Fragment No. 77

These globe-trotting fragments of cloth made me think about Berlin itself, as a city of far-flung fragments, and what this place means to me as a Syrian woman who grew up far from the Damascus of her ancestors. History teaches us that every city—ancient and modern—is a site where a diverse array of ghosts, ruins, and traumatic memories overlap. In recent decades, Germany has become the locus of the global Syrian diaspora after absorbing almost one million migrants fleeing the country’s brutal civil war. The capital, Berlin, now sports endless Syrian shops, and vibrant scenes of Arabic music, comedy, intellect, and art. Syrian identity has even mingled with the German club culture and the city’s techno beats—which themselves developed because of war and migration. Many eager tourists standing in line for techno parties today forget that it was African American DJs from Detroit, Michigan, who brought techno to Berlin in the 1980s. Their music resonated with a generation of disaffected German youth, who repurposed abandoned warehouses, factories, and bunkers to throw illegal raves—partying their hearts out in the postwar ruins of their parents’ world. Now the Syrians bring their own pain and ecstasy to the clubs, banding together with other Middle Eastern migrants to produce fascinating fusions like Electro-Tarab and Oriental Techno, and to articulate yet again, shoulder to shoulder on the dance floor, that from the ruins new life can grow.

The Syrians live alongside the Turkish and Kurdish communities who first settled in Berlin in the sixties through the “guest worker” program, which was designed to rebuild the country after the ravages of World War II. These old and new migrants—slices of an even more diverse pie from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe—regularly trip on the Stolperstein or “stumbling stones” that are scattered around the city. Designed by Gunter Demnig, the Stolperstein are memorial plaques installed across Germany to commemorate the fate of those who were persecuted, murdered, deported, expelled, or driven to suicide by the Nazi regime—the majority of whom were Jews. The ghosts of Holocaust victims live alongside the migrants of today, who have brought their own ghosts in their bodies and suitcases to this hallowed ground.

On the forested outskirts of West Berlin lies Teufelsberg, “Devil’s Mountain,” which was not a mountain formed by nature or by God. Overlooking the city and with a Cold War–era CIA listening station perched on its top, it was formed by dumping seventy-five million cubic meters of Berlin’s wartime rubble in one spot and allowing the wilderness to reclaim it. Like the archeological tels (mounds) of Iraq—which mark where former cities once stood, and contain many of the antiquities we now excavate—inside Devil’s Mountain there lie the ruins of an old city, too. A Berlin that was devastated by violence.

Cities are living beings: they grow, they change, they die, and sometimes, they come back from the ashes, mixing what is old with what is new. Berlin is a city that never stops reminding us of this: as the Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath al-Madhoun once said to me, living in Berlin gives him hope, because it is a city that was once decimated, and now has been made whole. Perhaps Damascus, Hama, Homs, and Gaza will one day be made whole as well. In Berlin, under the trees and the lakes that remind him of his homelands, this is the dream he dreams.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, 1.2 million Ukrainian refugees have joined Germany’s social fabric. Their fresh pain empties out into the migrants’ collective river. A Syrian friend of mine tells me how a German family hosted him when he first made it to Berlin as a refugee in 2013, after he had faced life and death traveling to Europe by land and sea. He was among the first to register as a host for the newly arriving Ukrainians, offering them a place to get their bearings and start rebuilding their lives from scratch, like he once did. “You never know,” he says, “when it will be you who is on the move again. I have a home now, which means that I have something I can share.”

Berlin is a city built on layers and layers of pain—but also layers of love. This rug that inspired me—it was destroyed here, in Berlin’s embrace. May its fragments travel far and wide, gathering stories of loss and love from around the world, before it is reunited here and reborn in the crucible of Berlin once more. In a way, that is the work of love: to break our old forms, open us up, and remake us. Love is another kind of rupture and fragmentation that leads to completeness, to a new form of being “whole”. I would like to end this short essay on a few lines by the Muslim mystic Ibn Arabi (1165-1240 AD), known for seeing Allah in all the beautiful creatures of this Earth, and for writing devotional verses that cannot be distinguished from love poetry. He was born in Muslim Iberia (al-Andalus), a cosmopolitan hub of coexistence and creativity, and traveled across Africa and the Middle East, ultimately passing away in Damascus, where he is now buried. Though al-Andalus would be brutally crushed by the Reconquista two centuries after his death, forcing thousands of Muslims and Jews out of Spain, his tender words and Sufi dreams live on in many of us.

Here is my rendition:

Finally my heart

can take on any

form: a meadow

for gazelles, a cloister

for monks

a temple for idols; a Kaa’ba

for pilgrims—and pages of

Torah, and scrolls of

Qu’ran.

I follow the faith of

Love—wherever its caravan

points, there lies

my religion.

I decided to photograph my carpet fragment at the graveyard near my apartment in Neukölln called Emmauskirchhof. This graveyard is a space of deep contemplation and tranquility for me—a place where all our fragments can mingle together, generation after generation, in the earth of one neighborhood. Here you can see the overgrown tombs of old German couples from the 1800s buried side by side, having died only a few years apart. Only a few trees away, you can find the fresh grave of an eight-year old Turkish child, buried with his favorite football. I felt this was the perfect place for my carpet fragment: a sacred space of loss and unity. I also decided to include a few more photos to illustrate various items referenced in my essay