By Alistair Noon

How did I end up spending most of my adult life in Berlin? When I was ten, my parents took me on a beach holiday to what was still Yugoslavia. I was somehow fascinated by the idea of a Europe that wasn’t Europe. Or was it? Then as now, that term was politically loaded. West of the tank traps it meant more or less what was still the European Community, not yet the European Union. Yugoslavia was – more or less – part of what was still the Eastern Bloc.

At school I chose German not Spanish, took a trip to the capital of what was still the Soviet Union, and did German and Russian at university, as well as a little Czech. The latter was – please don’t lynch me next time I’m in Prague – an option in the Russian department.

In March 1989 I got my first glimpse of the inverse city walls of – one more time! – what was still West Berlin. We pulled in to Wannsee following a 22-hour train and ferry jaunt that – pre-easyjet – was the basic way of getting to Berlin from the UK. I left six months later with a shocking haircut, ripped clothes from flea markets, and a lot of sleep to catch up on.

1993 and I was back, more or less for good. The Anglophone community at the time consisted of a few arty types but mostly of military personnel still stationed there, as well as British and Irish brickies at the hard end of the post-1989 building boom. I wrote lots of poetry, published a little in magazines, and hardly knew any other poets in Berlin.

Thirteen years later, ‘Bordercrossing Berlin’ was started up as a few of us realized that a critical mass had been reached in Berlin in terms of the number of Anglophone writers living there. The core of the people involved met in what was still Café Rosa – then run by Fiona Mizani, who got the magazine off the ground as chief editor.

Another impetus for me personally was a realization that translocal writers living long-term outside the Anglosphere have no apologies to make for being somewhat outside the events and discourse of their countries of origin. If they can go beyond simply writing about their place of residence as an exotic Other, they have a part to play in reflecting on the ever-faster flows of people and ideas that are characteristic of our time. That’s part of what ‘Bordercrossing Berlin’ is about.

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