About me

If there were a travel-discover-observe-understand-write-photograph-GEN, it could be decoded in my DNA. If it were up to me, that’s exactly what I would always do. But my everyday life as a journalist, not quite a professional photographer but with a sharp eye, as an ethnologist and social scientist in Berlin doesn’t allow me to travel abroad very often. So I mostly devote myself to the other verbs.

I think that friends and colleagues would describe me as open, curious, quite active to restless, also empathic. My topics are diverse and colorful like life itself, sometimes gloomy when it comes to social ills and challenges I point to and describe. But I very much enjoy reporting on things that make room for the positive, or on people who are committed to changing the world a teeny bit for the better.

Over the last five years, I have been very concerned with what new arrivals in Berlin and Germany need in order to enable them to participate, self-determination and equal opportunities. What barriers are structurally present that make integration difficult, what hurdles they have to overcome.

This blog is an experiment. It is certainly not perfect, not perfect. But that’s exactly what excites me: to let you participate while traveling and experiencing. So to speak, from the eyes and ears, the nose and the skin without much detour simply pass on.

The trip to Ghana, which I am now embarking on in December 2021, is already my sixth to this country since 1989, when I lived and researched in the homestead with a family in the north. The theme for me then was extended family cohesion in the context of migration and education. It is a project of the heart to now visit the family again, to once again engage intensively with the people and their lives as subsistence farmers.

For me, an unknown territory is that I will realize the project with Ernestina Zumeh. She is a young journalist from Accra, fresh out of university, and comes from the family herself. She didn’t grow up there at all, but in another region of Ghana. But now her father has returned to his home village for quite some time. We’ve already started a dialogue about the distance, what we want to research together.

I am so excited …