This article first appeared in “Plan W”, the SZ’s women’s business magazine. Why is the term superwoman outdated? What is the best way to save money for old age? And why do traveling professions have to be rethought? You can find answers to these questions and other interviews and portraits in the digital Plan W edition.
When I look out the window of my tiny home office, I see Bullerbü. Behind the apartment in which we live for rent lives a perfect family with four happy children in their semi-detached house, they play around the clock in the garden. She receives constant visitors, apparently various aunts, cousins, grandparents and friends live nearby. The mother plants tomatoes. The smell of the grill pervades my desk through the tilted window. I am very jealous.
The pandemic was a time of reflection for me. And there is hardly a question that I have thought so much about as this: How do we want to live? “It takes a whole village to raise a child,” is an African proverb. Unlike our neighbors, my little family has no village. We have very busy friends and parents and siblings who live hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometers away. We greet our neighbors politely, but don’t know their names. I have almost never seen my colleagues in a year and a half. In the pandemic, my husband and I and our two small children were never alone and never part of a community, only the four of us. It’s a fragile construct that only works when we work. It is often very exhausting. We want to live differently. That’s why we’re moving soon, out of Munich, to a village. We will have a small garden and we have already met our neighbors – by first names, including those of the pets.
During the pandemic, many people, like us, decided against the big city and the surrounding area. According to an evaluation by the Empirica research institute, property prices have risen by 40 percent even in remote regions. But they are still well below what rent or buy costs in the city – especially in Munich. Many of the new villagers are people like me who hope that they can continue to work from home a lot in the future. With all the advantages and disadvantages that the home office brings. I think of the warning from the former Siemens board member Janina Kugel, who believes that women in particular will work from home more often while men return to the office: “If you are not present, you cannot have a career.”
I look forward to country life with anticipation, but also with a certain sadness. After all, I love the speed of the big city, the parks, the good food, the culture, the many opportunities that I appreciate, even when I don’t use them. I love the diversity of people, cycling to the office, even anonymity. Moving to the country is also a farewell to me, the big city dweller. And of course I’m worried about whether our dream of village life will come true, after all we are newcomers to a centuries-old community whose Bavarian dialect I find difficult to understand. Perhaps our uprooting, which resulted from following our jobs in a city where we don’t know anyone, cannot be cured simply by finding a village. Perhaps a problem that lies in the system cannot be solved by moving – which not everyone can afford anyway. I remember Adorno: There is no right life in the wrong one.
What makes me confident is the fact that we are not fleeing the city that we love, but rather that we are drawn to the countryside. I will see chickens and horses from my new home office window. We made up our minds for something, not against something.