Katharine Finke hasn’t had her own place to live in for five years.
The 31-year-old German journalist spends a little time in one place before moving on to the next, taking just a few belongings with her.
At the moment she’s looking after a flat in Berlin for friends, while she prepares for her trip across Asia and also writing a book about her nomadic existence.
It’s to be titled Loslassen (Letting Go) and describes “how I discovered the world and learnt to do without.”
Finke has one suitcase and a holdall, and keeps another suitcase and a box at her parents home in Frankfurt am Main.
She doesn’t have a flat, furniture, a car or any mementoes.
“On my travels I noticed that I didn’t need any more than what fitted in my suitcase,” says Finke, who works for various print media and television stations.
The last time she had a fixed abode was when she lived in Hamburg with a boyfriend. When they split up she decided to move out of their shared flat and launched a thorough clear out, giving some of her possessions away to friends and charity and selling other things.
What was hardest, she says, was to throw mementoes from her childhood away, that was “horrible.”
The enormity of what she’d done only really hit her after a period of time.
She was at the airport, she says, on her way to Portugal. “I realised: ‘All I’ve really got left is the things I just checked in’.”
Did she regret the decision? “No, it was a completely liberating feeling.”
And she’s still enjoying her materially unencumbered life. “You can go anywhere straightaway, you’re incredibly flexible, your head’s clear.”
But it can be difficult in crisis situations, she says.
When a close friend of hers died, she was living in a flatshare in which her flatmate had to pass through her room to get to his own.
“Then I knew what I needed: a door that I could shut.”
When she’s in Germany she lives in Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg or Berlin with friends or she house sits or rents a room.
“So you’re a scrounger,” say some people, who can’t imagine doing what she does.
Bit Finke doesn’t see it like that. She still pays rent, contributes towards bills and repays generosity with cooking or travel souvenirs.
Most of the time she’s abroad. In the past five years she’s spent time in New York, Lisbon, Buenos Aires and travelled through New Zealand, Australia, China and Indonesia.
In India she wrote a book, Mit dem Herzen einer Tigerin (With the Heart of a Tiger), about a young woman who was sold into slavery for two years at the age of nine and then forced to marry a much older man.
On her travels she also tries to live in private accommodation as opposed to hotels.
“It’s easier to meet local people that way,” she says. And she’s managed to finance her trips with her work.
“Rent and food, that’s all I need,” she says. And of course she doesn’t have any bills mounting up at home in Germany when she’s away. “My only luxury are flights.”
Finke was born on the North Sea coast of Germany, grew up further south in the city of Frankfurt and currently has a boyfriend in Berlin.
Her other anchors are her parents. “It’s not so easy for them,” she says.
She likes taking risks, she says, and her parents worry about her.
“My father always tells me, ‘Do what you have to do, but don’t tell me until afterwards’.”
Nevertheless, Finke doesn’t plan to spend the rest of her life like this.
“At some point I’d like to have children,” she says. That will be the time when she’ll need to have her own place again. “But I don’t think I’ll go to Ikea and fill the whole place up with stuff,” she adds.
What does she actually have in her suitcase and her holdall? “Clothes mainly,” she says. Shoes, sports clothes, make-up and a bit of jewellery — a bracelet from Haiti, her dead grandmother’s ring.
Since she doesn’t have a washing machine she has to be careful with her clothes.
One week she wears the dark things, the next the lighter colours. “Otherwise I run out,” she says. —DPA