My Biography

I was born in Germany in 1964.

At the age of 2, my parents took me to Sicily to stay with my grandparents. My mother was about to give birth to my sister and didn’t know who to leave me with.
A few months later, they came back to get me, only to take me back to Sicily at the age of 4, this time with my sister, because my mother was giving birth to our brother.
This second time, I stayed with the Sicilian family for 9 months.
I remember the moment when my father stopped the car in the yard of what he called “your new home”.
It was a three-story house. We lived in an apartment with one bedroom, where we slept five people, a bathroom, and a kitchen. It was an attic. I only had big curious eyes for this new reality.

The next memory was when my mother told me: “Tomorrow you will go to kindergarten.” I was happy, I didn’t know what it was, but it sounded adventurous. In fact, I liked being in kindergarten. My sister cried a lot, and I had to translate for her with the teachers. Somehow, I had learned the German language without any difficulty.

In the family, we always spoke German between us siblings, in German with my mother, and my father would respond in Sicilian. In the later years, even my mother spoke only German, while my father never went beyond the basic knowledge he had learned in the first two years in Germany.

I grew up with German television from the 70s, when children’s programs were mainly made up of Lassie, Flipper, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s documentaries.

There is one particular video that marks a before and after in me. It probably concludes my childhood and my romantic view of life, in which children are protected by adults who take care of them in every way.
It was about sea turtles.
The mother turtle visibly tired climbs the beach to find the right spot, begins to dig a hole deep enough by her standards, and lays her eggs. She then covers the hole more or less carefully and returns, visibly relieved and lightened, to the sea, sure that she has done everything that was required of her.
There was no sign of the father.

I was there, waiting for her return. Nothing. I waited for her to surprise her little ones. Nothing. Soon, I realized that she wouldn’t return. She had turned her back on her children and disappeared, indifferent to them.

I began to foresee the disaster. I suspected that the hole wasn’t deep enough, poor mother, and indeed, snakes and rats began to come forward to raid the nest. I stood there in disbelief watching the eggs hatch and the little lives emerging from the sand to begin a frantic race to reach the sea. The beach was scattered with their presence. Predatory birds dived like they were at a grand feast. I was horrified.

Some little turtles managed to reach the sea, but there, other predators were already waiting for them. The speaker calmly commented that of the 500 eggs laid by the mother in 4 nests, only about 20 turtles would reach adulthood.

I was in shock. I had always thought that parents could abandon their children to their fate, but that this was even allowed by nature was shocking to me.

Other documentaries confirmed that the father was indeed optional for many animal species. So, I became very grateful to my father, who lovingly took care of us, no longer taking him for granted.

From that day, from that documentary, I asked myself why life was so cruel. Why lay all those eggs and then not protect them? Why this waste of life? And, above all, could the mother turtle really do nothing different for her children? Was that how much she trusted in the success of her endeavor, was that how much she trusted the survival of her offspring?
I began to study from there.

In second grade, our teacher talked to us about world hunger. In 1970, the first images and documentaries about African children with swollen bellies due to hunger began to circulate. The parents of my best friend had adopted a girl by going directly to Africa. They brought traditional African objects with the child. I saw the first wooden masks hanging in their house and admired the craftsmanship, in contrast to the story of underdevelopment that had caused hunger in the Third World – according to my teacher’s account. At that time, the world population was about 2.5 billion. By the year 2000 – which seemed really far away to me – the teacher said that we would double in number, and that there wouldn’t be enough food for everyone.
I was overweight. I couldn’t understand how it was possible that I had too much, and they had nothing.

Later, in 1977, the film *Roots*, the story of Kunta Kinte, made me discover the history of slavery. I learned that in America, on the entire continent, there were no black people, and that all black or mixed-race people had been taken from Africa, and their roots lay in slavery.
In Erlangen, my city, 20 km from Nürnberg, there was an American military base with many black soldiers. Erlangen is home to Siemens, and the entire university in the city was focused on studying and developing new technologies. My mother worked for 30 years in a factory soldering microchips for sophisticated equipment, which we could see once a year on the open house day for family members and visitors. So much so that I only found out when I arrived in Italy that Siemens also made household appliances in other factories around Germany. We lived in a complex of 4 very modern skyscrapers along the Europakanal, which connected the Main, Rhine, and Danube rivers with its 171 km. My father, who immigrated to Germany in 1960, had worked as a blacksmith on this construction, preparing the iron framework onto which the concrete was poured, which is why it’s called reinforced concrete. During that time, he had seen the foundations of future skyscrapers being laid and said that he would never live there, only to move into one of the generous apartments on the 14th floor a few years later, and then later buy the same apartment.
In our Siemens condominium, there were families of soldiers, and we played American football with their children in the yard. I loved having their mothers braid my hair.
After *Roots*, I looked at black Americans with different eyes.

