In Berlin, Everybody’s Willkommen!

Ali and his mother don’t speak much German—but then, neither do I.

Nor does anyone at this table, with the exception of Peter, a Berliner who is here once a week, entirely voluntarily, to help people like us muddle our way through der, die, and das. Elsewhere, in the more advanced groups, the conversation is free-flowing, and a pleasing hubbub fills the echoey hall. Our beginners’ table, however, relies considerably on charades.

Still, it’s surprising how much you can learn from people without a common tongue. I have discovered that Ali’s dream is to train as a nurse, and that back home in Afghanistan, his mother—let’s call her Mrs. Ali—was a seamstress. I’ve learned that Afghanistan produces a lot of pistachios—an easy one, because the German is Pistazien—and that Mrs. Ali does not especially like to swim. She gently nudges a plate of small wrinkled fruit toward me. “Persische Beeren,” she says: Persian berries. She brought them for us to share.

There are more than a hundred of us gathered here tonight in the Refugio building in Berlin’s Neukölln district, from all over the world: Britain, the United States, Somalia, Sudan, Turkey, Syria. Some people in the room have fled conflict, persecution, or crippling poverty in their home countries; many never imagined that they would find themselves looking for work, and for friends, in a country whose language they had never spoken before. But where you’re from and why you’re here isn’t the issue at the Sprachcafé (conversation group). We’re all just here to practice our German over a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.

It has been nearly five years since Angela Merkel announced that Germany would open its borders in response to Europe’s worst refugee crisis in decades. By 2015 the devastating civil war in Syria had displaced millions of people, vastly adding to the numbers of those