“We are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. … It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke

It’s been a long time since you were last here. Years, in fact. Your uncle and your father are running late and you stand around outside the airport for a while, listening to the strange but ever familiar words of your mother tongue being spoken all around you. Eventually they find you by the taxi stand, waving at you as if you are still far away. There’s a family story that you are descended from Mongolians, although there’s also the story that you are in fact descended from one of the abandoned babies of the Duke of York, of the 10,000 men fame. You have inherited: some of their height; all of their broad shoulders; a mild tendency towards Rosacea; an unwavering belief in the goodness of mankind. None of these sit as well on you as they do your father.

Your uncle drives you back to his house, through the auburn forests north of the city. He tells you there are wolves roaming freely once again, just beyond the safe confines of this car. He lives ten minutes from where the two of them grew up. You resist the urge to ask him if you can drive past where your oma used to live, where they lived as boys. You don’t want to upset your dad.

When you get back to the house, it is bright and warm, late autumn sun streams through the big French windows, filtered through the copper of a million beech leaves. Your uncle makes coffee, and there is apple cake, with vanilla scented cream. They apologise that they still don’t have the heating on, wanting to save on gas. The war is costing everyone something. On the way here you noticed the buses all have ‘end the war’ written on them, instead of their destinations. Posters everywhere reminding people to think of the planet, to think of their children. It is so good to be back. 

Your uncle’s wife, Sabine, is one of those women you’d instantly want to be friends with. She is laid back, open-hearted. She asks direct questions, looks you in the eye, and wants to know more. She has three grown-up children whom you imagine adore her. Not for the first time you think he lucked out with her. 

Your uncle has a chequered past with women, although you are definitely not one to judge. His first wife, who came from Indonesia, defrauded your father and your uncle of all their heirlooms after your oma died. He forgave her, in that pragmatic, autistic way most Germans have, because she had had her own traumatic past. She moved to Germany when she was little, with her older sister. It only came out when she was in her thirties that her sister was in fact her mother, and they had come to Germany because her family made her leave to avoid shame for the family. Your uncle still talks of her fondly.

Sabine is German, she grew up on the street they live on. She is blonde, in her mid-sixties, does yoga and alpine walking, only quit smoking a year ago. You bond over how you both still grieve for the people you were when you smoked. How much happier, how much more fun you were back then.

You watch her care for her very aged dog, a scrappy little guy who is almost seventeen, completely deaf and blind. He spends most of his time bumbling through the house, like a Rumba without instructions, nosing himself up against furniture and walls. She scatters pungent treats for him around the house. When he gets lost, he barks, and then she picks him up and puts him back in his little bed. It is incredibly moving. Your father is single, the Thai girl he was dating now his assistant. She stayed back in Bangkok this time, and it is clear your father is not used to being alone. He has never been alone. Even when you were little, he couldn’t do holidays with you without a girlfriend coming along. You are used to it, except this time it is a little different. 

Your father has started to forget things. It started last year, maybe earlier, though it’s hard to know, as he lives so far away. He has lived in Thailand for the past eight years, maybe more, you can’t really remember. For you, selfishly, importantly, it started when he forgot your birthday, over a year ago. 

You have a complicated relationship, it is distanced, and pragmatic, and you can go months without speaking. But last autumn you didn’t hear from him for three months. Your birthday came and went, and there was no message from him, not even a text. When you finally spoke to him, months later, he was evasive, and non-committal, and it irritated you. It would be simplistic to say you feel guilty now. 

There’s five years between your uncle and your father, the same gap as between your own three, a fact you find reassuring, as if their closeness might genetically make your own children closer to each other as they age. Your father was born a year before the war ended, in 1944. His father, Wilhelm August Ropers, was a member of the social democrats, the left-wing opposition party, which the Nazis outlawed in 1933. Wilhelm was arrested by the Gestapo early after the outbreak of war, for plotting to overthrow the new government. He spent a year and a half in a prison in Hamburg, after which he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin. His fellow inmates were political prisoners, artists, poets, gypsies and homosexuals, all of them there because they were ‘undesirable’. It was supposed to be the ‘ideal’ labour camp, built by prisoners to the specifications of an SS architect, subjecting inmates to the ideological and physical force of the Nazi regime. He was there for eighteen months.

