Lemmings have a better plan than I had when, at the end of 1967 and having completed my two compulsory years as an assisted migrant in Australia, I decided to return to the (c)old "Vaterland" for no better reason than that I could.
I had started a new life in Australia and secured a new career which even a native-born could've been proud of, and yet, to twist a famous phrase, where to be and what to be was still the question. Twenty years later, when my first girlfriend in Germany - who by that time had found herself a more reliable husband and already had two teenage sons - sent me a big DHL-package containing all the letters I had ever written her, I found in it a letter in which I had told her, just after a few months in the new country, "I've got a better job than I could've got at home, and I seem to be settled in for the rest of my life. It's all been too easy!"
"It's all been too easy!" has been my constant complaint. Whatever was given to me, I would refuse. Whatever was spread before me, I would turn my back on, the better to hunger for what I had denied myself.
And so it was with my next employers, the German-South American Bank in Hamburg, who offered me a transfer to South America if I did my time in their head office in that brightly-lit building shown in the above photo. It was taken by a friend a few days ago when it was already springtime in Germany, and not in that arctic winter of January 1968.
After only two months I resigned and moved back to my hometown Braunschweig where I found an equally promising welcome in the "Auslandsabteilung" of the Braunschweigische Landesbank, but not with either of my divorced parents who no longer wanted to be part of my restless life. It hurt at the time but, in hindsight, they both did me a favour because it would've been just too easy to return to a comfortable life of homecooked meals and my washing done and ironed every day.
And so I moved on again to Frankfurt, where I not only found work as a currency dealer with the First National City Bank but also a girlfriend who seemed more interested in me than I in her. The "It's all been too easy!" warning bells were ringing again and I escaped to South-West Africa where I worked just long enough to save up enough money for my return fares to Australia. The bank in Australia welcomed me back with open arms, for which I repaid them by resigning nine months later to move to New Guinea. It had been a year of living stupidly, but perhaps it had also served its purpose of showing me that I was not cut out for an "Uncle Vanya" life, so aptly lamented by Sonya in its closing scene:
"Uncle Vanya, we must go on. We've no choice! All we can do is go on living ... all through the endless days and evenings, we will get through them, whatever fate brings. We'll work for others until we're old, there'll be no rest for us till we die. And when the time comes, we'll go without complaining and we'll remember that we wept, and that we suffered, and that life was bitter, but God will take pity on us!"
