Halfway through Amit Chaudhuri’s compact novel(la) Sojourn, the protagonist, an Indian academic visiting Berlin for a semester fifteen years after the fall of the Wall, asks a German couple with whom he is travelling through the “East”, “‘Tell me’—I was peering into the rear-view mirror—‘what exactly is Heimat?’”
Germany
Marlene Dietrich famously sang of still having a suitcase in Berlin, a wistful testament to the evocative power of memory and the hold that people and places can have on us. In many ways the unnamed Korean female narrator in Bae Suah’s novella A Greater Music has left her own suitcase in the German capital, one packed with scraps of memories from a broken intimate relationship with an older German woman and the morning-after emotions that surface when reflecting on a life lived elsewhere.