Wilhelm was tortured and beaten so severely while there, that when he was released in 1938, he had lost the ability to see things in three dimensions, amongst countless other injuries. Four years after the war ended, your grandmother Gerda, heavily pregnant with your uncle, his new post-war business thriving, Wilhelm was killed by a passing tram. He was forty-one years old, and he hadn’t seen it coming. No-one ever asks whether he might have stepped into the road on purpose.

Your uncle has collected documents from the Bundesamt, every single archived piece of paper with your grandfather’s name on it. He tried to find out all he could about a father who died before he was born. He hands them to you, as if there is something to be found there, some secret, a message. You skim the papers, mainly court documents, all written in that unmistakeable blackletter font, the dark, almost illegible writing bringing to mind all the worst things. Your father, sitting beside you, picks them up from the table. 

You watch him read the pages and pages of documents detailing your grandfather’s ‘crimes’: giving speeches, handing out leaflets, creating channels for news to be disseminated. He gets visibly upset, swearing, something he never does, and saying he wants to hurt the people who wrote this. You take the papers out of his trembling hands.  

Annie Ernaux, in her meditation on the loss of her mother to dementia, In Darkness, says it is ‘not just the notion of time passing, it’s something else, something linked to death: now I belong in a chain, my life is part of a lineage that will outlive me.’ You are unsure of this chain, and maybe you are too late to find the end of it, to unravel all that has happened before. You are lost, trying to make sense of your own part in this story. 

That first evening everyone is on good form, you are all happy to see each other. You drink wine, and talk about everything but the obvious. Your father seems alert and not confused. Sabine says he slept for 20 hours straight the day before, after he landed. Not so strange, really, it was a twelve-hour flight. Perfectly normal. In fact, you all tell yourselves, to be a little confused, to forget the odd thing, this is completely normal. He is almost eighty after all. How many 80-year-olds still have full time jobs? If he were sat in an armchair and occasionally forgetting his grandchildren’s names, you probably wouldn’t think twice.

The next morning, you drive to a lake near their house, in the middle of the forest, leaves the colour of old blood drifting lazily across the icy slate-grey water. Anglers and dog walkers shout encouragement as you step into the lake, which cannot be more than 5 degrees. You are the only one to wear a costume. You feel prudish, and very English. You envy the others their freedom, their lack of shame, or embarrassment. It is beautiful, the water below the surface a deep brown, the edge of the lake crusted with trees in a riot of colour, the cold bracing and painful and enriching all at once. 

You struggle to engage fully with the experience, make small talk while your aunt does breathing exercises. You swim out near the middle and then get scared, the water suddenly deep and unknowable and full of threat. After a few minutes you all climb out again, and dress, laughing and shivering. You father is the last, and as your uncle and his wife run up and down the track to warm up, he keeps staring at the shoes he has only just managed to put on. 

‘They’re not mine’ he says, and you laugh, and say ‘maybe that dog walker swapped with you.’ As he carries on taking them on and off, inspecting his shoes, increasingly agitated, you realise this isn’t funny. Even after your uncle has convinced him that they are his shoes, that it is ok, he stares at them in disbelief. In the car on the way to the café he is clearly irritated, staring at his feet as if they are an alien thing. You exchange worried glances with Sabine.

Back at the house, you drink coffee, so much coffee, and there is bread, and ham, and cheese. You are warm again, your fingertips have thawed and your father laughs about his shoes. He agrees they must be his. You laugh that he was so cold after the swim that he couldn’t eat his eggs. That you had to cut up his bread for him so that he could eat it. 

You talk about politics, your father’s favourite subject. You talk about immigration, and about the planet, about what your uncle’s children and your aunt’s children are up to. They have three children each, from previous relationships. Sabine describes the walks they go on in the forests around the house, how there is an area now where no human activity can happen. Where there is no logging, no management of the woods, no human intervention. 

