l have been certifiably German - which is not a disease - since 2015, but my heart isn't in it. Sometimes I "feel" Irish or French, for more or less silly reasons, and I was uncertifiably stateless for a month while waiting for my "Certificate of Loss of Nationality of the United States" - which sounds even worse than a disease. It also cost me $2,350. There is a certain lightness of being that comes with that but I don't recommend it. In the end one has to throw one's lot in with some lot.
I don't think it's totally accidental that I've ended up here. After all, I was here during a formative period of my life. Here I am reviewing the troops at Vaihengen:
My father was assigned to the US Constabulary after the war, and my brother and I had a lot of contact with the natives via our "house helpers": Gertrud (here holding my hand)
Johanna
and Karl
who jumped in front of a train in Augsburg because, my mother wrote in her memoir, "his own countrymen had hounded him by threatening to turn him in as an escaped Nazi." He was replaced by Walter, who could do coin tricks (no photo). Who knows what seeds of fate were planted in my brain in those days?
The proximal reason for my coming back in 1977 was employment. I got a job teaching English at the University of Kassel. I had no strong political opinions in those days. I had been against the Vietnam war, but when a student asked me during a "get acquainted" session, "What do you think of American imperialism?" I had no idea what to say.
Nine years later, I still had no clue. In fact, I distinctly remember, after hearing the news that Reagan had bombed Libya, supposedly in retaliation for the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque, punching my fist into the air and thinking, "Finally, the US has done something right!" I suppose that counts as a political opinion. I had also taken to wearing cowboy boots and occasionally coloring my speech with a Texas twang modeled after Lyndon Johnson, whom I forgot I hated. I cringe at the memory. I didn't know it at the time, but I was one sick puppy.
Despite my opposition to the war, I had not read Noam Chomsky or anything else that went beyond the condemnation of a war that made no sense to me (see here). I was not a Marxist or anything close to it. I had grown up on Army posts, with a father and a brother, and later a nephew, who went to West Point, and one uncle who graduated from the Naval Academy and the other from the Coast Guard Academy. But when Muhammad Al i said "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong," he hit the nail on the head. McGeorge Bundy and the rest of "the best and the brightest" claiming US national security was at stake in Vietnam and that we were saving the South Vietnamese from communism seemed the height of stupidity to me. Yet Kennedy had appointed them, and I had no inkling that they or the CIA had anything to do with his assassination. (Bundy as the national security advisor had to know what the CIA was up to.)
How could they have been so stupid? Exactly the same question can and should be asked about the proxy war in Ukraine today, and the genocide in Gaza. Today I know the answer. They weren't stupid, they were lying. They didn't give a hoot about the Vietnamese then, and they don't give a hoot about Ukrainians or Palestinians now. They don't give a hoot about Israelis either, because if they did they wouldn't let them destroy themselves as well by massacring thousands of innocent and helpless people, mostly women and children. No Israeli, and no Jew who identifies as an Israeli, will ever recover from this shame.
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