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This place where we are standing now at the Gesundbrunnen-Center is not just the start of our guided city tour. Since it was built more than 20 years ago, it has developed into a place of consumption, but at the same time, it is also the hub of the Gesundbrunnen neighbourhood. What many people see is a place of mere consumerism nowadays used to be a recreational area with a spa and a medicinal spring. Yet only very few people who live here know about this, because there is hardly anything that reminds us of this time if we walk through the area around the Gesundbrunnen-Center today. Only the name “Gesundbrunnen” (fountain of health) remains. It goes back to a spring discovered near today’s Luisenbad. While people used to yearn for the Gesundbrunnen area as a spa and health resort, we only heard voices that advised against the Wedding district during our current times. We were used to that from right-wing populists and extremists, but the image of Wedding as a ghetto – an image we always had to fight with, also managed to take hold in middle-class circles of our society. Even a member of the Federal Government of Germany adviseed one of our regular tour guests from the USA against visiting Berlin-Wedding. This narrative of the dangers in Wedding is not new to us. When people talk about Berlin-Wedding, it is often about criminality, unemployment and social welfare. Strangely enough, these aspects are often linked to the high “percentage of foreigners” in Wedding. Indeed, around half of the approximately 96,000 people who live in the Gesundbrunnen area, have a migration background. There have been endless discussions about migrants, foreigners or people with a migration background here, but nobody really knew what these terms actually meant. Yet they very clearly suggested one thing: The conversation was about people that somehow did not really belong, that had something that should not even be mentioned. In the beginning, we were the foreigners, then the migrants and one day, we became the people with a migration background. But most of us has no experience with migration whatsoever. People looked and are still looking for terms, maybe also unconsciously, that express that somebody does not really belong to Germany majority society and is somehow different. Paradoxically, this also happens in our so-called perceived home countries, where we are the Germans, so foreigners once again, and here in Germany, we are also foreigners. We are birds without legs, we can fly everywhere, but land nowhere. And no, I do not want to say us or them, but the narratives of past and present shape us until today and are sometimes simply necessary to explain the effects and traces of these designations to our tour guests. Many people in Wedding who live in the Gesundbrunnen neighbourhood shared and still share the fate of not belonging. You only need to look at e-mail addresses we had as teenagers and you will find the former Wedding postcode “Wedding 65” wherever you look. Wedding 65 was the only designation we used ourselves at the time. This was an attempt to create our own identity beyond the designations used for us by others. However, this did not help to cope with every single identity crisis. For us, the Gesundbrunnen Center is a place that best embodies Wedding65, which is why it is not just a place of consumption, but also part of what we call home.

We are standing here in front of the Diesterweg-Gymnasium, our former secondary school, where we passed our final school-leaving exam, the Abitur. Like us, almost everybody who has attended the upper secondary level here manages to get their Abitur. Around 93 percent of all the pupils at this school have a migration background. Considering that around half of the population of Wedding has a migration background, you have to ask yourself why this is not matched by the school population at the Diesterweg-Gymnasium. It means that enough parents believe that their children would be better equipped for the centralized school-leaving exam by attending a school a few stops away from Gesundbrunnen. This contradiction is not a problem as such, but it leads to the development of parallel societies on both sides that result in fear and mutual alienation. The Diesterweg Gymnasium is one of the first all-day schools in Berlin Mitte. That is no coincidence. It was rightly recognized that most pupils at this school could not expect any help from their parents. This was due to the social class most of the pupils belonged to, rather than where they might have come from. At the same time, education was always important to our parents, especially given that for various reasons, they did not have the opportunity to enjoy a good education. In turn, this put us under pressure, because we had to justify our parents’ sacrifices. Therefore, it was even more important to compensate with the all-day school for the lack of support we had for our learning at home. As many disadvantages as the pupils at the Diesterweg-Gymnasium may have, they also have one clear advantage: multilingualism. Yet most of them do not know about this advantage. On the contrary, the majority society often sees it as a problem and often calls it double semilingualism. This term implies that we neither speak German nor our mother tongue correctly. But if parents from Prenzlauer Berg send their children to daycare in a Kita with French-speaking educators, double semilingualism suddenly turns into a bilingual education. It seems to depend on the language itself whether multilingualism is valued or not, because some languages enjoy prestige and respect, whereas others do not. Unfortunately, the great majority of the students at the Diesterweg Gymnasium speak languages that are not at the top of the linguistic hierarchy. How often did I hear the sentence that we should speak German at home. Which always posed the question “who with?”. I would really enjoy to hear that it is nice that we have grown up with several languages. For us, multilingualism led to the development of the so-called Brockensprache. Fragments of other first languages are mixed with German in a way that everybody in Wedding can still understand. We exist in several languages.

We are in a historic place: Behmstraße, corner of Jülicher Straße in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen. Where there is now a block of flats with a grey pebbledash facade, a football stadium could be admired once. This stadium called Plumpe by Berliners was predominantly used by the club Hertha BSC as their home pitch. Right on the opposite side of the street is another football pitch, which is quite inconspicuous if compared to the Plumpe. The so-called NNW pitch has been the home pitch of one of the most traditional German football clubs, the SV Norden-Nordwest 1898. I played for this club for approximately 8 years. If it had been up to my father’s friends, I would have never ended up there. They perceived it as dangerous to let the child play in such a “foreigners’ team”. People who saw themselves as foreigners and were also perceived as foreigners by society told him this. Time and again, the media wrote about brawls in the “migrant clubs”. But my father was pragmatic. The kitchen window of our flat looked out on the NNW pitch, which meant that my parents could always keep an eye on me, and the sport itself could only be beneficial for my personal development. This is how I ended up in a team with three Mohammeds that we only called Momo. In order for them to know who was meant, we gave them additional names based on their looks: Momo Lint, Momo Toothpick and Momo Eyebrow. Together with them, there were people from all kinds of different countries. From the outside, it looked like a homogeneous bunch – simply the foreigners. On closer examination, however, we were a group that could not have been more heterogeneous. Yet one thing we all had in common: We felt disadvantaged, somebody was always badmouthing us, expected integration and knowledge of the German language at the highest level – and we were always the foreigners. Which is why we developed a not to be underestimated rage about an abstract system that we called Germany. The NNW pitch was one of the few places where we were able to forget all of that and where it did not matter where we came from or how we looked. Your athletic ability was all that mattered. We were not that talented, none of us seriously hoped to become a professional footballer one day. It was about enjoying the game and getting away from being an outsider that kept us on the NNW pitch for hours. Against all concerns, there were never any bigger conflicts. Nobody should be surprised that the team consisted predominantly of so-called foreigners at the time. Where the Plumpe was once, a block of flats with a grey pebbledash facade was built in the 1970s. Naturally, the so-called guest workers moved there, because after all, Berlin-Wedding has always been a working-class district and our parents did not have any choice. The NNW pitch was the place where it did not matter where you came from, but at the same time, it was also the place where it regularly became apparent that our (hi)story did not have anything in common with that of many other teams. Every weekend, cultures clashed — us, the team of foreigners against the German teams from the other Berlin districts. It was the same with every match. We did not know each other, and what was seen as foreign was allegedly dangerous and had to be fought. So it took less than five minutes until the mutual insults started that were sometimes racist. The “Kanaken” on one side and the “Nazis” on the others. We played against each other, yet also somehow with each other. It took far too long, but it led to an understanding that “Kanaken” were not playing against “Nazis”, but that we were people from different social classes that nevertheless had quite a few things in common. This insight was quite valuable later on, which is why I will always be grateful to the NNW pitch. For that and for being toughened against many racist insults.