At my school, some high school students only wore orange clothes. It was rumored that they smoked drugs in search of the ‘Nirvana’, a kind of paradise, but not a Catholic one. In 1971, they were followers of Bhagwan, before he changed his name to Osho in 1981 and wore white – his followers adopted this color change.
Others wore long hair and flowers on their jeans. They also smoked drugs, but with the slogan “Make love, not war!”. I didn’t understand it well. I learned about the Vietnam War only because my best friend’s parents adopted another child, this time from Vietnam, found in a pit next to her mother, who had been killed. I couldn’t help but think that maybe some soldier father of my neighborhood friends had been in Vietnam, making a child orphaned. I thought about the absurdity of life: I could play with children whose parents were soldiers who came to Erlangen after serving at the front in Vietnam to relax in our city, unaware of the devastating effects of war, the consequences of which were focused on my best friend’s sister, who stuttered due to the trauma of her mother being killed next to her in Vietnam? And how did the followers of Bhagwan and the Flower Children influence these events through their search for Nirvana, drug use, and free sex, compared to the parents of my friend?

During that time, the first McDonald’s opened in the nearby city of Fürth, close to Erlangen, which was a fun city for American soldiers. My father took us there because his company had worked on the construction. The first McDonald’s in Erlangen was built in an old building from the time the city was founded in 1743, which had previously housed the post office, a wonderfully ancient place we had visited during elementary school as part of a school trip. I was shocked. Later, I worked there for a few months as a young student.

A few years later, I delved into the Nazi period and learned about the Holocaust. I was 13, and a very brave teacher anticipated the curriculum to teach us about these important historical events. Among other things, I learned that Siemens – like all other major German industries – had been important and cutting-edge because during the Nazi period, it took full advantage of the opportunity to employ Jews and prisoners of war at no cost in its factories. In fact, by the end of the war, German industry had state-of-the-art machinery that was 90% operational, while the rest of Europe was fighting on the frontlines with a loss of industrial capacity. This gave Germany a leading position in the industry after the war, a competitive edge it maintained for decades by focusing on training and development, while other nations had to start from scratch.

I saw pictures of the wooden barracks that made up the concentration camps. They were the same barracks I had seen in the photographs of my parents and uncles. When my father brought his young bride, my 21-year-old mother, to Germany in 1960, where he had been working since 1958, recruited by the Italian government in agreement with the German government to send young, healthy male workers, mostly from the South, they were assigned a barracks just for them, while the unmarried men slept in communal barracks. My parents stayed in the barracks for six months before my father could rent a house for his growing young family.
Now, I wondered if those nice old grandparents of my classmates who looked so peaceful sitting in armchairs reading newspapers and making jokes about the “Italians who betrayed the Germans in two wars,” were the same ones who had massacred Jews in those barracks.

I can say that at 13, my initial questions about the cruelty and indifference of the mother turtle and the equally unforgivable absence of the father turtle were joined by three existential questions that were impossible for me to understand at the time:
Why am I fat, and children in Africa die from hunger?
Why did someone think they could enslave the black people of Africa?
Why did someone think they could exterminate the Jews?
At 13, I also added a more private, selfish question.
Why did my father emigrate to Germany?

I studied and educated myself to answer my questions. I studied geography, history, politics, economics, the mafia phenomenon, religion – even though I left the church at 8 – and philosophy. I studied the human brain, the laws of nature, chemistry, biology, physics, cells, tissues, organs, their collaboration in systems that form the human body.

At 14, another very brave teacher invited us to participate in youth meetings at her house. In reality, she discovered that it was “group psychology” based on the model of Erich Fromm, my teacher’s professor, who regularly traveled with some classmates to Switzerland to attend his lessons. They even went to his funeral in 1980, organizing a bus trip from our city.
I didn’t get my mother’s permission. As a good Italian girl, I couldn’t sleep out of the house. During these two years of participation in the group, I learned the importance of belonging as a driving force behind decision-making. Every decision I made during those years was balanced between the risk of being rejected by my mother for being too German or being left at home by my friends for being too Sicilian. I didn’t understand all the talk about sex. For me, the most urgent need was and remains belonging.

All those years, from the turtles to Fromm, helped me understand that life is interconnected and systemic. At 14, I had a systemic view of life. I understood that a system acts in a specific environment, and it is inseparable from that environment. I understood that once part of a system, it becomes so internalized that it travels with you everywhere, regardless of geographical, socio-cultural, historical, or political circumstances. Just as my mother had lived her family system in Sicily in a village of 450 inhabitants living on subsistence, she also lived in Erlangen, home of Siemens, a city that in 1974 celebrated reaching 100,000 inhabitants with great joy, marking its status as a Großstadt. I was also there at that time, with a kind of countdown that had been prepared for weeks at school. If I remember correctly, the girl born to reach that milestone was not of German origin.

The foundations for identifying and understanding the Twin System are precisely these. The curiosity in front of an overstimulation carefully experienced with the eyes of a child and adolescent in awe, in the face of world phenomena in the living room, and the constant search for a reason for these phenomena.

It’s not true that education is useless. It helps, for example, in observing the laws of nature and the deep balance between the forces that govern it. It helps avoid turning a natural phenomenon that I have not learned into an extra-dimensional or spiritual phenomenon, instead of keeping it in phenomenological observation and studying the phenomenon itself. It helps not to be manipulable, but to gather and understand every single component of the whole picture. It helps to abandon a fatalistic view and reach a deterministic view of one’s life.

Recognize what is. To know, not to believe.