In Berlin there is a concrete building by Siza with Bonjour Tristesse written on the top. The same facade, years later, gained a second warning, more urgent than poetic: BITTE LEBN, “please live”. Between these two phrases, as between the less touristy sides of David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, there is a Portuguese generation that packed its bags during the great troika crisis, left green receipts and house keys on the table and went to Berlin to learn how to breathe in another language. This is the third and final report in a trilogy that follows some of these postponed lives, divided between the country that pushed and the city that welcomed: qualified work paid as if it were a favor, winters that never end, languages that are learned in a hurry, returns that both save and hurt. More than stories of emigration, they are three letters written from Berlin to a place called Portugal, trying to say, with all the syllables: goodbye, sadness
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Sofia is inside the house, opens the door, invites her in: open smile, fresh face, 34 years old that doesn’t even look like 30 – her short hair and spring clothes take five years off her. At least five.
Mochi is behind her, Mochi is a cat with two big blue eyes in the middle of a well-decorated room, a room that replicates inside the doors what happens outside them, it is “a mix of old things and new things”, says Sofia about her room but also about her neighborhood – Alvalade, in Lisbon, which is the more or less new thing in Sofia’s life after the old thing-life in Berlin.
In Alvalade there are no longer giant concrete facades or Soviet blocks with graffiti and pasted posters: here the buildings are low, have pink or egg-yellow tones, the doors feature worked stone and the small balconies boast proud flower boxes. Neighbors recognize each other from the window and you can hear church bells and planes passing by. Portugal.
Sofia, Sofia Gonçalves, left Berlin two years ago because she wanted to “have children close to her family”. She brought her Spanish boyfriend, who also stayed closer to home. Their first child was born shortly afterwards in Lisbon, where Sofia came from Guarda when she was 18: she chose Economics at Universidade NOVA, where “everyone did Erasmus”. “It’s considered a normal part of your degree to gain experience abroad because, to begin with, at NOVA you already have a lot of classes in English, so then you see that the people who study there already have a pretty good level of English that allows them to live abroad. I don’t know, I didn’t even think twice. It seemed like a pretty normal thing.” He was.
2011, Sofia arrives in Brussels. Six months in the heart of Europe, halfway through her degree, led her to conclude that “nationality wasn’t that important and returning to Portugal wasn’t that appealing”. And then: “I started dating a German, making friends from other places and feeling more European”. In the meantime he has to return to Lisbon, “I didn’t like having to do that at all”, but he has to finish the course. The chairs are once again theoretical and “super more restricted”, in full amphitheaters where no teacher knows that Sofia was called that way – it’s just a face there. People are not numbers, people have names. Sofia gets the feeling of once again looking at the world from a distance from the window that is Lisbon.
From then on, the prospect of being “alone” in Portugal becomes suffocating. He finishes a master’s degree in Lisbon in 2014, returns to Brussels for a five-month internship at the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) and Berlin appears in 2015 – with a short experience in the United Kingdom in between. Discover a city in the capital of Germany that is “less elitist” than the Portuguese capital, at least in the way you spend your free time.
“Of course, it’s important to have some money there to survive, but the activities you do – for example, going to a park for a drink or going to a bar – don’t depend that much on your type of position in a company.” In Lisbon, on the contrary, “the activities you do in your free time depend more on your income level, there is a bit more ostentation than in Berlin”.
There are habits that he misses every day: in the summer, “everyone in Berlin leaves work and goes to a park, there are a thousand parks to choose from”, no one stays working until 7pm because by 5pm or 6pm they already have a blanket on the grass and a beer in their hand, “I really miss going to a park in a random place”. In Lisbon people go out later and “there is no culture of going to the park”, the day before Sofia had gone to Jardim da Estrela and the lawn was full but “you look around and no one is Portuguese”. In Berlin or London every ray of sunlight is an event, in Portugal the sun is a given.
She started visiting Portugal once a year from 2015 onwards, preferring to use her vacation days to travel to unknown destinations, after all Sofia speaks three languages, has friends spread across cities across many borders, when they ask Sofia “where are you from?” Sofia responds “I’m from Europe”. He returns to Portugal in the summer of 2023 to have the children he decided would be born here but notices that there are habits, rhythms and priorities that are no longer entirely the same, Portugal has changed – people are not numbers but the number of years changes people.
