When home feels unfamiliar: a coach’s return to Germany
Annegret Bertsch left teaching for expat coaching after China, now she's back, and repatriation is the work she understands best.
“Just living abroad is not as easy as it looks.” - Annegret Bertsch
Annegret opens with that sentence and you can hear what follows in three choices she made: study abroad, move far away, and turn the friction into a profession. She trained in mathematics (taught in English), spent time studying in Brighton, and later lived in China, where the hard part of living abroad crystalized for her.
The return is not the reverse of leaving
Annegret uses the word repatriation the way some people use “relocation”, it’s a process, not a moment. She and Marc are newly back in Germany, and that framing matters: returning didn’t feel like a reset to a previous life, it felt like stepping into a new one with old labels.
That’s the practical insight she brings to her coaching: people expect home to be familiar and are surprised when it isn’t. In the recording she makes the move from anecdote to practice, living abroad exposed gaps she hadn’t anticipated, so she trained to help others fill them. The most useful detail here is simple and concrete: she didn’t invent a theory from a book. She became a coach because of what actually broke for her in China.
What she offers other expats coming back home
Annegret’s work focuses on translating experience into landing tools. She speaks from having taught, studied in the U.K., navigated China, and now repatriated to Germany herself. That sequence (teacher, student abroad, expatriate, coach, returnee) is the map she uses when she helps clients:
identify what they lost or gained abroad
name the expectations they carry about return
create small, concrete steps to rebuild networks and routines
Those steps aren’t listed as a prescription in the conversation; they’re a method learned by doing.
If you’ve ever assumed home would feel automatic, her short, clear account is the corrective: repatriation is its own relocation. Listen to the full conversation with Marc to hear the examples she uses and the small coaching moves she recommends for anyone re-entering a country they once left.