Tracing a path: from a childhood by the sea, through fifteen years in the theatre, to that day in Galilee when my life unexpectedly turned.
Ships have always fascinated me - even small dinghies lying quietly in the water. And I loved stones. Stones in heaps, stones along paths, stones in the water, stones in houses. Sometimes stones also close doors.
Have I always been waiting for my life to begin? As a child I found a stone on a beach on an island. It looks like a sheep, I thought. I held the stone sharply against the line beneath the sky, slipped it into my anorak pocket and went on looking at the sea.
„Often I lay awake at night. Waiting for morning with questions we cast into shadows."
Always hungry for life, searching for love, hands torn open, unfulfilled. I no longer have the stone. Someone borrowed it and forgot to return it. The certainty remained.
At sixteen I left home. Drama school in Rostock. Back at the sea again. I was eighteen when my daughter was born. She says today that her childhood was exciting. I became an actress.
In the East, the profession was a niche in which longing, freedom and dreams could be lived. Fifteen years of engagements at various theatres. Applause. Success is far from the same as happiness.
In between, the turn of 1989. I lived through it in rehearsals for a children's play. The opening of the Wall shattered my view of the world, opened doors, closed old horizons. Bright colours instead of grey. Colours. In the West I ate kiwis for the first time.
Everything shifted. Even the mood in the theatre. I had always been writing and painting. I thought: surely I ought to feel peace in what I do. When that peace does not come, I must turn - against every certainty I have found - back toward the longing in my heart, and keep wandering through the house of life.
I left the profession. Various jobs. I was searching for meaning, for happiness. I moved to Berlin with my daughter. I took wrong turns and detours, entangled myself in the web of unhappy relationships.
At some point I began to rummage through a drawer where a stack of small, colourful books lay. My diaries. Each a metaphor for a new beginning. Each a breath. Each a longing.
In the year 2000 I flew to Jerusalem in place of a friend. Work at a Catholic pilgrim house. After five hours I wanted to leave. I stayed. The Paulushaus sits opposite the Damascus Gate.
What I longed for was quiet. What I found was anything but. No country I had travelled through carried within it so much aggression, and none so much love. A land that is searching for its home.
The sisters gave me the rooms of a closed natural-history museum. My studio. At night, when it was too loud outside to sleep, I painted - with my fingers, straight onto the paper.
At some point someone gave me his Bible, a well-thumbed little book with many coloured markings. By the Sea of Galilee, between Tabgha and Capernaum, I began to read.
Later, in the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves, I saw the mosaic on the floor. Years earlier I had painted a picture: three houses, a figure and a blue fish. It looks like a child's drawing, I had thought, and almost thrown it away. And now, shining at my feet, was a small blue fish.
On a Friday morning I learned the Lord's Prayer by heart. That evening I was baptised; the next morning I received my first communion. At midday I sat on the plane with a plastic bottle in my hand, holding the water of my baptism. I knew that my whole life had changed.
More work, more image, more word.
To the work