Germany is 31.8% forest. There’s a reason the brothers Grimm collected so many tales about scary things that happen in forests. Walk ten minutes from their house and it’s easy to get lost. Wild boar roam freely. There is space for wolves. But even here to leave a forest to its own devices is considered unusual. Sabine says they found themselves in that area recently, they suddenly had a sense they had entered uncharted territory, something gnarly and unfamiliar about the way the trees leaned on one another, the way it all felt a little more dangerous.

Your father tells of something similar in Thailand. A project on the outskirts of Bangkok, started twenty years ago on an area of wasteland that would otherwise have been filled with high rises and car parks. They planted native trees and plants in over 48,000 square metres, helped them seed, then fenced the whole thing off, left it in peace. It is a true, genuine jungle, a rainforest where no human being enters, where nothing is touched by man. A walkway and viewing platform runs across the top of it, like a zoo or a safari park, a place where you can stand and look down into the leafy chaos. They are building an education centre beside it, to teach future generations about what an authentic jungle is. Your father explains that Thai people are afraid of it, there are apparently so many snakes that they slither up the viewing platform and have been known to wind themselves around people’s feet. 

You imagine what it might feel like to stand on that platform, and look down into a forest like that. To not be allowed in, to be locked out, like Adam and Eve, a well-deserved purgatory for all of your sins. 

Your childhood, much of it off-grid, home-schooled and bare-bones, was influenced by the landscape you were raised in. Snowdonia, the land of Tolkien mountains, a craggy landscape buzzing with ancient stories and ghosts, the sky guarded by Hen Harriers and Ospreys. You camped out in tents made of discarded fencing and rushes; covered yourselves in algae and swam down a river for a day pretending to be otters; spent an afternoon watching a dragonfly hatch from its chrysalis, then wrote poems about it in the afternoon. Nature was your teacher, and you thought you were a good student. 

You write this from the comfort of your own living room, a week after you return, and your father is back in Bangkok. There’s a storm raging outside, and the moors in the distance are completely shrouded in mist. It rains a lot here, in south Devon. You chose this place because of its wildness, because you are sandwiched between the ocean and the uplands, between the mountains and the sea. 

Until very recently Dartmoor was the only place you could still legally set up a place to sleep, without paying for the privilege, in England. The history of enclosures and afforestation in this country is a long one, and relates to far more than just a handful of people’s right to camp: ‘Enclosure was a key factor in a wider, profoundly radical cultural shift… ideas of private ownership, profit and ‘usefulness’ (that what makes something ‘valuable’ is its ability to generate monetary value – so that sub fertile moorland, wild forest and mountain regions come to be seen as being ‘without value’) overtook older ideas of community and responsibility and duty.’ Sara Maitland explains, in Gossip from the Forest. Our relationship to wilderness, to the less ‘valuable’ parts of this landscape, is a complex one, and one which relates deeply to our relationship with ourselves. A love of nature is often selfish, motivated by an almost childlike need and desire. 

Your father is here to spend a few days at a fancy clinic, get tests done. No one says the words out loud, though he tells you that his Thai girlfriend/assistant/carer bought him a book by a Japanese doctor. In Japan Alzheimer’s is treated very differently. The book is in Thai, and so your father, laughing, tells you he has his girlfriend translate for him the exercises he must do, which involve doing everything backwards. Walk backwards, do familiar tasks in reverse order. There is something beautiful about this, the reversal of everything, of power, of language, of the familiar. That night you message your boyfriend that things are so much better than you thought. ‘He is more with it than before, I am so reassured’, you write, and fall asleep. 

You are woken in the dark by the sound of shuffling feet. They slide along the corridor, past your room, and on, then back. You find your father in the hallway. It is dark, you ask him if he is looking for the bathroom. You switch the light on and he goes in, shuts the door. You go back to bed. A moment later you hear shuffling again. He appears at your bedroom door, pokes his head in, then disappears again. You find him opening every door in the hallway. You ask him what he is doing and he says something about the exit. He needs to find the exit. You talk to him in German, he replies in English. Your uncle comes out of his room, and tries to talk to him, who keeps going from door to door, looking behind each one as if this one will hold the truth. 

‘I need to find the exit. Where is the exit, the way out.’ He starts to look panicked, but then laughs, as if he knows that what he is doing does not make any sense. ‘The exit is downstairs, dad, we are all ok, it is the night time, we are all safe, you don’t need to go outside now.’ 

