Living with an Asterix

Is it all a dream? At some point the question must be confronted, the body must be pinched. Is this real life, or a Zwischenspiel? Are Americans who live abroad really just “on leave”, living with an asterix—for years or decades perhaps—like so many university professors whose starred departmental profiles provide annual disappointment to scores of over-eager pupils?

I am not an expatriate. I have neither married a European nor given up my American citizenship. I jealously—bitterly—cling to my right to vote, among other New World privileges. Despite soon beginning work for a European magazine, my mind still inhabits a media community whose main organs are centered in New York. I am considering opening a Roth IRA. My return to the United States may be perpetually deferred in an earthly, temporal sense, but it is always imminent as a mental proposition. My waking mind might be uncertain about its future plans, but my unconscious has no doubt that it will soon find itself back on the other side of the Atlantic.

So what does it mean, in the year 2008, for Americans in their early twenties to pack up and move to Europe? Everyone draws on traditions, whether they like to or not, and “losing” oneself in European exile in an especially venerable one. And yet, as I open the Literatur section of this week’s Die Zeit and read about Truman Capote’s romp around Venice with Donald Windham, I feel more distance than resonance. Capote’s own gay grand tour, his Italian muse-mongering, was untraditional in its own way, and cannot really be compared to the kind of American exile-experiences chronicled and/or imagined by earlier writers like Henry James.

But Capote seems much closer to James and the nineteenth century ‘Grand Tour’ model than he does to any Americans I know today. What’s so different about 2008?

Well, for one thing, the dollar is a lot weaker. In a way this is the crucial thing. Americans living in Europe can no longer correctly style themselves as the emissaries of American empire, feasting upon the cultural left-overs of a ruined and bankrupt continent. Neither are we burdened with the same sense of cultural inferiority that Americans once inevitably were. In matters both cultural and economic, the scales have tipped back towards parity. Does this make the European-American relationship in some way “purer”, an encounter between equals?

The other thing that must be said—loath as I am to over-extrapolate from my inevitably narrow experience—is that moving to Europe feels entirely normalized. It has carries with it no special romance or cachet. In a way, deciding to move to Berlin is not so unlike deciding to move to New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco, particularly if you speak German. Part of this is a cyber-effect, no doubt, an illusion of closeness.

And yet I still wonder if this a detour from life as I will one day live it. Whether this were so would be much clearer if I were living in, say, Bangkok. There would be no question in my mind that living in Thailand would carry a very big asterix indeed. Berlin is fuzzier, because it is less exotic. Maybe this really is real life. Maybe my expectations of myself shouldn’t be any different than they would be back in the states. Maybe I should be looking for a long-term career, a long-term mate, a mortgage-loan, etc.

Surely one of the chief reasons young Americans go abroad in the first place is because they don’t want to look for these things. Maybe it’s a mistake to qualify jobs and marriages and mortgages as “real” and everything else as “vacation”. Maybe life really is a beach. Or should be.