When I think back to my childhood, I remember rooms, objects and situations more than sequences of events. Pieces of furniture, materials, warmth. The finely sawn flower-shaped knobs on the drawers under my first own bed, in which I never slept. The doll corner where we re-enacted the big life. The creaking floor with woodworm traces and holes so large I feared for my marbles. Such incidental details stay present, often for a lifetime.
They carry meaning without imposing themselves. None of us perceives the world from a neutral standpoint. Our view always comes into being at a concrete place, in a family constellation we did not choose. This early imprint stays effective, even when the outer circumstances have long since changed.
The French sociologist Didier Eribon describes how the world we grew up in keeps working in our later life, even when we believe we have finished with it. These early experiences do not disappear. They shift, and become part of an inner measure against which we take the measure of later rooms.
Taking a thought of the sociologist Martina Löw further, one can speak of a floor plan inscribed in our innermost self. The floor plans of the rooms of our past join together in us into a structure. This inner floor plan shows itself in our routines and habits, in movements we hardly notice. It has its origin in rooms of the past, in surroundings that shaped us long before we could think about them.
Perhaps that is exactly why the world of childhood becomes a place of longing for many people. Not because it was ideal, but because it marks the beginning. The American essayist Susan Stewart points out that the words longing and belonging are related. Every longing feeds on earlier experience. In that sense it looks backwards. For many people the word home carries the world of childhood within it for a lifetime, even when that place has long ceased to exist.
This imprint has a flip side. We create surroundings for ourselves out of the familiar. And in them we behave along exactly those familiar lines. A cycle emerges. We live in rooms that resemble our earlier ones. And in doing so we confirm, again and again, what we already know.
This cycle can only be broken by questioning. Only when I recognise which lines I move along can I consciously decide for them or against them. One day my children will remember this flat. Perhaps the wooden table in the kitchen, perhaps only a basic feeling of what it was like to move here. That too is being inscribed in them right now. I want to understand which rooms have formed me before I move on. Which of their patterns do I carry forward? And which may I leave behind?