🇩🇪 Berlin

Berlin holds one of the largest Iranian communities in Europe. Charlottenburg and Schoeneberg are full of Iranian restaurants, grocery shops stocked with things from home, and Farsi spoken on the street. Walking those neighbourhoods for the first time, you may feel a step closer to home. That closeness does not always make the ache smaller.

The reality of Berlin often differs from the picture you had at a distance. At first everything is exciting: the museums, the cafes, the architecture, the feeling of a city that breathes freely. Then a few months pass, the first excitement settles, and harder questions arrive. Who am I here? Is this life I have built actually mine?

The Iranian community in Berlin is not one thing. It runs from students and artists to political exiles who arrived decades ago. That variety is a strength and, sometimes, a source of confusion: each generation of Iranians in this city tells a different story about it, and finding where you fit among them is not simple.

German bureaucracy is one of the hardest early experiences of migration. Auslaenderbehoerde, Anmeldung, Krankenkasse: the words are difficult to say, and behind each one sit hours of waiting, complicated forms, and a feeling of powerlessness. When your language is not yet good enough to ask for what you are entitled to, when you know exactly what you want to say and do not have the German for it, that is one of the loneliest moments migration produces.

German communication style is a shock to many Iranians. We grow up with taarof, the thin polite layer that softens Iranian relationships. Germans speak directly, not out of rudeness but because honesty is the value being expressed. Still, when a colleague criticises your work with no preamble, or a friend tells you plainly that they will not take your suggestion, that directness can land like cold water.

Berlin's weather is a reality most people underestimate. Nine grey months, days when you forget what the sun looks like, a heaviness that settles on your shoulders. This is not only weather. Seasonal depression is very common in Germany, and for someone raised in the light of Tehran or Isfahan the change of climate can reach a long way into the mind.

Learning German is not only a language skill, it is a journey through your own identity. The first time you dream in German, the first time you notice you are thinking through a complicated conversation in German rather than Farsi, something in you has shifted. That shift is remarkable and unsettling at once: you are becoming someone you do not entirely recognise.

Living between two cultures is like standing on a bridge while both banks move away from you. When you go back to Iran you are no longer entirely Iranian; your gaze has changed, you ask questions you did not ask before. In Berlin you do not become German either; your accent, your history, your memories are different. That space between two cultures can be liberating and disorienting in the same week.

Missing Iran is a complicated feeling. It is not only missing your family. It is missing the warmth of how people relate, the long evenings with everyone in one room, the sense of belonging that needs no explanation. In Berlin you have to build that belonging again from nothing, and building it takes years and an energy you do not always have.