The Problem with Patriotism: A Critical Look at Collective Identity in the U.S. and Germany
1.
In 1984, George Orwell’s year of looming dystopia, I received an academic scholarship to study fine arts and moved to Germany, a country that had embodied modern dystopia to an unprecedented degree. The scholarship, awarded to students of the United States and the United Kingdom, had been created in commemoration of the Berlin Air Lift of 1948–1949. It carried the cumbrous name “Luftbrückendank” (literally “Air Lift Thanks”), which amused my artist colleagues but reminded them that the Allied forces occupying their country still retained a degree of legal jurisdiction over the whole of East and West Germany—inducing in them that strange mixture of irritation, envy, and respect that anything American inspired in Europe at the time.
You lose several important parts of yourself when you move to another country. First you lose your language: struggling to explain things in simple terms, grappling with a new grammar and syntax, you wince at the wince on the face of the person you’re talking to as you stumble through your botched sentence. The next thing you lose is your identity as a citizen, as a member of an ethnic group, as a native. Eventually, however—and this is the strange part—loss leads to gain. You learn to master this new language, grow comfortable in this new culture: You crack jokes, slip into slang; it becomes second nature, and you think in it now, dream in it.
This loss and gain does not, of course, revert to a default setting when I’m back home; it’s permanent, and it colors my perception of America. I am both of us and not of us. I’ve begun the process of acquiring dual citizenship, of declaring not only an emotional but also a formal loyalty to my adopted home—but although I pay my taxes there, am raising my child there, have lived considerably more than half my life there—my position is and always will be ambivalent. Because I didn’t stay to absorb the changes gradually, adapt to them organically, the current state of affairs—our own new 1984—comes as a profound shock.
2.
Leave America, and you begin to see it as the rest of the world sees
