Amerikan Dream

The author, born in East Prussia in 1941, was too young to consciously experience the Nazi era and World War II, but, like the rest of his generation, he remains haunted by an unseen monster for a lifetime. The core of his family survived and resettled in the West. Attending an elite ‘humanist Gymnasium,’ then the University of Hamburg, he experienced the best, as well as the failures, of traditional German Bildung (classical education) to cope with the challenges of the postwar era.  Amerika became the magic icon of a dynamic and exciting future, the utopia of his generation. Concrete encounters with the American Dream included: A year at an American high school, later American Studies at the University of New Mexico, and a PhD in German literature from Stanford University in the context of ’68, the international student movement, then professor at Northwestern University for three decades. These experiences generated the understanding of the profound dialectic between European thought and American materialism. The present relapse of Trumpism and the MAGA movement into tribal nationalism and the rise of the far right in Europe is viewed by his generation as a return of the repressed.  Rainer Rumold is a professor emeritus of German literature and critical thought at Northwestern University. His previous books include monographs on Helmut Heissenbuettel  (Stanford) and Gottfried Benn (Scriptor/Athenaeum); The Janus Face ofthe German Avant-Garde: From Expressionism toward Postmodernism (Northwestern,2001); editions of Eugene Jolas’s writings on James Joyce and the international avant-garde (Yale & Northwestern); and Archaeologies of Modernity. Avant-garde Bildung (Northwestern, 2015).