You tell him this, again and again. He keeps looking, walks into your uncle’s bedroom, where your aunt is in bed. ‘I need to find the way out of this political situation.’ He says, and laughs again, making another circuit of each door in the hallway. 

Your uncle takes him by the arm, and tells him, in a stern voice, that he has to go to bed now, that he is being ridiculous, that he needs to sleep. By some miracle this works, and your father totters back to bed. You close the door, and look at one another for a silent, dreadful minute. Eventually you go back to bed, and you lie in the dark, unable to sleep. You hear him moving around next door, for ages after. 

Hours later, you get up and quietly lock your bedroom door. Then you fall asleep, dreaming only of wolves running, panting, slobbering. You wake in a pool of sweat, the sheets drenched. You are ashamed, that you locked my door, that you couldn’t take charge of the situation, that you want it to just be ok. That you wait to get up until you hear your uncle get up. 

The term rewilding was first coined in 1990, by the radical advocacy group Earth First!, but has dominated ecological discourse in the last few years because of the pioneering work of Isabella Tree at Knepp in West Sussex, and her book on the project, Wilding, published in 2019. Wilding. Re-Wilding. Such a generous, bountiful, evocative, pleasing word. To wild, in an active, adjective sense. To un-domesticate, un-cultivate, to loosen the restraints, make inhospitable, un-tame. 

Knepp, and other projects like it, are described as safaris. You can rent a yurt, spend the weekend. Watch as #natureishealing. The wilderness reclaims a manicured parkland live before your very eyes. It is a wonderful thing, astonishing, remarkable in its simplicity. It is also a place to visit, to view from a safe distance, a ‘wild’ adventure, a temporary release from the confines of safety. Maybe it is the aloneness of wilderness that most appeals and frightens us, that is most attractive and alien, all at once. But if we lack the ‘emotional maturity’ to be alone, then we lack the emotional maturity for the wild, within us and without. 

You want this spectacular planet to survive because without it you are fucked. You protect your children’s future because they are carrying your genes. You do good things to feel good. You create oases of wilderness so that you can enjoy it, so that you can feel you did something. To do so is not only rational, but moral too. Kantian ideas of a morality embedded within societal duty, the inherently German, rational way of translating care into action. Feelings have nothing to do with it. 

And yet, imagining this wilderness that exists purely for the sake of its wildness, it elicits something feral, something primal. Both joyful and terrifying. A place without humans in it is frightening, the original forest of the fairy tales. Anything could happen there, in fact you are guaranteed to meet a wolf, or a witch. If you’re not frightened, then what are you? 

Over breakfast your father apologises. He says he’s sorry if he scared you. He does this about twice a year, he says, waking and needing to find an exit. He is not going mad, he says. It’s from when he was on the kill list, in Sri Lanka. Of course. You realise you have never talked about it. Yet more things you have not talked about, that might be lost. 

Your father moved to Berlin a few years after reunification, bringing a chunk of the fallen wall as a gift for you soon after. After your GCSE’s, sixteen and entirely naïve, you moved to Berlin to live with him. You shared a small, high-ceilinged apartment a few streets from the Ku’Damm, and you travelled by bus every day to the JFK High School in Kleinmachnow, founded after the war for US ex-pats and their children. You went to parties with American kids, a lifetime from everything you had seen and lived until that point. You had a crush on a boy who looked like Kurt Cobain, and you kissed him after a party, pressed against a hedge in a dark courtyard. He wandered off after a while, and you realised you were completely lost, this was way before 24 hour trains. You walked the city all night, hiding in doorways, locking eyes with a fox in an alley, stepping like a zombie onto the first train at 6, and making your way back to the apartment. 

You recently moved to Devon. From the window in your bedroom, you can see the tors of Dartmoor, ancient rock teeth left behind as the land eroded around them. A land of giants. Your daughter, almost fourteen and with her own experience of an itinerant childhood, much as you were determined to give her something different, has an app that means she knows the exact location of her friends all over the world. On the way to school she can show you the cute little avatars of each of her friends, and their exact location on a map. She can navigate her friendships in this way, though you do not know if it makes it easier. 

