daHEIM – Glances into Fugitive Lives

Anna Seghers' lifeblood was the literary work and commitment among the exiled persons. In 1942 “Das siebte Kreuz” (The Seventh Cross) was published, one of the most important novels about Germany during the period of National Socialism. In 1947 she returned to Berlin and lived in the eastern part of the city. From 1952 to 1978 she was President of the Schriftstellerverband der DDR (Association of Writers in East Germany). She died in 1983.

"I was born in the village of Korki Mkhayett in Syria. It's a fact that the exact date of my birth is not known. My parents told me that it was in summer – contrary to my official date of birth, 5/1/1966. 
During my time in the village I played in the steppe with my cousins and friends. We took part in communal life, helped the family with the housework and with the harvest of the wheat, barley and lentil crops. We used simple machines drawn by horses to grind the corn. We brought in the hay, watered the animals, fetched water from the ponds, kept watch over the fields and had to take on all the hard and difficult jobs there are to do in the countryside."

was born the eleventh child of Ignat and Kenefefa German on 6/4/1915. These were descendants of German settlers living in a village on the Crimea. In January 1938 Magdalena married the lorry driver Nikolaj Schweiger. In her short marriage she had three children, a son in 1938 and two daughters in 1940 and 1943. 
In September 1941 in the course of the Second World War the family was dispossessed, being “German nationals”, and deported from their homeland to a labour camp in the north of Kazakhstan. The husband was mobilised for industrial work and taken to Korkin in January 1942, where he died in a traffic accident in 1945.

Magdalena and her children were under the supervision of the commander's office in Kazakhstan without the right of freedom of movement until 1955. It was not until 1990 that she was recognised as a victim of “illegal deportation” and political reprisals and was rehabilitated. On 31/3/1993 Magdalena left Kazakhstan for Germany, together with her youngest daughter, as a so-called laterepatriate, where she died on 11/10/2003 at the age of 88.

"I was born in a town named Shingal, Iraq, in March 1992, exactly one year after the First Gulf War stopped. I grew up as a normal child with a dream of being a scientist and an inventor. Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci became my idols when I was ten years old. The 'Islamic State' attacked my city after the Iraqi and Kurdish forces left Shingal in August 2014 causing a genocide. Even if we, as Yazidis, are hopeful and peaceful in our beliefs – this attack didn't leave any more hope for us to stay in a part of the world where we had been through 73 genocides. 'Hope is a waking dream' (Aristotle)."

"I gave up the life of having no simple human rights neither in the Iraqi nor Kurdish parts. Thus I went to Germany to continue my life as a normal human being. I am now in search of my own inside home and understanding of what nationality and borders mean to me.“

Switzerland has never reached such a size as shown on Jasim's map. It almost equally adjoins Germany. Jasim has mapped his dream. He has so much country-specific knowledge on a wide variety of subjects related to Helvetism that he can talk sovereignly about the founding years of the confederation or the complex waste separation system. Although the judge smiled due to the now 31-year-old Afghan man's enthusiasm about Switzerland's public transportation, Jasim now had to leave Switzerland after one and a half years. 

As a seven-year-old child, he had to experience what it means to be excluded from society: born to an unmarried mother, he couldn't be protected by his mother from the laws of an archaic society. He fled across the border to his uncle in Pakistan. He heard of his brothers' lives in Paris and in Switzerland and looked at the photos they sent him. Films illustrated his idea of Europe.

“At around this time, I thought that the better countries for me, my life and my future were in Europe. When I finished school, I was faced with problems, and I started looking for a country where no Muslims live. After one year, I found it. In Liechtenstein, there were no Muslims and I found it a better country for my future.” So he went from Afghanistan to Liechtenstein. And when the Liechtenstein people said to him, “We are too small, we have no place for you, you must go back,” Jasim then went to Switzerland and his hope to find a place to stay there made the small country a large one.