, Germany. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in German language and law and a master’s degree in communication and language sciences. She worked as a freelance journalist for the daily SĆ¼ddeutsche Zeitung and now works in marketing.
