Time for Tomatoes in the Times of Trump

“Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden”
– Voltaire, letter to Pierre-Joseph Luneau de Boisjermain (October 21, 1769)

It started much earlier than when Donald Trump came into the picture, of course, but I couldn’t possibly pass on this alliteration.
In my case, I would have to date to my early teenage years the time I first discovered that there had been a Holocaust – moreover, that it had happened not in some distant realm but in the middle of the very country in which I was in the middle of trying to grow up into a decent person. As for the fact that it had taken place in the past: well, yes, but it was a past where my one grandmother had been about thirty years old and my other grandmother a teenager like I. To me that somehow made it something of a present. To be clear, there was no Nazi terror when I grew up in West Germany. But the shadows of that terror were alive and well.
At any rate, sometime around this moment of discovery, I must have asked myself for the very first time the question why, given all this, I should – or, better said, how I could – enjoy the small backyard garden my parents kept in our townhouse. My parents had bought that place on the southeastern outskirts of my hometown Nuremberg when I was six years old. My brother and I enjoyed that garden so much during the first years we were there that one of our neighbors hated us with a passion that could only be matched by our own passion for soccer, water balloon fights, and the like. We never planted tomatoes, but my parents did try their luck – their thumbs – at raspberry and gooseberry bushes, which even bore a handful of fruit some years. If I may say so myself, though: they were nothing compared to the tomatoes I’m growing this year in my own backyard.

This picture seems to suggest that I outgrew the Weltschmerz that plagued me in my younger years. Weltschmerz is one of these German words one shouldn’t even try to translate into English but John Steinbeck once beautifully paraphrased it in one of his novels as “the world of sadness that rises into the soul like a gas and spreads despair so that you probe for the offending event and can find none.” And, no, I never completely outgrew my Weltschmerz. Never really wanted to either. But I did learn to live with it.

In the fall of 2016 I had a student in one of my classes who, halfway into the semester, confided to me that he was battling onsets of depression. As a result, he claimed, his assignments sometimes came in late and he occasionally wouldn’t attend class. But whatever he did hand in was impressive, and whenever he showed up to class he was outstanding. His questions and comments were thoughtful and probing – so much so that I made it my mission to encourage this person to make it through my class despite all the personal odds he was facing. For a while it seemed to work. He shone a little bit brighter in that class.
Then came election night. When I realized that Donald Trump had won the American presidency, I wasn’t just disappointed, I was shaken. Even though, as a historian, I knew by now that masses of people – even the majority of a people – can make the wrong decision, somewhere hidden in me was still that girl who grew up in the shadow of the Cold War and wanted to cling on to that childish belief that Americans were better democrats than Germans ever would be.
So I was not surprised when that student wrote me that he wouldn’t show up to our next class, because he literally could not get out of bed. I tried to encourage him to come anyway, but he didn’t respond, so I tried again. And again. It was no use. He withdrew from the class and that was the end of my mission.
The Trump trolls gladly and condescendingly point to people like this student as prototypes of “Generation Snowflake,” a term used to mock its members supposed lack of resiliency and tendency to take offence easily. Personally, I have always preferred people who care and are able to share in the pain of others – who empathize. And snowflakes are fun and beautiful and magical, so what’s not to like? I just wish that all we fellow snowflakes would keep in mind that there will always be something as beautiful and satisfying as growing your own tomatoes in this world. And that doing that might make you strong enough to cultivate your larger backyard – despite Weltschmerz and all.