Made by language(s)

“In German I sing; in English I disguise myself; and in French I fly, I thieve.” – Hélène Cixous, French writer

detail from Claude Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869)

Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of my life in America. My first thirty years I spent in Germany. In smaller, scattered stretches, I lived in France and Italy for study, work and fun.

Twenty years is a long time to orient myself in American culture and language, but they can still feel like magma, ever moving, evolving, never quite solid under my feet. I’ll never be as American as my U.S.-born daughter; she is now seventeen.

As everyone else’s, my identity is confusing, rich, and ambiguous. When I was little, I clung to my home and my mother’s side. I spoke late—at least that’s how the story goes— and later found myself drawn into my interiority and the silent wonder of books. There’s a bit of irony when I say this: language and the spoken word made my world. It is hard to overstate the influence and consequence they have had on my life.

I think and express myself, in varying degrees, in four languages. I belong to all four and completely to none. Each language ties to a different version of me in the way it is shaping, inventing, imagining, revealing, and hiding me. I speak each language with a kind of permanent imperfection (besides German, I guess), but it is language itself that has brought so much possibility and aliveness into my life.

Each language I speak is a beloved, a different place of affection, reflection, sensibility and understanding. What am I to make of this deep attachment and sentimental-intellectual involvement in these languages?

Deutsch
German is my mother tongue. In my heart and my mind, it still rings the most clearly and will remain my forever lullaby. My roots are in the hilly countryside around Cologne where I grew up, played in a sand box and rode my small yellow bike, later climbed 130 worn steps to school daily and spent the first good stretch of my work career. It’s where I still have family and longstanding friends I typically return to once a year.

German was the nurturing soil for my consciousness and my original encodings. It may forever remain the main underlying structure my thinking and meaning-making grows from, the base line for my sense of safety and what I may still fear or be ashamed of. My German may be what remains in old age, depending on if I get there and how things go. Linguists and other’s lived experience suggest that we tend to lose languages learned later first, and our mother tongue last.

My German is precise; it feels vaguely warm and deeply familiar. It must be my most embodied language as I can feel it in my body. Language is a verbal track, to be sure, but there is an intimately felt sense of it too, perhaps comparable to what is evoked by music or poetry. When I hear “Tannenduft, Nebel, Laub” (pine scent, mist, foliage), I feel the coloring and weight of fall in my chest and can smell the woods where I hiked with my parents when I was a kid, the kind of atmosphere that lives on in one’s heart. Images, symbols, and patterns formed in my German may still shape a lot of my daytime thoughts and nighttime dreams.

English
English is my best-mastered, albeit forever imperfect, second language. It now surrounds me in my everyday life and constitutes the language for most of what I read and write. The latter developed over time, like a slow weaning off from German, helped by immersion and the discipline of improving my skills, as well as the growing opportunities I see to meet other English-speaking writers and readers.

English is my street-smart shape shifter, I can be quite nimble in it. It has always charmed me with its agility and openness for improvisation, tolerance, and a certain coolness and hipness, probably first absorbed during my coming-of-age around America‘s music and brands in the nineties.

American English has taught me more than any other how deeply language is also tied to geography. First at age seven, and then again and again, I had the opportunity to visit and travel across parts of the United States. I remember long stretches of road and open space, my growing sense for the land’s distance and the incredible diversity of its terrains and people. Maybe this is how language stretches too, trying to accommodate differences. I will forever carry an appreciation for the ease and willingness with which people spoke to me and welcomed me in.

I only recently realized something else about English¹: its Anglo-Saxon backbone, in contrast to its other main strand that originates in French and Latin, can be strikingly close to German in rhythm, syntax, and the way it hits my mind and body. An example for this: when you place a passage from the King James Bible and compare it to the literal German translation, can you see and sense the similarities?

And God said,
let there be light:
and there was light.
—Gen. 1:3

Und Gott sagte,
lass’ dort Licht sein,
und dort ward Licht.
—Gen. 1:3

Français
My grandmother had an intellectual knack for French, even though she knew only few words of it. I can still hear her tongue roll off words like trottoir or porte-monnaie in deliberate elegance during conversation.² Only much later did I learn how much she was dreaming of seeing Paris once in her lifetime, together with her husband (my grandfather). But times were different; they never went.

