Name: Dirk Auer
Nationality: German
Place of birth: near Frankfurt
Occupation: Journalist
Date of Arrival: 2005

Dirk Auer is a German sociologist-turned-journalist who came to Bulgaria because it seemed like the nicest place to live near Kosovo, where he does most of his reporting.

Auer works for radio and newspapers, often producing stories with partners from Austria, Bulgaria and Germany. Originally he is from outside Frankfurt, but the place he's lived longest recently is Oldenburg, where he attended university and later taught.

He became a journalist in 2003, he said, because he became disenchanted with the monastic academic lifestyle. He was more or less power-lifting academically, researching a biography of Theodor Adorno, when it struck him that he’d accomplished what he'd set out to do intellectually.

“I was sitting in an office reading a thousand books,” he said. “I didn’t want to add another book to the thousand. I wanted to have other experiences.”

The first thing he covered was a storytelling festival in Bremen.

“This is more popular in Ireland or England or America,” he said. “In Germany this is not so popular but interest is growing.”

A few years later he was talking to Roma refugees who were returning to Kosovo after they had lived in Germany for 15 years. They had fled Kosovo when the troubles started in the early 1990s. Initially, the German state welcomed them and was generous towards them. They had jobs and raised families whose children had never lived in Kosovo and thus spoke German. But since German law strictly defines who is a citizen, they had to be repatriated.

Auer interviewed them as they got off the plane at Pristina airport.

“In this province (Kosovo) full of NGOs and other organisations of the international community,” he said. “people are coming back there and they have nothing”.

The luckiest ones had relatives who could put them up. That usually meant a grandfather sharing his one-room house with nine members of his extended family, the floor at night covered with people sleeping.

Auer likes Bulgaria because he finds that people are open here. “As a journalist, the job here is not difficult because you find people to talk to,” he said.

During the recent presidential elections, for example, he interviewed voters as they left the polls. People stopped and discussed their choices and would say who they voted for. In Germany, no one would take time out of their day to talk politics in this manner.

Did he find the Bulgarian Government as open? Could he find someone in a ministry to answer questions so easily? “I don’t have experience with the Government,” he said. “I’ve heard they can be as difficult as anyplace.”

His lifestyle in Sofia is simple. It is the lifestyle of the freelance journalist. He is constantly working on projects, editing in German, pitching stories and preparing to travel somewhere for the next story. In between, he relaxes.

“I sleep until noon and work until three in the morning,” he said. “This is what I like. You don’t have fixed work and nobody is telling you how to work. I like thinking in terms of projects, to work a lot on one project and then finish. This means, in one word, freedom.”

What does he think of the future of Kosovo?

“This region is already practically ethnically cleansed of Serbians,” he said. “There’s no alternative to independence. If they don’t grant independence to the Albanians, the fight will continue. There are still a lot of [Albanian] terrorist groups with guns.”

Auer is more keen to talk about the Roma angle of the Kosovo story. After covering the families who returned from Germany, he visited bombed-out villages where the Kosovar Roma once lived and wrote more stories. Many of their villages had been cleared out by Albanians. Nato bombed others.

The Roma community has no voice in the Albanian-Serbian negotiations being held in Vienna to resolve the Kosovo question, Auer said. So just as one tragedy from the wars of Yugolsav Secession might be brought to a close, another is being forgotten.

Auer visited a former Roma neighbourhood in Kosovo recently, for example, where the provincial government was trumpeting the start of construction of a new housing project. Ostensibly the apartments were funded with money to help returning Roma. But none of the people who used to live in the neighbourhood attended the groundbreaking ceremony. It was clear, Auer said, that Kosovar-Albanian families would soon be living there.

“The media only talks about Serbians and Albanians,” he said. “I want to show in my stories that there is and was another ethnic community living there for hundreds of years."