There's always someone who asks me, "Why did you leave Germany?" to which I reply, "Well, no one ever emigrates because of the success they've enjoyed at home. No one ever says, 'Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off.' The only reason anyone has for going to live in another country is because they've cocked everything up in their own."
Being the youngest solo-migrant on board the migrant ship FLAVIA, a television crew on board had asked me the same question before I left Bremerhaven in 1965. I had no answer in front of the whirring newsreel camera and still have no answer today. I mean, how do I explain the sense of dissatisfaction and frustration that affected me at the time?
Being just nineteen years old, my opportunities for cocking things up had been rather limited by the time I left; in fact, my only - and certainly biggest - cock-up until then had been that I allowed myself to be born to parents who were so dirt-poor that they packed me off to work as soon as I had reached the minimum school-leaving age of 14.
Today, more than sixty years later, I consider myself lucky not to have had too much invested in my schooling which may have made me think twice about leaving the "Vaterland" and never try my luck in Australia.
It reminds me a little of one of Somerset W. Maugham's stories entitled "The Verger" about a man without formal education who ended up more successful than he might've been had he had the right kind of schooling.
