DANIEL SCHERMERHORN

Fernweh or Finding a Place in the Snow Untouched

– A short story by Daniel Schermerhorn Stockholm, Sweden

I was living in Berlin, Germany on the edge of the Grunewald forest on a street called Wasgenstraße. It was January, and the nearby lake, Schlachtensee, was frozen over, hidden under the snow that had been falling nonstop for days. The accumulation had formed a sheet of white, giving the landscape the appearance of a painting whose creator had left a blank void nestled between the dead trees that stood like mute behemoths on the surrounding banks. Typically, the lake served as a getaway for Berliners trying to escape the city heat during the summer; however, I found that I much preferred walking along the shores in its wintry state, bundled up from head to toe and rarely crossing paths with another soul. Those I did pass, try as I might to avoid them, were likewise cocooned in thick parkas and rarely offered so much as a grunt of acknowledgement. As it was my first extended stay outside of the United States, many back home were concerned that I would be struck with a loneliness that they believed I had never experienced before. On the contrary, I found no reason to correlate loneliness with my geographical location. There had been plenty of times when I had been surrounded by family or friends and could have sworn I didn’t exist for them. Like the time I had received a letter from my grandmother, with the following lines scribbled in her trademark cursive handwriting, “After much thought, I believe you are homosexual. You are in my prayers, and I look forward to talking to you about the ways in which the Lord can help you see the light. –Mommom.”

The use of homosexual jumped off the page and cut into me with the cold, prescriptive glare of a physician making a diagnosis rather than an observation. Given my grandparents’ conservative political and religious views, I believed my assumption to be justified, and after several minutes running her lines through my head, I tore her note into as many little pieces as possible, summarily building a wall between us with the scraps. It was a feat executed quickly and efficiently, and to this day, we have never spoken again. However, I also believed facing this rejection was a small price to pay to protect myself. It is one of the few defense mechanisms available to those who identify with a marginalized group: escape. Many people forget, outside of Berlin that is, that Berlin was an early gay mecca in the 1920’s before the Nazis came to power. Thinkers such as Magnus Hirschfeld and his colleagues at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft promoted a sex-positive society whose influence could be seen in a flourishing gay, lesbian, and transsexual cultural scene. Queer expression thrived, culminating in 1929, when the German parliament would likely have voted to decriminalize homosexuality were it not for that year’s economic crash. However, as is more widely known, by 1933 any glimpse of equality was crushed under National Socialism, and the LGBTQ community was forced to either flee or face deportation to the camps. Yet, it’s impossible to think about escape without also acknowledging the ways in which it is historically tied to privilege. What choices exist for those who do not have the means to escape? Few, I think, other than to hide. Thus, entire minority groups, spanning over generations, have existed in the shadows—a reality made visible to me by the Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen. As I approached that specific memorial, a bizarre, misshapen cube of concrete, I felt a pang of disappointment. The underwhelming block could easily be mistaken for a public toilet. Then, I realized how its shape may have also been its main draw. I began to notice people approaching with quizzical expressions that grew more puzzled as they questioned whether the large block in front of them was in fact diverging ever so slightly from its seemingly perfect squareness. I walked around to the street-facing side where a small opening existed at eye-level inviting

