Bright and early tomorrow, I hit the skies. Sometime in the late morning EDT, I’ll reach American airspace. The air will be warmer, brighter, and filled with more car exhaust and factory emissions but less cigarette smoke than what I’m accustomed to, as I’ll surely notice through the double-paned airplane window in seat 39a. After 2 hours and 20 minutes in the Newark airport, riffling through magazines and maybe eating a crappy burger somewhere, I’ll board a little shuttle plane and touch down on the west bank of the Potomac at precisely 4:14 p.m.
It was fun being a Berliner for two months. But of course I wasn’t really a Berliner, was I? Several Americans I talked to in Berlin, who have lived here for at least eights years each, told me that no matter how much you immerse yourself in the culture, no matter how fluent your German gets, no matter how German your spouse is, you can never really become German. It’s just not that kind of culture. In America, as long as you speak fluent English and live somewhere within the 50 states, no one really questions your American-ness (OK, maybe Lindsey Graham does, but still). But German-ness, by all accounts, is more impenetrable. Sure, the Germans were crazy enough to give me a red passport with my face in it, but did that really make me German? Anyone who hears me speak or sees me struggle to figure out how many grams of Rinderfleisch to order at the supermarket meat counter would tell you that there’s still a healthy chasm separating me and Deutschheit.
