Amplify: Writing about living in Berlin in a fictional way gave the experience a whole new perspective

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This is the weekly Amplify newsletter, where you can be inspired and challenged by the voices, opinions and insights of women at The Globe and Mail.

Menaka Raman-Wilms is the host of The Decibel, The Globe and Mail’s daily news podcast.

In 2015, I left my home in Toronto to live in Berlin with a friend for six months.

I was in my mid-twenties, had finished grad school and was working a mix of tutoring and babysitting jobs. Though I’d traveled, I realized I’d never lived anywhere else. So I decided to go.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to find in Berlin. But the stories I encountered in the city, particularly those of women, ended up driving me to write my first novel.

I’d been to Berlin for a summer program before, but moving there for half a year felt different. There were things I was anticipating: the excitement of independence, the loneliness, figuring out where to buy groceries, which streets to avoid at night and how to make friends in a new city.

But other things surprised me and ignited my imagination. The outside of a building still pockmarked with bullet holes from the war. Markers where the wall that once split the city used to run. Even an abandoned, overgrown amusement park complete with an old Ferris wheel and graffitied pirate ship. These moments frozen in time made me think about how the past and the present could, in a sense, exist together.

There were so many reminders of what had happened before in the city. My apartment was close to an old crossing of the Berlin Wall, where at one point people used to go from one side to the other. I bought a poster, a picture of a woman from decades ago when the wall was still up. The photographer had caught her hiking up her skirt to tuck a packet of cigarettes in her garter belt, so she could sneak them into east Berlin.

Being there also brought to life a book I read at university called A Woman in Berlin. It was a diary written by a German journalist at the end of the Second World War, and it chronicles the widespread rape of civilians by Soviet soldiers after they captured the city.

As I walked through Berlin, I thought about these different experiences, and how so many women who came before me knew a very different city than I was experiencing.

The present was also changing Berlin, too. While I was there, political tensions were ramping up. The war in Syria, along with other instabilities, sent more than a million people fleeing their homes and entering Europe. On the weekends, my friend and I would sometimes volunteer at a refugee centre, and I would mostly help in the daycare, playing with the kids and trying to communicate with their mothers through gestures and simple English. I knew most of them had been on long journeys, and though they may not have meant to end up in Berlin, at least some of them would be building a new life here.

I’d come to Berlin looking for something different, but I wasn’t expecting to discover so many new, complex ideas to think about. The juxtaposition of present experiences and stories of the past stayed with me.

It was in the middle of all that when I started writing a story. I wasn’t sure what I was creating at first, but what came naturally was writing about a woman navigating Berlin, walking along the cobblestone streets that I knew and seeing all the reminders of the things that had come before. I thought about the different women I’d encountered in the city – both historically and in the present – and the character of a young woman started to emerge.

My book The rooftop garden was finally published this fall. The story went through several evolutions from its early days, and now includes segments in Toronto as well, where I returned after my time in Europe. The vague idea of that initial young woman solidified and turned into Nabila, the main character. Though she’s not based on any specific individual I met in Berlin, she started to come to life in my imagination during my time there.

When I look back on it now, I realize that writing about my experiences in a fictional way helped me make sense of things I encountered in Berlin. Sometimes it’s easier to understand what’s happening around you when you see it through someone else’s eyes.

What else we’re thinking about:

One of the best podcasts I’ve listened to this year is the latest season of Connie Walker’s Stolen. Walker is a Cree journalist from Saskatchewan, and I’ve always been a fan of her work. This season is different from her previous ones though, because it explores her own family’s stories at residential school. Stolen: Surviving St. Micheal’s delves into this history with nuance and compassion, and lets the listener gain a deeper understanding of what happened. I can’t recommend this podcast enough.

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