Latest News

Why Berlin is the City of Dreams

October 2nd 2019

By Washington Post

 

Salim Chujfi still remembers his first impression of the city when he arrived at the turn of the millennium: “Cold, very big…very, very big. But I was not afraid.”

Chujfi and his wife Juliana González both grew up in Pereira, a mountainous coffee region in Colombia (although they actually met later, after they’d both left). He moved to Germany for a job as a systems engineer; back in Colombia, González worked in strategic communications with a background in international affairs.

Of course, following her heart, González joined Chujfi in 2002. They both fell in love with the richness of Berlin’s history and the city’s potential. It wasn’t an easy path—Colombia is thousands of miles from Germany, in all kinds of ways—but they were determined.

“I said, ‘I’m going to learn German, I don’t care how long it’s going to take,’” González recalls. “It was just trying to realize, ‘who am I in this new place,’ and defining myself, that took more time. The first years were very confusing for me, but language was my vehicle to move forward.”

“Oh, yes,” Chujfi echoes. “That’s the best decision anyone can make.”

Chujfi eventually launched his own innovative telecommunications company, Sabienzia; he strongly believes “trustable technology is made in Germany”. González found a job as a producer in the Spanish department of broadcaster Deutsche Welle and later worked as the deputy chief of mission at the Colombian embassy. Their two daughters, Hanna and Claire, were born in Berlin and now ping-pong fluently between Spanish, German, and English.

But two years ago, the family faced a tough decision of whether to return to Colombia. González’s embassy work was putting her in very close contact with the politics and affairs in her home country, and her passion about these matters made her wonder whether it would be better to simply go back.

“I felt like I was in the middle of a bridge, and I wondered whether I should cross that bridge or take a step back and remain here,” she says.

But Chujfi had a successful business to run, and González wash welcomed back to Deutsche Welle, where she is now a political correspondent.

Ultimately, it was their lifestyle that kept them in Berlin.

“I can ride my bike to the office, I can drop the kids off at school. You work, but you also have a fulfilled life,” González says. “It gives me a sense of freedom, of security. Those little but significant details make me happy and enrich me—the small stuff is so important. And I’m not willing to give that up.”


Manon Roux

4.5 years in Berlin

 

Manon Roux wouldn’t have her story to tell if it weren’t for a wildly last-minute job offer. She had been camping with a friend in Paris and applying to a slew of startup jobs in Berlin with no luck. And then, on the day her train was leaving for Berlin, she received an email about a Skype interview for a marketing position in a housing rental startup. She was hired on the spot.

The ex-Parisian arrived in the city in the winter of 2014 after deciding to quit the French capital. A six-month Erasmus exchange program in Oslo where she reveled in an international cohort had opened her eyes to the world, and she couldn’t face working in Paris after going back to complete her studies there.

“I started feeling repressed there,” Roux recalls. She had studied political science and communications at the Paris-Sorbonne University and interned at the European Parliament in France.

“But I started to have this other image for myself, of someone doing something completely different than working for a political party or for French institutions. I came to Berlin really without a plan—it was a complete coup de tête.”

In Berlin she did a Weiterbildung—German for “traineeship”—in website conception and online communication, and decided to forge her own way as freelancer. She now builds online communication strategies for small companies in Berlin and France.

A typical weekday for Roux starts with breakfast with her boyfriend—a German artist—and listening to her favorite French radio show. “I know I should listen to German programs, but I can’t help myself,” she says. “I can’t skip my mother tongue in the mornings.”

Then she works from home in Friedrichshain, a young, bustling neighborhood on Berlin’s eastern flank, before heading out for a few client meetings in the afternoon. The evenings are devoted to German class or an art exhibition and dinner in one of the neighborhood’s many restaurants.

Weekends have gotten a lot more wholesome. Roux used to explore Berlin’s club scene, but these days—particularly during the summer—her favorite thing to do is take her bike to one of the city’s myriad lakes and picnic all afternoon.

“I’m really a lake freak,” she says. “It’s so beautiful to have so many lakes around Berlin. I feel so much more connected to nature here than I ever was in Paris.”

Of course, she misses home, but she’s convinced she’s found her personal island in the German capital.

“I also could have a very beautiful life in France,” she says. “But in Paris, it’s just much more coded; if you want to get your baguette, you can’t go in your pajamas. I feel much better, much freer here.”

 

Manuel Pessao de Lima

Just arrived

 

As a pianist performer-composer, Manuel Pessao de Lima has always valued experimentation. And it’s this personal mandate that pulled him to Berlin.

After finishing his doctorate in musical arts in 2016 at the California Institute of the Arts, where he was also a lecturer, Lima moved back to his parents’ house in his native Brazil. By 2019 his compositional repertoire already included pieces for dance, theater, cinema installations and orchestra, but he found teaching was the only sustainable way to make a living.

Eventually two things became clear: he had to leave the academic world, and he had to leave Brazil.

“I always felt really trapped inside the university,” Lima says. “In Brazil, academia is very much based on a conservative French model. And you have a strong divide: either you have an academic career, or you have an artistic career, which is a whole other world.”

At the same time, the political climate back home was deteriorating; Jair Bolsonaro was rising to power, and once in office, he began cutting budgets from the country’s top universities. Lima was pessimistic. He had three concerts in Europe, and he took the chance to visit Berlin and see if it was a place where he could find a haven.

“Whenever you have a situation like this, you have resistance—there’s more engagement from people from the left, from artists and intellectuals, and that can be empowering,” he says. “But I’d already felt displaced. I studied abroad and had been gone for so long.”

Moving to Berlin offered Lima a kind of personal liberation. It’s a theme that resonates deeply within his work, which engages heavily with the notions of failure and vulnerability. And the experimental music scene here was exactly what he was searching for.

“It’s the perfect setting to experiment [with] this liberation I’m in need of to be reborn artistically,” Lima says. “Being a classical pianist is a very Olympic career. You’re always dealing with a very high standard. I don’t even have a piano here.”

Lima is still getting settled. He’s looking for long-term housing, which can be a Herculean task these days in the city, but he harbors high hopes for the future.

“I just really want to exist as a living artist, which is having some sort of living interaction with the present reality.”