Auf wiedersehen Berlin

Oh Berlin, Berlin, what will I do without you, today is my farewell and I'm leaving as sad as I was happy when I arrived two and a half years ago.

I'm leaving older and a little defeated. I'm leaving because your winters are too cold and too long and because I've lost patience with your slow times, because I've already lived through the 90s.

I'm not leaving, I'm escaping, because once inside, Berlin traps you in its net of nothing is possible and everything takes a long time.

There are days when I understand why my grandparents left, and every day I still feel a little more German. I won't miss your complex language and your grey days, I will miss greeting my neighbours and the peace of walking safely in your streets, which, even if you don't light them up, the rats and passers-by walk without fear.

Berlin, that big space with varied opinions, where everyone has a place to express them in a press that is not yet so polarised. With your generous promises for those who need shelter, which you then drown in your bureaucracy, with your romantic idea of a better world, and at the same time with your old-fashioned portrait of a family that hardly exists any more.

Oh Berlin, if we had met earlier, I would have hugged you tighter and our story would have been more passionate and romantic... but I arrived at that moment when the world stopped and the streets were empty and everything was almost turned off. At the moment when you can't cope any more, there is no more home for those who arrive, there are no more doctors and teachers, businesses close because there is no one to work them. When rents are no longer cheap and salaries are still cheap.

But I'll keep on singing, in my rustic German and in a low voice, the songs of Rammstein, with whom I learned so many new words, and I'll go on paraphrasing for a while...

So kalt und doch so warm

And you will be, like that love that only happens in the 20s, brief, intense and beautiful, but not destined to last, and is remembered with a touch of melancholy, always...

(Berlin!) Deine Liebe ist Fluch und Segen (Berlin!) Meine Liebe kann ich dir nicht geben Deutschland, Deutschland über allen...

Thank you for everything Berlin.