“Xenophobia was never far beneath the surface and sometimes broke forth in ugly forms, as an American friend and I discovered in an inn in the village of Eschenlohe, fifteen kilometers from Garmisch, when menacing looks from a band of muscular hikers in brown shirts and audible sneers about foreigners persuaded us that it was expedient to go to bed early, and again, in a pub in Jena, when we were talking quietly in our own tongue and were interrupted by a drunken shout from a nearby table, ‘Speak German!’”
–Gordon Craig on his first visit to Germany in 1935, from The Germans
The evening was not going as well as I had hoped. It was the early 2000s and I was sitting with my newlywed American husband at a table sumptuously laden with homemade Persian dishes in a large, modern house on the outskirts of Geesthacht, a small city southeast of Hamburg, located on the right bank of the Elbe River. I had thought it would be interesting for my husband to meet my Uncle Nasser, who had moved to Germany from Iran in the late 1950s to study medicine. He quickly decided to stay – for both political and personal reasons: his opposition to the Shah, and falling in love with my mother’s sister. But instead of talking about his past, we had been, for the last half hour or so, enduring Nasser’s detailed summary about the latest novel he had read. When a longed-for pause finally came, my husband quickly tried to switch topics by pointing to a beautiful Persian rug hung on the wall opposite from where we were sitting.
“Beautiful,” he began, “I’ve once heard that there is a mistake in every Persian rug, because…”
He was interrupted before he could finish the sentence.
“Americans don’t make mistakes, eh?”
My uncle obviously hadn’t heard of his ancestors’ custom to make deliberate mistakes in handmade Persian rugs because of their belief that only Allah could make things perfectly – either that, or his anti-Americanism had gotten the better of him so quickly that he forgot more than just his manners. At least we started talking politics after that – and, perhaps in an attempt to make up for his earlier faux pas, my uncle repeatedly tried to emphasize that he shared our progressive views on German politics. But he also took care to repeatedly mention that he was, of course, looking at all of this from the perspective of a foreigner, and not a German.
My husband told me afterwards that the most shocking revelation for him had not been Nasser’s latent anti-Americanism, but rather that he had felt the need to begin almost every statement on German policies by mentioning that he was still an outsider in the country he had lived in longer than in his actual place of birth. My husband, who grew up in Brooklyn, NY, found it unfathomable that a man living in Germany for almost half a century, who spoke the language fluently, and who had pursued a successful career as a doctor, while raising two German children, still didn’t identify as German. In his opinion, his story showed the regrettable limits of integration by immigrants into German society.
Since that experience, when talking about the difference between Germany and the United States, I always like to juxtapose my Uncle Nasser’s persistent feeling of otherness in Germany with one of my husband’s favorite anecdotes, an encounter he had overheard on a train to Manhattan. He was sitting in a four-seater behind four older ladies talking among themselves. One of them was telling the others that she originally was from Lviv, a city in Ukraine. The mention of her homeland prompted the other women to share stories about their own respective countries of origin.
Then, out of the blue, one of them stopped the spirited conversation with a wave of her hand.
“Ach, who cares?” she said. “We are all Americans now!”
Everyone nodded and smiled in agreement.
I have always loved this story because it was something that could not happen in many other places. To me, it symbolized the openness and strength of the United States of America, an unbeatable sense of confidence that I had never experienced in Germany – where I was once asked, “Where are you from?” in a much different tone. It was the evening after the final game of the 1990 soccer World Cup. Germany had just beaten the Argentinian team and become the world champions. The whole city of Nuremberg celebrated, and so did I. But as I was trying to catch the last bus home that night and asked a stranger for the time, the answer I received was an aggressive “Where are you from?” The implication was obvious – that he would only answer me if I had the “right” blood, and my dark hair and eyes had clearly made him suspicious. I had run into a Neo-Nazi who was riding a wave of nationalist euphoria – a potent mix of divided Germany’s looming unification and its recent victory in the World Cup.
I have been asked the question “where are you from?” many times since then – not in Germany, but after moving to the United States. Not once did I stop and wonder if it was ill meant or xenophobic. But the next time will be different. With his racist tweets, Trump has potentially transformed the question “where are you from?” from a harmless inquiry about a person’s cultural origin (and, in my case, usually prompted by my unmistakable accent) into an aggressive one reminiscent of the experience I had that night back in Germany.
And so, another noble quality of the United States has been weakened by the tweets and deeds of this president. Quo vadis, America?