7/4 Going to America was, in my case, a project of one-and-a-half decades. I started making the decision in 2008, when Obama gave his speech at the Victory Column in Berlin, not at the Brandenburg Gate, because he was not president, only a candidate, and Angela Merkel would not allow it. He had them play David Bowie, Let’s Dance from the speakers before he came on stage. We later saved the paper copy of the New York Times from the day after he won the election. 

Going to America felt like an awesome thing to do at that time, even though for the first two years after I’d moved, I felt like I had done the most stupid thing I could have done to my life. I considered myself a German writer, after all, and now I had to start all over again at age 40. I ended up writing more in the 2010s than I had ever written before, and all of it in German. I became a US citizen two years ago, barely three months before the 2024 election.

I don’t know if the America of today would have the pull for me that I’d change my entire life trajectory to live here, like I did in 2008. But that is not a relevant question. This is now my country. Not the country I hoped for, and that means we’ve got work to do. That I can call this my country just like anybody else arriving here, and that everybody agrees there is work to do, and then does it, is why I am, after all, grateful to have come here.