I sometimes like to think she’d be proud of her (in)direct influence on me. There was no question I’d pick up French as my second foreign language in grade seven, and to go to France later to study (and party) there. This might sound silly, but it holds meaning for me to be free and wild on her behalf too.

French is a queen, and there’s no stopping her. She’s royal and some kind of higher standard, she is a mouthful and fast. I am in love with her imagination and elegant complication, and her ways of dressing up ideas. Here’s Simone de Beauvoir, for example, who wrote: On ne naît pas femme: on le devient. - One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. How much more naturally and efficiently flowing this appears to me in French.³

Unfortunately, due to a lack of practice, I’ve already lost a good chunk of what I’ve once mastered in French. My heart and mind will hold on to her though. Merci, ma reine. De rien, she goes.

Italiano
Stepping into the attico atop the city roofs of Genova was likely the moment I fell in love with the language and lifestyle of Italy. Terracotta light trickled through the shutters, washing the wooden floors with what looked like stripes of honey. I was twenty-two years old and had traveled all night on the train from Cologne to see my then Italian boyfriend. He and I had met in France earlier that year—and had been speaking French to each other—and now his family was welcoming me into their home and their hearts, while my skin was still tingling from the train’s metal clatter. I stayed for a few weeks and returned for the two summers that followed.

Learning Italian became an organically growing thing, for once freed from any typical school setting; I learned it while cooking pasta or when I talked with Milly (the boyfriend’s mother) about Italian movies or the books that I found all over their house. Milly was in her early forties at the time, a relaxed and free-spirited woman, and in certain ways different from my mom. She captivated me with her laugh and natural warmth, and how she made me feel immediately accepted.

My mastery of Italian falls short compared to English and French, but I can feel it in my gut; it animates my hands and moves my soul. It has become rare to find the opportunity to speak Italian, but when it happens, I still catch myself wondering: isn’t Italian, or in fact all foreign language speaking, a kind of miracle?

A still from the movie “Call Me by Your Name” (2017) with Timothée Chalamet; it captures so much mood around life, language, and of course Italy in the 80s and 90s

All this is part of what I mean when I say that language(s) made me. They helped me grow associations, understanding, and connections—not only to new people and parts of the world, but also to new shades and facets of me.

The Canadian author Nancy Huston, who has lived in France for many years, wrote in her book Losing North⁴ about her own experience between different languages and cultures:

“Life is an unending flow of infinitely diverse impressions. We receive, classify and organize these impressions, responding to them with a flexibility which far surpasses that of the most sophisticated computer. We know how to be a thousand different people in turn, and we name the sum of these people “I.” … [A] myriad selves dart to and fro like schools of tiny, slippery, glittering fish, and as it is impossible to catch them in the net of language, we generally content ourselves with summing up the extravagant flux of our lives in a few pat phrases [like]: ‘Yeah, had a great summer.’”

I really like Huston’s imagery of the glittery and slippery net of language trying to capture a life, and what it all means to us. What else can language be than frustratingly imperfect, especially when spoken in (and with) non-native tongues? In my case, I can explore the boundaries, perhaps even the mainland, of Italian, French and English, but their deeply layered interiors still escape me. But what a personal loss it would be if I didn’t possess what they have given me: in possibility, joy and aliveness, and in opening doors to so many amazing people I now have in my life. All in all irreplaceable—also by AI, by the way, as these are matters of the heart.

I want to thank my wonderful writing friends, namely Rachel Parker Larry Urish Rick Lewis Kathy Ayers Dana Allen — and: Michelle Varghese!!!

1. The following insight was brought to me by the conversation on David Perell's How I Write with Ward Farnsworth in December 2025.

2. I think this was still a kind of “overhang effect” from Napoleon’s huge influence on culture and language in Germany (or Europe more generally) in the 19th century.

3. Another aspect I want to mention here is how words have a certain flavor, and this flavor can be perceived and formed differently depending on the language. For example, it is informing that the French words for flavor (saveur) and for knowledge (savoir) share the same Latin root. It can be such little details that make a language and one’s understanding of it more profound. Different knowledge of a word then becomes a differently sliced knowledge of the world, upon which we work and act and which act and work upon us.

4. Huston, Nancy. Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Self. McArthur & Company, 2002.