Magic Ramadan – On a Flying Carpet through Berlin
Growing up in East Germany, shortly after the fall of the wall, there was not a lot of ethnic diversity around me. Many people I met in my daily life thought I would be Turkish or Arab because that were the only “dark” foreigners that they knew from TV. Once I remember an older lady stopping me in the streets saying that I looked like I just jumped out of an Arabic fairy tale and she meant it all seriously. As a kid, I did not know how to answer to this kind of comments.
It was only years later when I moved to Berlin that I realized how free I felt all of a sudden in a city where nobody was stopping me in the streets to ask which fairy tale I just came from. The city was full of colorful unicorns and sparkling birds of paradise wandering around without restrictions, that I suddenly had the feeling of belonging and acceptance.