Your father lived in Sri Lanka for nine years. He worked to find a peaceful resolution to the brutal civil war that has raged there since it was still called Ceylon, yet another hangover from Britain’s proud colonial past. Your father’s work keeps him mainly in the diplomatic shadows, his job to create spaces where people from both sides of the conflict can learn to work and study together, a trickle-down effect of cooperation and mutual understanding. But something he did was not liked by the Sinhalese government, and he was placed on a hit list. He knew enough journalists and friends who had already been killed to know that this was real. 

For ten days he was accompanied everywhere by two security guards. He tells us this over breakfast, and you are all rapt. One security guard was as wide as he was tall, a brute. The other tiny, and incredibly fast. He laughs as he tells us they would drive him around the city, taking him from one meeting to another, the car on an angle whenever the bigger guy got in. He is still laughing when he tells us about the night when there was a credible threat, and he was told to jump out of a window, and the little security guy shouted at him to run. He had to escape, down pitch-black muddy lanes through Colombo’s suburban streets, hiding in a garden for hours before they found him again. 

You tell him he probably has PTSD. He says he wakes from dreams and hears the instruction to ‘run’. That for those ten days everywhere he went he needed to know where the exits were. That it took him years to be able to sleep at night. 

Dartmoor is full of tales of fear and horror. It is the kind of landscape to inspire dread. In deepest winter, when the winds howl across the high flat hills, and the rain gathers in dark pools amongst the rushes, and the only way-markers are the granite tors, rock giants that can look as if they are moving slowly across the landscape. The Hound of the Baskervilles, arguably Sherlock Holmes’ best mystery, is based on the many different tales of wild hounds who roam the moors of south Devon, looking for lost souls. The Whisht Hounds, ever looking for their evil master, with red eyes and a howl that would curl the hairs of even the bravest soul. The Yeth Hound, giant and terrible, all circling our imaginations as we try to enjoy the view. Is it a giant dog we fear, or is it what we might see reflected if we look in their eyes?

After a break up seven years ago you volunteered to help run the Duke of Edinburgh scheme at the school you taught at. Every weekend one long spring and summer you set off straight after school and spent two nights in a little tent, chivvying teenagers on through the hills of the South Downs, the Bannau Brycheiniog, the New Forest, Cornwall, Scotland. Being on the move, life stripped back for those brief times to the essentials, food, shelter, warmth. The students were taught how to navigate using their compasses, you monitored their progress with GPS trackers strapped to their heavy rucksacks. Watched them make their way slowly across digital OS maps on a little screen, kept yourself in check when you saw they were heading in the wrong direction. 

Your father’s tests come back. It’s the beginning of Alzheimer’s. His MRI shows he once received a significant blow to the head, a long time ago, though they can’t say for sure when. There some minor bruising, signs of damage. Your father says he has no recollection of this, and thinks it can only have been when he was a baby. 

The bombs were falling when he was born. Maybe he was dropped during an air raid, he says. In July 1943, the year before his birth, the allies unleashed operation Gomorrah, dropping 9,000 high-explosive, incendiary phosphorous and napalm bombs on a city already suffering a heat wave. 40,000 people died that year alone. I read articles on the plane home, the horror unimaginable. ‘The resulting firestorm was so powerful that buildings would have flames reaching over 20 feet high. With hurricane force, 150 mile per-hour winds were sucked into the oxygen vacuum created by the fire, ripping trees out by their roots, collapsing buildings, pulling children out of their mothers’ arms. Twenty square miles of the city centre burned in an inferno that would rage for nine full days. … The temperature in the firestorm reached 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit. There was no oxygen to breathe; whatever was flammable burst spontaneously into flame.’ My grandmother was two months pregnant with my dad that summer. I struggle to write that sentence after reading the first.

In the forest lurks danger, and discovery. Threat, and adventure, dark corners and light-filled clearings where you might meet anything. Ancient trees and young saplings, tiny creatures and the monsters of our collective subconscious. Forests have existed in our stories since we first gathered around the fire, since the first human got lost and found their way back to tell the tale. 

