I associate my family's fate with the fall of the Berlin Wall. A lingering pain. I was relatively young at the time, but I remember it well. My parents were born in '59, so they were influenced by the GDR era. My mother was a hairdresser. You had good connections in the GDR, actually the best. She started her own business right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Through contacts, acquaintances brought over a complete set of equipment for the salon. So my mother quickly had a thriving hairdressing business. She also obtained a master's degree and was in demand. It was different with my father. He was an agricultural machinery mechanic in the region. That lasted for a while, but then quickly ended. The familiar job security was gone. In the end, it had serious consequences. The energy my mother needed to pursue her independence and the energy my father had could no longer function together. There were imbalances, especially due to my father's constant job changes. He was simply overwhelmed. This ended in a bitter divorce. It had something to do with the demands on life and the work situation. As a child, I was always afraid that my parents would separate – subconsciously. The separation would probably have happened anyway, but the fact that my mother experienced such great development and my father fell apart can definitely be traced back to the fall of the Wall. For me as a young person, the most important thing was listening to music, going out, meeting people, and so on. My greatest developmental asset is freedom. I'm still fighting for that now – for my children and ours. I think things would have turned out differently in the GDR. That's why I'm grateful. I didn't get it when the Wall came down, when I was 8 or 9, but I did when I was 15.
