Although it's a rich and deeply personal story, it's not a conventional memoir, but almost a deconstruction of the genre, as Wedde chases the ghosts of his ancestors, parents and brother. As he grapples with the untrustworthiness of his own memory, he rewrites his history, as new understandings come to light.
"I've learned to accept the different ways memory works, not to put too much emphasis on the factual accuracy of what I remember, to be quite careful with that. And to trust certain things, certain things that are often vivid in a sensory way. I'm absolutely fascinated by how all of that functions and is in an interesting way totally dysfunctional and how we make sense of that and work through it."
For much of the book Wedde speaks of his parents' restlessness as a form of escape. Yet by the end of the book he has changed his mind.
"[Writing this] was therapeutic, it settled some things for me. I'd always greatly admired my mum in particular, she had a tremendous spirit. She was a woman in the Depression, the war, she'd had kids quite late in life, she had this urge to go out and live a different kind of life, she was a driver of it. I'd built up in my own mind this idea of her dissatisfaction, her irritation with life, and as a result of talking to my older cousin Norma in Blenheim and looking at photos of theatre productions and just being back there and turning over the territory of it a bit more, thinking about it a bit harder, I got a different picture of it. I've corrected a lot of assumptions I'd made. I've had to reel in this story of my mother's breaking-away adventure."
Then there are the illuminating early chapters that allude to Wedde's future as a writer - his melancholic disposition as opposed to Dave's equanimous one, the memorable teacher who introduced him to Shakespeare, and the power of metaphor.
Revisiting certain places wasn't easy. On a trip to visit the paper mill in Bangladesh where his father Chick used to work, he was at first treated with suspicion that he was a journalist there to report on the area's sweat shops. When he was finally allowed to comb through the old archives, an old photograph featuring his father brought him to tears.
Part of coming to Berlin has been the chance to get to know some of the ancestors he mentions in the book. Among them are his German great-grandfather, Heinrich Augustus Wedde, who met his Danish wife Maria on the boat to Wellington in 1870. It always struck Wedde as interesting that Maria had travelled alone to the other side of the world. During a trip to her hometown of Kiel in the past year he saw traces of what might have spurred her to make that life-altering decision.
"Maria would have seen ships coming and going, she would've heard stories of people who went to New Zealand or the Pacific or Australia, she probably heard lots of different languages. Maybe it was an amazing thing for a young woman on her own to do, not nearly as unimaginable as someone from the interior of Germany ... she and my great-grandfather, a sailor, they were people who had horizons in their eyes, they had a sense they could do this. So it was really fascinating for me to go up there."
Meanwhile, Berlin has provided a colourful backdrop for Wedde to work on other projects. In the past year he has written a novel, written introductions for peers' books, worked on a poetry anthology and done academic research. He has also done a lot of journal-writing, jotting down observations, snippets of conversation and items of visual interest, for use in future projects.
"It's always little things: someone stepping up into a bus or hearing a fragment of conversation or watching a kid scoot past on a bicycle. And sitting over the top of that, the big questions: why we bother with the things we bother with, what is the nature of relationships and those large themes that make the little things significant. That's where it usually starts, listening to a couple of people having a conversation with a bottle of beer in their hands about what to do. It doesn't matter where you are. The great thing about being engaged in that process is it keeps you awake, alert, and looking around you. If you're out in the world you're never bored. There's always something happening."
The Grass Catcher: A Digression About Home (Victoria University Press $40) is out now.