The UK is the most nature depleted country in Europe. Only 11% is covered in forest, and most of that managed within an inch of its life. It’s hard to get lost in the UK now. To remove the wild, the danger, the unknowable, this is why we build houses, cities, walls. To keep our families safe. But by doing so did we destroy something elemental to what it means to be a human at all? Is this why we all yearn to escape to the wild, to bring it back, albeit on our own terms? Wilderness, but only so much, behind a fence, and neat and tidy. Does it work like that? 

Forests linger in the subconscious, stand for so much more than themselves. The word for world is forest, Ursula Le Guin’s novella, thought to be the inspiration for Avatar, like so many of her works uses planets as metaphors for human frailty. The forest dwellers, in defending their lands, become as bad as the invaders, violence begets violence, and all is lost. 

Germans have a complicated relationship with violence. Growing up my parents were emphatic in their pacifism, a sense of guilt and shame and staunch anti-violence that permeated everything they said and did. This legacy lives on in me, and I pass it on to my children, though they speak no German, know nothing of the life and the people I come from, not really. Every German whose parents grew up in the suburbs of war, whose parents had seen, and often done, the worst things imaginable, grows up a pacifist. An apologist too, the shame and guilt and genetic responsibility passed down without words. 

We pass on the things we do not mean to, parenting an act of faith, of accident, of luck. Of course part of my reaction to my father’s fading is selfish, focussed, as almost all things are, entirely on me. Family is complicated. As Mary Karr famously said, ‘a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.’ We are like the trees, existing in relation to others. We are an amalgam, something cobbled together from everything that came before. My three-year-old keeps asking, ‘how did I get built?’ He asks this in the same way he asks me how houses and cars are made, or dinosaurs and robots. The answer is not so simple, I say. We made you, your daddy and me. We loved each other, and you started out inside of me, tiny as an acorn, and grew and grew until you were big enough to exist outside of me. It makes no sense, this, he looks at me askance, as if to say I’ve lost the plot. 

Miraculous, mad, silly and profound, all of life starts out like this. Often, because he is three, and figuring out how the world works, he butts his head against my tummy, or pushes his shoulders up into my ribs, as if trying to climb back in. My partner laughs, says this is what we are all trying to do, even if we ran away from home as soon as we were able. Looking for a way back in, back to the safety of the womb, the ultimate domestic refuge. 

The doctors tell my dad he needs to do some exercises, keep his brain engaged. He tells them about walking backwards, and they are impressed. My uncle and I agree that there’s not much we can do, both of us avoiding the obvious fear that one day we’ll get a call telling us my dad was found wandering the streets of Bangkok, looking for somewhere to hide. We have to let him go, for this to take its course. I set up a Whatsapp group, so when we talk to dad we can let each other know, orient ourselves with the full picture. 

Rebecca Solnit, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, her meditation on being lost, in every sense of the word, beautifully encapsulates this idea that we also need the sadness, the losses in our lives, as a waymarker for our own existence: ‘Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.’ 

I think about the last time I saw my dad. He travelled with me, on my last morning, to the airport. Before we left we let the dog out, lifting him gently and placing him in the middle of the lawn. A few minutes later my father brought him back inside, and the dog lay down in his little bed with a contented grunt. We travelled on the S Bahn, one long overland train journey through the forest, passing the house where my dad grew up, past the place my grandfather was born in the city. Past all the places destroyed in the war, now all shiny and new. There are so many things we could talk about, should talk about, and instead we make small talk, and look out of the window. It is comfortable, and feels incredibly precious. I think about how old he looks, and how frail, and how I always took his height and his strength and his mind for granted. 

Annie Ernaux was close to her mother, her love for and mourning of a mother whom she was very close to so moving, so deeply profound. But what happens when you lose something you may never have had in the first place? I am yearning suddenly for something which was never there, a father figure I do not understand, a male role model I could look up to. Someone to admire, yes, I had that, but someone who was present, alive, real and a part of my life. I am beginning to realise that I have been looking for something a long time, I do not think it is the exit, or the way back home.

I stand in line for baggage control, the queue full of people from all over the world, people who now call Germany home, I hear at least four different languages from where I stand. My dad stands at the barriers, and although I keep waving at him, telling him he can go, worried he will get lost on the way home, he stays until I am through, waving until I walk away and can no longer see him.