Fernweh

a single guest at a time to approach and look inside to find a looped video of two men passionately kissing. The casual observer will seldom take anything away from most of the memorials scattered around Berlin, which require active mental participation from its viewers. The Memorial Commemorating Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism was no different. I walked away from that video more confused than anything, until some time after it struck me how the act of two men kissing was intentionally hidden in the dark recess of the concrete cube, luring in viewers of all nationalities, religions, and belief systems, and demanding that for at least one second that they look into the shadows and bring these men out into the light. Even today, I can clearly imagine those two men repetitively leaning into each other, breaking the tension at the very moment their lips touch. Their faces have changed in my mind over the years, but little else. They continue on a loop in my head just like they do in Berlin’s Tiergarten. Infinite examples of minority persecution exist around the world. My connection to the persecution of LGBTQ individuals was, of course, a more personal one. But, as I sat in a tucked away corner in a Schöneberg bar cradling a beer, I wondered how other minority groups persecuted by the Nazis, such as the Jews or Romani, reacted to the monuments erected to pay respect to their communities. Did they accept modern-day Germany’s acknowledgement of its horrific past, or was it not enough? In comparison, I thought of the effort my own country was making, if any at all, in acknowledging its role in the persecution and mass genocide of minority groups. The backlash against Black Lives Matter and the rise of the alt-right was a sure sign that things were headed in the wrong direction. My move to Germany had in no way started as a purposeful attempt to escape the United States. I had simply wanted to improve my German language skills. But, several months after the move I increasingly began to feel the burden of “American-ness.” I realized it had been naïve to assume that just by moving to another country, I could shed my nationality like a second skin and try on another. It was a monumental task to tap into the mind of a different culture, especially not having the words to do so. But, to move abroad and learn a new language seemed the closest I could get to accomplishing it. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is famously quoted as saying, “Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt,” which I’ve always taken to mean that language has the power to create the world you live in. In other words, as a native English speaker, my thought patterns and the way I experienced the world around me were intimately tangled in the very words and phrases that taught me how to express myself. On the other hand, to learn another language required expanding your mind and accepting entirely different grammatical constructions and lexicons, including words and concepts that don’t even exist in your own language. Take, for example, the German word, Fernweh, which puts a name to the feeling of longing for somewhere else, similar to wanderlust, another German word that has found a permanent home in the English dictionary. But, rather than being a catchy word used to inspire traveling, Fernweh is, in a sense, the German antithesis to homesickness. Rather than longing for home, it is the feeling of wanting to escape to somewhere else, anywhere else, to a place that is often unreachable. Studying this word, I could acutely feel its beautiful simplicity missing from my vocabulary. What Germans could describe in one word might take me several sentences, whole paragraphs, to accurately describe, which made me wonder what this said, if anything, about Germans.

I, on the other hand, was disturbed by my own “American-ness” and the mire of racism and conservative puritanism that somehow seemed inherently tied to that identity. But I also couldn’t hide that I was also running from my own community. I could handle the self-inflicted loneliness, but the loneliness incurred by the expulsion from the only community that ever felt like home was different. What had started as an oasis of acceptance had turned into a garden plagued with rot. It all started one night in the club when I was approached by an older man with a proposition. I was young and attractive, he had said, drawing me in closer. Better yet, I was new to the scene—his boyfriend would love me, and he would love to watch. I made a move to back away, but the hand he had placed on my lower back didn’t allow it. I’m a big name in these clubs, he had warned, so it’s not a good idea to pass up the offer. I resisted again, and this time he let me go. I retreated into the crowd, and made my way to the exit. The next time I returned, however, I could feel the disapproving glare of the regulars, and I wondered what awful rumors had been said about me. I couldn’t imagine why a community that had been formed by oppression could adopt the characteristics of its oppressors. It was as if, through osmosis, power structures focused on dominance had turned themselves into something to be idolized in the collective subconscious of the gay community. Somehow, the toxic masculinity of heteronormativity inflicted so much abuse that it had become normalized in the power dynamics of relationships between men. Regardless, I did not return to that club, or any other. They were no longer the safe havens I thought them to be.