Sofia continues to feel that need to pack her suitcase and move on to somewhere, going or staying is a geographical equation that torments the mathematics of compulsive travelers, meanwhile in the next room there is a crib that marks your roots and sometimes you need to have something that reminds you where you belong, “in the beginning I didn’t even make an effort to meet many Portuguese people because I didn’t want to see them, as time passes it’s the opposite, I need that connection”. So: in the end we all feel Portuguese, don’t we, Sofia?, Sofia hesitates, finally Sofia responds – with the mantra: “I feel European”.
“Too many new people, too much money to be true”
Carcavelos, late afternoon, the sky is cloudy, the sea is where it always is: João Goulão, 32 years old, runs into the water with a board on his arm, a black surf suit on his body, brown curls in the wind.
On the sand, Raj Vijayan, 34 years old: friend of João, on a 10-day vacation in Portugal, takes photographs of the horizon. He is from Chennai, India, has lived in Berlin for around five years, and met João four years ago, in a professional context. They went to Porto, Aveiro, Lagos, Lisbon is the final destination.
“Carcavelos is everyone’s beach, it’s 15 minutes from the city”, João returns from the sea, shakes the salt out of his hair, puts down his board and takes off his suit to the waist. “I have to see the beach every time I’m visiting, even if it’s raining – just to remind myself.” Then: grandmother’s or mother’s food, or even restaurant food, and also: “just the light, just the street light is automatically an antidepressant”. Portugal.
João visits Portugal “at least four times a year”, almost always for periods of two weeks: he comes to fuel the energy he only finds in Lisbon, especially because he discovered that “if you can look, see, if you can see, notice” happens in Saramago’s books and when you start living outside the country, “I started to appreciate things that I didn’t even appreciate before” in Portugal. Ah, Portugal.
He grew up between Lisbon and Castelo Branco, left his parents’ house at 18 and studied marketing. Instead of following the classic path after the straw – work, wait, climb slowly – he decided to be guided by a maxim that he refined over time, “comfort is the enemy of discovery”. At the age of 23, he went to Thailand, where he volunteered to teach English for four months.
During his master’s degree he went to Istanbul on Erasmus, stayed there for almost a year, returned to Portugal to try to dedicate himself to consultancy and finance, “I can’t say I didn’t try because I tried and had some success”. But he realized that life could be organized around a combination of remote work and travel as long as there was somewhere to land regularly, that place became Berlin – almost by accident.
The opportunity appeared at a conference, people who worked in the data and technology area showed the way, later a vacancy for which he applied and the contract that took him to the German capital in 2020. “The move was structured, not planned.”
João was never truly “off the ground”, a significant part of his circles already lived or would live in the city – not just Portuguese but friendships built elsewhere that reappeared there, as if the German capital were a reunion arranged without anyone having announced it. “Berlin really feels like a magnet, it attracts like-minded people.”
The sun has already set. On a wooden terrace, sitting facing the sea, João and Raj raise glasses of beer. Gift. Health.
João is a financial analyst at a German company. The salary is paid in “Germanic euros”: €75,000 per year, in the same position in Portugal it would be “around €25,000”. He can pay a rent of €1500/€1600 a month in Berlin, he has room to have two lives: the one he leads in Berlin, with stable income, and these regular returns to Portugal, oh Portugal. From time to time you can even work from here, oh German companies, “I consider myself a privileged person to be able to do that”. When winter attacks Berlin, João has a rule, “a long trip is tradition”: “Since the last few years, after my birthday, in November, Berlin becomes impossible, it’s super depressing, you have three hours of sun – when you have sun”.
He usually goes to Asia or South America, not only for the climate but for the surf, “I take care of what I have to do and go away for a while to a warmer place, it makes me feel good”, then João explains why he spends the rest of the months in Berlin: the way he describes it it seems like he is talking about an old friend whose faults he knows by heart and suddenly: “The choice of Berlin is a bit existential, first of all because it is a city where you can be young forever, people don’t ask you what it is. you are, how old you are and where you come from. Nobody makes comparisons about what you are in life, everyone is at their own pace doing their own thing – as long as you don’t interfere with my freedom, I won’t interfere with yours.” Laughter, the reasoning concludes: “Even compared to the rest of Germany, Berlin should be considered a country in its own right”. Or as João’s parents say: “Berlin has too many young people, too much money and too much free time for it to be true”. That’s why he left Portugal to move to Berlin, but still: “If you ask me in the long term where I’m going to live, I say: it’s going to be in Portugal”.
