Who am I?

01 — My roots

I grew up here in south Neukölln and I know our reality first-hand. My Kiez (neighbourhood) stretches from the Grundschule am Teltowkanal, the primary school in Britz, all the way to the Hannah-Arendt-Gymnasium in Rudow. All my friends are here, my family is here, and so are a great many warm-hearted, hard-working neighbours who look out for one another. My parents had to work hard all their lives, too. My father first as a steelworker, but for most of his working life as a service worker at the BVG (Berlin's public transport operator) — my mother as a cleaner at a special-needs school.

You can imagine that money was often tight in our home. I remember school trips that I could not go on, along with several of my friends, and far too many families who could not afford tutoring even though their child was struggling at school. Twenty years on, I still see every day how many children and families here share exactly the same fate.

02 — What shaped me

These circumstances meant that I started grappling with questions of racism, justice and social inequality at an early age. By the time I finished my Abitur (the German school-leaving exams) at the Hannah-Arendt-Gymnasium, my parents were already too old to work, and like so many pensioners in Germany their pension was barely enough to live on. So from early on I worked all kinds of jobs to support them — in a supermarket, as a delivery driver, in an office or behind the wheel. That time shaped me deeply, because I had to find out first-hand how most people in our society are doing: we work long and hard, and still there is not enough money left at the end of the month.

03 — My path

In 2015 I joined DIE LINKE, and since then I have worked in a number of political organisations on issues such as anti-racism, social justice, education and young people, international politics, and asylum and migration law. Alongside my industrial engineering degree I gave private tuition on a regular basis — that now adds up to more than nine years of working with children and young people. On top of that, over the past ten years I have had the privilege of gaining political and diplomatic experience at state and federal level, and for more than a year I have been working in the team of our Neukölln member of the Bundestag (the German federal parliament), Ferat Koçak, where we fight every day for our people and for a better life in Neukölln.

Besides politics I am passionate about philosophy and culture, but I am also a huge sports fan — a proud supporter of our Berlin Bears (GO BEARS!) and for many years a player and referee myself at DJK SW Neukölln. I love spending time with my mother, who has just turned seventy-two, and I have lived in the same block of flats in Britz for over thirty years. That building is also where my hope for a neighbourhood built on solidarity comes from: whether my neighbours are Erika, Musa or Herr Lehmann — every one of them has shown me what people standing together looks like, and why it matters to stand up for one another.

04 — Where I stand

One of them was Tante Uschi. She defended my family without ever backing down, whenever the neighbour on the third floor called the police again although there had been no noise at all. Time after time she put herself in the way, without a moment's hesitation. She was eight years old when the Nazis were in power in Germany, and she told me all of it: how cruel those dark years were, and what unimaginable difficulties they had to overcome to protect her grandmother, who was Jewish. Shortly before she died, I promised her that I would stand against hatred, agitation and racism with everything I have
— first and foremost against the AfD!