The existential crisis of wanting to know where I belonged that followed was briefly suppressed when I began to seriously date a long-lost acquaintance a year later. His name was K—, and as in most new relationships, we became each other’s world. Like me, he was not intimately connected to a gay identity, so it was easy to create the illusion of a new one that incorporated only us. Like immersing into a new culture, wading into a new relationship required a fine attention to detail to make sure you were not imposing too heavily on another’s way of life. Similarly, falling in love required the same hyper-sensitive consideration to language. But instead of learning a language that had already been established, in love, two people established their own. And like a second language, full comprehension of your new love language, the one you helped create, is always just out of reach. I felt this most acutely when, after a year of dating, my boyfriend turned to me in bed and said, “I don’t think I can be loved anymore.” The construction of that sentence struck me as odd. No matter what way I broke it down and analyzed it, I was always left with a visceral sadness punctuated by nausea. As he described it, years of childhood abuse, the details of which he never fully described, morphed into selfdestructive behaviors as he grew into his teen years and tried to leave any trace of the past behind. But, vicious as the cycle of abuse is, he eventually found himself allowing the abuses of the past to manifest themselves in the form of anonymous sexual partners who mercilessly used the body from which he frequently disassociated himself. Now, in a relationship that didn’t force his mind to flee, he could feel the past catching up once and for all. It was a reality

he was not ready to face, nor one I was able to help deflect. In essence, our relationship had only been a new type of escape for him, the realization of which sucked all the air out of the world I had imagined for us, and once again replaced it with the isolation that I myself had tried so hard to escape. In the weeks that followed, I hung on to the idea of the person I had loved. But, oftentimes, he was completely mute, and when he did speak it was frequently to lash out at a dream that had caught him unawares while he slept. In the morning, when I asked him what made him scream in the middle of the night like that, he would get fidgety and irritable as if I was intruding on an embarrassing secret. Soon, the language we had created together was completely useless, and try as I might, there was no longer a viable way in which to cross the expanding universe that grew between our two separate worlds. In the end, he made what we both felt between us permanent by running away.

As I sat in my apartment on Wasgenstraße, staring out the window at the fresh snow falling in folly down from the midnight blackness above, I was forced to recall the feeling of being by myself the first night after Kris left. Kris, that was his name, and as I said it out loud, the features of his face began to forge back into my mind, until they were so clear, he could have been standing in the room. My memory grew into flesh, and suddenly, he was there approaching me. The tension pulled on my heart, as he reached out and clasped my face between both his palms, drawing my mouth to his— closer and closer. When our lips finally met, the tension in my body snapped, and my body atrophied into a pile on the floor. When I opened my eyes, he was gone again. It had only been the memory of Kris that had caught up to me. The next morning, I went out for a walk along Schlachtensee. Despite the recent snowfall and low temperatures, the crisp air offered a much-needed refresher for my mind, and I hoped I would have the shores of the lake to myself to reflect uninterrupted. When I arrived, however, I noticed the fresh layer of snow had already been disturbed by boot tracks leading in every direction. A sudden, familiar anxiety gripped me, and I began to look around for an area of untouched snow in the hopes that I could follow it and avoid a run-in with a stranger. I was embarrassed to admit it, but since Kris’ revelation, I had developed a terrible habit of seeing an abuser in every man. I saw their faces everywhere—in teachers, cashiers, and once, even in my own father.

The only clear path I saw was out onto the lake. I was unsure if the frozen water would hold, but I had seen others do it before, so I took the risk. With tentative footsteps, my boots began to create their own paths in the snow. It struck me as ironic that in following the untouched path, I was also destroying it. Like trying to find a city in which I could settle down and feel at home, it was a useless pursuit that resulted in only temporary illusions of having found what I was looking for. I stopped and turned around. Two distinct lanes of tracks a foot apart led from the shore directly to where I stood. It was senseless, no matter where I went, I would leave a trace for the past to follow.

I thought of Kris at home, doing who knows what, but certainly facing it alone with one eye always looking back over his shoulder. Then I thought of the man at the club, and how much power I had subconsciously allowed him to have over me, and then of the pink triangle members of my community were once forced to bear. Finally, out of it all came my memory of the video of two men kissing, hidden in the concrete cube. I had escaped, only to hide myself away. But try as I might, I knew I couldn’t sustain it forever. In a way, however, I had found what I was looking for in Berlin—the words I needed to bring myself out of the darkness. I began following my footsteps back to the shore, back to America, back to my community, and, I hoped, back to myself.