Hamburg, Harburg, Lüneberg, Soltau, Uelzen. Four short hops for an honest traveller but a yawning chasm for a broken, half-dead man, a man travelling back through time in search of his own humanity. Every mile was gruelling, my breathing felt laboured. As I arrived in Uelzen, the town where Papa was born, my heart was pounding in my chest. Since leaving Hamburg, I had been steeling myself for the shock, but when I arrived I realised once again that in life, the more you prepare yourself, the less prepared you actually are. You conjure so many mental images that reality comes as a complete shock. When torn from our everyday routine, we’re like blind men deprived of our white sticks. Uelzen looks just like every other town in Germany, in Europe. A feeling of déjà vu follows me like my own shadow, whispering in my ear. Uniformity is the future – something business travellers like me have long known – it had been stupid to imagine things would be different, but I felt cheated that this town was so unlike what grief and distress had led me to expect. I’d been expecting a village out of the 1930s, all misery and rage, crushed under the weight of unemployment, tormented by primitive demons, hordes of officious, swastika-wearing party workers teeming through the streets, the Devil himself writhing at the heart of humanity. In reality, Uelzen is pristine, charming, welcoming, with every amenity a tourist could wish for, the people are warm, hospitable, the embodiment of cheerful artisans happy with their lot. The town that Papa was born in is gone, swept away by the war, buried in the reconstruction. Everything I see speaks of the new world, a world of brilliance and soaring heights, a miracle of urban planning which has slowly grown to encompass new buildings and the great ideas of generations of town-planners. Its suburbs are like any other suburbs, the pedestrianised town centre is like any other, but the beating heart of Uelzen is the financial district with its suited businessmen and hollow-eyed security guards. I was everywhere and nowhere, everything looks like everything else, the tsunami of globalisation has swept away our heritage, erased individual traits such that we no longer recognise our own or those of others. Uelzen is a product of post-war urbanisation. Millenstraße no longer exists and Landorf – which I had expected to be a patch of countryside in the town, or a scrap of town set in countryside – looks just like the Paris suburb I live in, though half the size and ten times as sturdy. We all live on the same quiet streets, with the same neatly trimmed hedges, in tidy little houses so similar we can barely tell ourselves from our neighbours. There is a vast Plexiglas shopping centre painted in bright colours to reassure the poor, the working classes, that they are on the right track, that wealth and happiness are waiting just as soon as the mortgage is paid off. How did Landorf look when Papa pounded these streets? Was it all misery and rage or was it an idyll of bucolic tedium? I wandered the streets, sniffing the air in the hope that instinct might speak to me, I talked to strangers in the streets, the bars, especially to old people, who carried their memories around like libraries. Nothing. ‘Millenstraße? Never heard of it.’ The name Schiller rang no bells either, except for those few who immediately thought of Friedrich Schiller. The Germans are an obliging race, too obliging, they feel frustrated and humiliated when they are unable to help. But they don’t give up easily: they direct the lost soul to someone who might know. ‘Try the post office,’ they said, ‘They’ll know where it is,’ or ‘Let’s ask the woman who runs the delicatessen, she knows everything.’ Checkmate: at the post office, the woman asked me to submit my request in writing, at the deli, the woman suggested I might ask at the police station. This was something I had no intention of doing, talking to the authorities, since I would have to answer their questions and I simply did not have the strength. You wouldn’t risk it in France, life’s too short for regrets. I was looking for my father and no one could help me. I was a lost child.