Amerikan Dream
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Rainer Rumold
About this book
While originating in the author’s experience as a German and American citizen (double citizenship), the book is not an autobiography. It combines narrative accounts, scholarly literary and art historical commentary, as well as critical political opinions. At its core it is focused on readings of German and American literature, art, film and popular culture in the context of the radically changing times. The book speaks for the first time specifically for a unique age-group, ‘Hitler’s war children’ (1939–1945), historically the most Americophile generation ever, of and for a highly privileged and educated stratum thereof. It is a cultural logbook of a transatlantic experience (1945 to the 2020s) with the German ideal of Bildung, critical education in the Trumpist U.S., and our democracy at issue.
Author / Editor information
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).
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