I moved to Germany in 2014 and became that other thing: a sporadic visitor to the country of my birth. Change in the national character was thereafter more evident to me than to my friends and family who remained in the warming pot, although we discussed the decline obsessively in texts and phone calls, poisoning our minds with stories of tyranny that might as well have been scripted to enrage and demoralize us. (Can you tell I’ve been reading Kleist?) But I was not living along the event horizon and so we had divergent experiences of time. In Germany, I was a member of society; in America, I became a mere observer, which is to say a consumer (of news, of commentary, of social media). I was primed to see difference more colorfully on my once or twice yearly trips home, snapshots of the country I’d left, which, arranged in order, became a stop-motion filmstrip with many frames missing. Trajectories that might have felt preordained or banal to those living through them were, in my forced perspective, as dramatic as meteors. Trump’s victory, I used to boast (I no longer boast), I may have saw coming, and I refused to attend our friends’ election party that November in Prenzlauer Berg, but my premonitions worked only in the general sense of a pessimist’s mind in its natural habitat; I could never divine the particulars, and over a long enough timeline the particulars become the general. Watching the January 6 riots, I was dumbfounded. Once upon a time, I lived a ten-minute walk from the U.S. Capitol, along the strip of since-gentrified H Street NE (maintained as a riot-scorched ruin for decades post-1980 by racist federal policy) at the edge of the orotund Hill, but these images were not of that place. They were from some place I’d never heard of.
The last time I was living in the United States, in Iowa, where national politics is a diner and whistle-stop spectacle every four years, Barack Obama was president and it seemed possible his successor would be a Jewish socialist from Vermont. Later, each time I set foot from the plane onto the carpet at JFK, the country was that much more a science fictional world, the planet from Solaris that regurgitates memory and desire but with perverse details wrong: no buttons, no history. CNN blared at full volume in every airport terminal, even when I arrived late at night when the shops were closed: news for no one, an automated overture of chaos and incredulity. Did Americans really leave TVs blaring in empty public spaces? I’d forgotten so much. Were cities really so dull and suburbanized as they now seemed, low-rise condos surrounded by congested highways leading to a depressed pedestrian downtown full of box stores and overshadowed, as in some ancient Mayan metropolis, by the sun-occluding sports stadium? Was it possible I had never noticed all this air conditioning?
Cultural changes became more evident after 2016 — discourse went acidulated and, well, orange. Also—I know it sounds preachy—social lives moved online and, as a result, many people I know went insane. Professors complained to me about their sanctimonious and high-strung college students. Grad school “wasn’t fun anymore.” People were afraid of getting cancelled, even those who complained about those who publicly staked out that position. Writers and artists were lonely as scarecrows, and not only during the pandemic. The people I knew who were thinking and writing with originality were the ones who kept away from it all. Workers in precarity described the moment of realization when they knew they would never escape their debt; others quietly purchased homes with parental cash. I had to stop telling my childless single friends who worked on computers (they wouldn’t listen, they weren’t ready) that if they would only move to Berlin or some place like it they could afford life as a freelancer on €20,000 a year, that my public health insurance was subsidized by a state artist fund, that I never saw a bill for an MRI or doctor’s visit and did not need or want to own a car, that I couldn’t vote but that those who could chose between three or four left-wing parties all of which enjoyed representation in the Bundestag. Of course, most people don’t want to jump continents. Most people want the place where they are to become, or remain, livable. And Germany wasn’t paradise, it wasn’t communism, it was just a normal wealthy country. In 2021, German police shot and killed eight people. In the U.S, the figure was 1,055.
Some of the places where I spent time seeing family and friends on visits home were deep blue—Maryland, New York City—while others (Iowa, Tennessee, Alabama) were purple or crimson. This past January, I was offered a job teaching in Tuscaloosa, where the main drag through downtown is still named after George Wallace’s first wife Lurleen and passes near the building where Mr. Wallace, at his inauguration as governor, spoke the words “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” This, too, was still standing, an attraction of sorts.
