The Millennials Travelling Europe In Search Of Work
I’ve spent weeks living in Berlin’s hostels—fellow guests include chefs, doctors and programmers looking for jobs.
You run into all sorts in hostel dorms. For the last month I’ve floated round Berlin, staying wherever’s cheap but favouring places I know. The biggest thing I’ve learnt is that where a room is matters less than the people sharing it with you: there are better and worse hostels, but which you end up in isn’t as meaningful as the roommates you’re dealt.
The place I’m sleeping now is in Mitte, a corridor of rooms a short walk from Checkpoint Charlie — it’s the first place I stayed on getting here, and where I stayed up all night on Grindr. When I first checked in at the end of March, the bunk opposite mine was taken by a young Romanian, who I found out was here for a job. Trained as a software engineer, he’d come to Berlin and been hired by a firm in its booming tech sector: the morning he checked out was his first on the job, and like me he had just one bag.
We started talking after I’d shut the key to my locker inside it. Article 50 had just been invoked, and my roommate couldn’t comprehend why Britain had voted for Brexit. (‘Because,’ I said, ‘we’re terrible.’) Most graduates in his year, he told me, had done what he was doing now, leaving Romania to find work in Europe’s tech capitals — a feat enabled by open borders. ‘Europe is like one big country,’ he smiled, wondering once again why mine would leave. Every European I talk to shows the same bafflement.
Brexit may be confusing, I say, but it’s not complex: Britain is a rainy fascist island, a sometime empire drowning in its own shit, scapegoating migrants for the effects of austerity. The Romanian says he knows why migrants from his country are hated, and tells me how he decided a begging gypsy woman wasn’t deaf and reported her to the police. I don’t say much — certainly not that I’m Roma and gypsy is a slur — and note instead that while Brexit is a British disease, the instincts that gave rise to it are everywhere.
Fast forward a few weeks and I’m back in the corridor-hostel. My roommates are all men, and the first I meet is an Australian bartender, who wants to find work in London and shrugs that a hundred days in, Trump has yet to fuck up. (‘He did ban all the Muslims,’ tries his friend.) Between us is a Cambodian-Minnesotan on his way to Prague, and after the Georgians opposite ply him with chacha, he vomits in the rubbish bin. I manage to avoid being baptised as he climbs into bed with me.
I never speak directly to the Australian’s more-woke friend, but he interests me more than anyone else in the room. The two of them, I learn, have hostelled together the last few nights, but his plan is to find work as a chef in Switzerland. His name, which I hear early on, is one of the popular German ones, but his accent is hard to place, so I wonder whether he’s Swiss himself. I decide against it when he says what he might earn there: this sounds less like a return home and more like economic migration.
That’s one of the first things you notice here — how some guests are travelling for pleasure, others hostelling out of need. Among the others in the dorm, the chef is one of the quieter ones, and like me he catches up on sleep in the day — the habit of someone with no bed of their own to return to. The two of us are more tuned into world events than most of our roommates, just as the Romanian was. That makes sense too: when you’re crossing borders in search of work, geopolitics is hard to ignore.
I’ve escaped to Berlin three times—from work in 2011, austerity in 2014, homelessness in 2017. Britain will soon withdraw from free travel, but for the moment, this is how it looks. The EU lets people move freely to make sure money does too: a land of opportunity on any continent is a neoliberal fairy tale, and Berlin’s rising rents are symptoms of the single market as much as the down-and-outs who wash up here—but at least we can wash up here. By March 2019, the escape hatch I dived through will have closed.
I changed hostels a few days back. The place I’m staying now looks out over Kottbusser Tor. Reception is a lounge with mismatched furniture, and a guy my age has laid claim to one of the sofas. He’s well dressed for a hostel guest, but wears his smart clothes like he’s off hours. Two young Americans take the next seats, and when one of them mentions a sports injury and he starts recommending therapies, I find out he’s a recent med school graduate—Mexican, U.S. trained and interviewing for jobs in Berlin.
Every hostel has people paying their way—bar staff and hairdressers, fruitpickers on their way to Burning Man—but what does it tell us when doctors and programmers are trawling Europe in search of jobs? More to the point, that some of them are North American? One can see why a Mexican might flee Trump’s USA, but the medic says he was here before November. Like the others, he’s a drifter on economic grounds—though Berlin testifies to the danger of being the wrong side of a wall.
When East Germany was absorbed into the west after the Mauerfall, many of those who’d made a show of condemning the wall became concerned about an influx of people they now saw as migrants. The collapse in support for easterners as soon as they actually arrived suggests some of the earlier posturing was less about solidarity than smugness—the superior sense that western states would never build walls or stop their people emigrating. In the last year, voters in Britain and America have answered: wouldn’t we?
Millennials were promised a future without iron curtains, but the countries we’ve inherited feel more and more like fortresses. The jobseekers I’ve met are lucky—most are travelling on savings and many have found work—but their circumstances are precarious nevertheless. In a couple of years, my escape route to Europe will be gone—and before too long, so might theirs.
