How America saved my life
Nov. 5th, 2008 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321I spent most of the day with my ears glued to the radio (BBC World Service). The more I think about it, the more extraordinary this day seems. The whole Obama election is astounding. I'm still reeling from all its implications.
One thing I realised, unexpectedly, was how much I had hated hating America and how glad and relieved I am to be able to love America again now.
Germans have a special relationship to the US. Or some Germans at any rate. My father was 15 when the Second World War ended (the age my own son now is!!!!). He spent the war years in the Austrian Alps, away from the bombing in his home town of Bremen. He was liberated by Americans, and he made friends with one of the young American soldiers there, a boy only a few years older than himself who'd never before been out of Tennessee. My father was given chocolate and peanut butter and listened to jazz and thought that Americans were just the height of cool. When he returned to Bremen, he found that Bremen, too, was occupied by the Americans. For years, his mother (my grandmother) received CARE packages from the Tennessee boy's family and spoke of the amazing generosity of the Americans towards those they had conquered.
Decades later, my parents visited that Tennessee boy, now an elderly man, and they were received with open arms.
I grew up with this background: die Amis, as Germans colloquially call them, were cool and tolerant. Germany's love affair with die Amis (and this work, though it can be used with derision, is mostly an affectionate nickname, if slightly mocking) goes back to the 19th century. Great numbers emigrated during the potato famine; I think it was during the 1920s, that the famous 'Onkel aus Amerika' became proverbial in Germany, and the whole dream of 'vom Tellerwäscher zum Millionär' (literally: from washing plates to being a millionaire) spread, later made truth in the figure of Onassis; and then more Germans emigrated under Hitler.
Americans and Russians liberated my parents' generation from the Nazis. It is to America that I owe my entire life (so far) in democracy, prosperity and peace. I think for many Germans this gratitude and this feeling that America is cool and amazing went deep. Not much could shake it. I forgave them for Vietnam. Then things got more difficult with Nicaragua and Chile and Panama and Reagan but still (I bought Levi's jeans!). Despite all of this, I stuck by America and went there in 1990 to do my Ph.D. While I was there, the first Iraq War happened. This was the beginning of the end of my love affair.
There was the blip of Clinton but really, over the past 15 years or so, my love for America had pretty much been eroded. I just couldn't continue sticking up for the country of Guantanamo, torture, Iraq invasion, Bush junior, no gun control, race ghettoes, xenophobia, overreaction to terrorism. When t'h first mooted going to Stanford last year, I said, "no way am I going to have our children grow up there".
I hadn't realised how much I hated hated America until this morning. Suddenly, all the old love flooded back! All those clichés that had just made me sick when coming out of the mouths of all those old politicians suddenly seem enticing and true again! The American Dream! Liberty and freedom! Democracy! Suddenly, a different kind of people appear on television, nice people of all stripes, not the weird lunatics I had been used to. Presumably these nice Americans had been there all the time but just not on TV; suddenly, here they are, out of the woodwork, in focus again!
Just as Obama has refocused American history. It wasn't only a series of disastrous wars and interferences and invasions but also civil rights and FDR and Martin Luther King and democracy.
I talked to my parents on the phone and my father's feels the same: He's so happy that he doesn't have to hate the Americans any longer!
To be fair, t'h has stuck by die Amis all along. "Despite everything, they are democratic," he kept saying, "it's a democracy, and most of the lunatic governments in the world are not."
Maybe all this seems weird to Americans (at least half my flist is American! I should be saying 'you', not 'they'!) but to me, that's how it's been these last ten years or so. This morning I woke up and thought, I can breathe!!
One thing I realised, unexpectedly, was how much I had hated hating America and how glad and relieved I am to be able to love America again now.
Germans have a special relationship to the US. Or some Germans at any rate. My father was 15 when the Second World War ended (the age my own son now is!!!!). He spent the war years in the Austrian Alps, away from the bombing in his home town of Bremen. He was liberated by Americans, and he made friends with one of the young American soldiers there, a boy only a few years older than himself who'd never before been out of Tennessee. My father was given chocolate and peanut butter and listened to jazz and thought that Americans were just the height of cool. When he returned to Bremen, he found that Bremen, too, was occupied by the Americans. For years, his mother (my grandmother) received CARE packages from the Tennessee boy's family and spoke of the amazing generosity of the Americans towards those they had conquered.
Decades later, my parents visited that Tennessee boy, now an elderly man, and they were received with open arms.
I grew up with this background: die Amis, as Germans colloquially call them, were cool and tolerant. Germany's love affair with die Amis (and this work, though it can be used with derision, is mostly an affectionate nickname, if slightly mocking) goes back to the 19th century. Great numbers emigrated during the potato famine; I think it was during the 1920s, that the famous 'Onkel aus Amerika' became proverbial in Germany, and the whole dream of 'vom Tellerwäscher zum Millionär' (literally: from washing plates to being a millionaire) spread, later made truth in the figure of Onassis; and then more Germans emigrated under Hitler.
Americans and Russians liberated my parents' generation from the Nazis. It is to America that I owe my entire life (so far) in democracy, prosperity and peace. I think for many Germans this gratitude and this feeling that America is cool and amazing went deep. Not much could shake it. I forgave them for Vietnam. Then things got more difficult with Nicaragua and Chile and Panama and Reagan but still (I bought Levi's jeans!). Despite all of this, I stuck by America and went there in 1990 to do my Ph.D. While I was there, the first Iraq War happened. This was the beginning of the end of my love affair.
There was the blip of Clinton but really, over the past 15 years or so, my love for America had pretty much been eroded. I just couldn't continue sticking up for the country of Guantanamo, torture, Iraq invasion, Bush junior, no gun control, race ghettoes, xenophobia, overreaction to terrorism. When t'h first mooted going to Stanford last year, I said, "no way am I going to have our children grow up there".
I hadn't realised how much I hated hated America until this morning. Suddenly, all the old love flooded back! All those clichés that had just made me sick when coming out of the mouths of all those old politicians suddenly seem enticing and true again! The American Dream! Liberty and freedom! Democracy! Suddenly, a different kind of people appear on television, nice people of all stripes, not the weird lunatics I had been used to. Presumably these nice Americans had been there all the time but just not on TV; suddenly, here they are, out of the woodwork, in focus again!
Just as Obama has refocused American history. It wasn't only a series of disastrous wars and interferences and invasions but also civil rights and FDR and Martin Luther King and democracy.
I talked to my parents on the phone and my father's feels the same: He's so happy that he doesn't have to hate the Americans any longer!
To be fair, t'h has stuck by die Amis all along. "Despite everything, they are democratic," he kept saying, "it's a democracy, and most of the lunatic governments in the world are not."
Maybe all this seems weird to Americans (at least half my flist is American! I should be saying 'you', not 'they'!) but to me, that's how it's been these last ten years or so. This morning I woke up and thought, I can breathe!!