By Alistair Noon

To explain how I’ve ended up spending most of my adult life in Berlin, I’ll have to make extensive use of the phrase “what was still”. When I was 10, 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. In Western Europe it meant more or less what was still the European Community. Yugoslavia was part of what was still the Eastern Bloc. I chose German not Spanish at school, took a trip to the capital of what was still the Soviet Union, studied German and Russian, as well as a little Czech, which was – please don’t lynch me next time I’m in Prague – an option in the Russian course at Bristol University. 

My first glimpse of the inverted city walls of – one more time! – what was still West Berlin was in 1989, pulling in to Wannsee following the 22-hour train and ferry jaunt that – pre-easyjet – was still the basic way of getting there from the UK. I left six months later with a shocking haircut, 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 back then 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, experimented in sound art, and hardly knew any other poets in Berlin.

Thirteen years later, Bordercrossing Berlin came about 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.

My own personal involvement in the mag came about through meeting like-minded spirits here and putting some of them up on stage at the Poetry Hearings festival. Another impetus was my own realization that Anglophone writers living long-term outside the Anglosphere – translocal writers if you will – have no apologies to make for being somewhat outside the events and discourse of their countries of origin. If they can get away from simply presenting their place of residence as an exotic Other in their writing, they have a part to play in reflecting on the flows of people and ideas that are characteristic of our time.

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