The Hellenic Parliament in Athens, designed by German architect Friedrich von Gartner. Wikimedia. Public domain.As the existential tug of war between Greece and its creditors moves into its hair-raising end game, its hard for me not to feel like I’m being squeezed by the knot in the middle. I’m Greek-German: my mother, the German, is from outside of Düsseldorf, while my father, the Greek, was raised in Athens by parents who moved from Crete to the capital in their 20s.
Apart from five years as an expatriate in the US, I spent my entire childhood in Athens in a Greek-German limbo. After my British school in the northern suburbs of Athens had closed for the day, I’d watch German television by satellite. In the summers, I’d follow a few weeks at my grandparents house in the Rhineland with a few more of languishing on a beach by the Aegean.
Next week I depart Berlin after a year on a research fellowship. In simpler times the last days of a year like this would be spent touring the old hunting grounds and ticking off items on a bucket list. Instead, my last week has been a disorienting vacillation between a manic, fantastical desire to get to Athens or Brussels and do something and a bitter but resigned acceptance of my personal powerlessness.