I turned down the job and returned to Europe, which a few weeks later became a continent at war. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Berlin’s population erupted into direct action: volunteer networks, donation centers, Telegram groups. I tried to help out at the train station once or twice but it was always overwhelmed with volunteers. Friends all over the city opened their apartments to refugees, offered jobs, money, support. Leaderless networks were well-oiled because people had invested time in oiling them. These Berliners were not strangers or merely online avatars to one another, nor was the cultural memory of war, disaster, and national tyranny atrophied as it is in some places I could mention. Disaster struck and people responded with knowledge so close to action it appeared pheromonal, ant-like.
Americans, no matter their politics, tend toward eschatology. Their visions are distorted by having one eye always on the Second Coming. For conservatives the nature of the myopia is obvious, less so for progressives. In other countries, progressives may struggle to envision revolution as embedded in the here and now rather than around the next corner. The anticipated event becomes a teleological shell game, like those crazy-eyed End of Days types always recalculating doomsday. For Americans, the problem is the same but with dystopia. Hence some of the forward-looking reactions to overturning Roe, the ones that say “gay marriage is next/watch out, you’re next!” etc. Today’s disaster is always prefiguring tomorrow’s for which we should prepare. “Get ready” not now but for “next time,” as though this disaster weren’t enough, as though it weren’t a sufficiently catastrophic emergency that the repeal of Roe has set back women’s rights and our shared liberation “by half a century” (if progress were only so measured!), that it has consigned women to be second-class citizens with special vulnerabilities to surveillance and pursuit by trigger-happy authorities of the state, that it has turned bodily autonomy into a criminal act for half of us.
It isn’t that the liberal consensus is so well-established elsewhere. This week, of all weeks, Germany moved to liberalize its abortion laws, approaching if not realizing decriminalization, but abortion is still restricted throughout the country by high barriers, including a requirement that those seeking abortion attend state-run counseling. Since 2003, owing to the bureaucracy and legal hazards, the number of doctors willing to perform an abortion has fallen by 40 percent. What makes me a pessimist about the American left in particular is not that the right wins or keeps winning, but that the rhetorical response is that we should brace ourselves for (and therefore predictively accept) their next victory. In many corners, defeat is assumed. We are pre-defeated.
There are strains of American resistance that think otherwise. When the Dred Scott decision came down, finding that no person of African ancestry could claim citizenship in the United States, Frederick Douglass wrote:
We are now told, in tones of lofty exultation, that the day is lost all lost and that we might as well give up the struggle. The highest authority has spoken. The voice of the Supreme Court has gone out over the troubled waves of the National Conscience, saying peace, be still.... [But] my hopes were never brighter than now. I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies....
The impulse—every disaster must be a foreshadowing rather than an opportunity—is not the only response available. It is the product of weakness in labor, spirit, and imagination of the present. Although the present moment does tend to resist the radical spirit more than past or future do; after all, it is the event horizon. According to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, the Stalin-era writer who was unknown and largely unpublished in his own contemporary moment, among the legends of countries that do not exist there are certain universal features, including “that the fantastic lands of both folktales and individual phantasmagoric stories might exist in either the past or the future but never the present.”
Thank you, you have given me a very necessary headache. Monstrous difficulties are at our stoop, indeed we need to climb up the steps and declare that some entrapments and willful disregard to rights to half our population will not stand. Nor can the challenges of the fight on the cusp of the event horizon extinguish hope and optimism before we have engaged with our adversaries. The interplay of metropolitans' comparative perspective should be instructive as to how different cultures and communities respond at different times. American exceptionalism is on the ropes except it is about a bout within the ring of normal democratic clashes or a vision authoritarian bullying. (my daughter living as an expat in Zurich for 11 years forwarded the piece to. Thanks, Lon Davis)