Housing shortage and local elections: people are our only hope

I'm moving. It's not easy to find an apartment in a city like Hamburg, but now it happened, by chance or a lucky coincidence, that I'm moving at very short notice. And that gives me sleepless nights, I just can't calm down. I wake up between three and four o'clock every night and can't go back to sleep. What else do I have to do? The deposit account, water, electricity, internet and packing. I didn't know I had so much. My bookshelf alone, measured in boxes, takes up my entire living room. And the cellar! Oh, the basement!

We painted at the weekend. I have so much help and I am so grateful for it.

If there's anything in the world to be grateful for, it's for friends who are willing to help you. My boyfriend helps me, my children, my dearest friends and in between I hear that the AfD has tripled its results in the local elections in Lower Saxony. This penetrates my fatigue like a dark shadow. One is the I, the private one, which takes up my time and doesn't let me sleep, the other is the we, and that is also me, which perhaps changes everything, changes more than my new apartment changes my life.

But it is pushed back by the private sphere. And this is certainly how it is for many people in their everyday lives, that they live a private life that is full of difficult things, illnesses, deaths, separations, existential fears, money worries - things that completely stress you out.

That's difficult enough, but then, through it all, the concern for our community, for the people who are less protected than me, for the world. That's a lot, and today the sun is still shining and a bird is chirping outside and maybe it will be a nice autumn.

I don't have a solution either. I need a kitchen table and a wardrobe. I need a home. This was just a transition, I lived as a sublet for two years and now I have to move out.

These subtenancies in Hamburg are symptomatic of the catastrophic housing situation. People simply don't want to give up their apartments, even if they no longer live in them, because they seem so precious to them. Affordable housing is a treasure. That's why they are sublet and not given away.

At least someone is living there, like me, who has been living as a sublet for two years and never really got here because I was always told I had to move out again, and in the end I had to move out too and luckily I found an apartment. There are still nice people in the world and sometimes you just get lucky. The fact that I have found an apartment in which I can live well now that I urgently need one makes me very happy and grateful.

People are our only hope. Even if increasingly some of them are voting for a party that doesn't give me any hope at all. Everything is connected, and it will be people with a migrant background who will be carrying my washing machine into the new apartment in a few days. They will move my kitchen cupboard to the second floor and the many heavy boxes of books. I pay them, but I am also grateful that they exist, that they are here in my life. In my city.