Wolfgang Koeppen - Journey Through America

I could never have translated Wolfgang Koeppen's Amerikafahrt in isolation. My work has continuously depended on the teaching, expertise, and help of others, both in Europe and the United States.

My long debt of gratitude begins with my German-language teachers. Anne Bailey furnished a splendid introduction to the German language. She also had the patience to shepherd a group of teenagers through Germany some two months before die Wende. This three-week trip, my initial Deutschlandfahrt, left me with a lasting interest in Germany. At Oberlin College, I studied the German language with Heidi Tewerson.

At University College, Oxford, where a British Marshall Scholarship provided immersion in modern European history, I was lucky to read German history with Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann. As a doctoral student in Harvard's History of American Civilization program, I studied American literature with Werner Sollors. Werner is a man of many languages and literatures, German not least among them, and I cannot exaggerate the power of his example or influence. He was a natural mentor for this project. It was self-evident to him why an American student of American studies would want to go and study in Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich.

In the academic year 20042005, I was a German Chancellor Scholar and worked in Munich courtesy of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. It is an honor to be and remain a Humboldtianer. It has also been of immense practical value to me. This fellowship enabled a year of teaching and research at the Amerika Institut of the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU). There I was able to work closelyand become friendswith Berndt Ostendorf and Michael Hochgeschwender, eminent experts on the Euro-American terrain who have watched benevolently over this project. Later, the Humboldt Foundation sponsored several returns to Germany after 2005, during which I began my translation of Amerikafahrt. The Humboldt Foundation is astute in its emphasis on networks, and the network it constructed, by virtue of awarding me a Chancellor Scholarship, is the network I have relied upon in researching, conceptualizing, and executing this project. Within the Humboldt Foundation and the American Friends of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, I would like to thank in particular: Bob Grathwol and Donita Moorhus, Britta Gross, Katrin Amian, Virginia Barth, and Steffen Mehlich.

For four years in Washington, DC, I lived across the street from the German Historical Institute, a fellow without portfolio. There I got to know Christof Mauch, Anke Ortlepp, and Uta Balbier, three German Americanists and three friends who are colleagues in America as well as Europe. Anke gave a thorough reading of the introduction to this book. Between Washington and Munich, Christof has made countless contributions to this work of translation. He knows the inner dimensions of Koeppen's ouevre and is, as with so many subjects, the ideal interlocutor on the intricacies of this German text. Christof has also helped my translation efforts in many material ways. He has several times invited me to the Amerika Institut, and it was his invitation that brought me to the LMU's Center for Advanced Studies in the spring of 2010 and the summer of 2011. Christof was instrumental in transforming this translation from manuscript to book, a tireless advocate on its behalf who, together with his co-editor, Christoph Irmscher, welcomed Journey through America into their series, Transatlantic Perspectives, with Berghahn Books.

At Berghahn Books, both Marion Berghahn and Ann Przyzycki have been exceptionally helpful, responsive, and interested in this project, from proposal to manuscript to book. They have had the courage to publish a historical document that remains, after some five decades, an avant-garde experiment in language and vision.

It was with Christof Mauch that I organized a Koeppen conference at the Center for Advanced Studies in Munich, in January 2010, titled Amerikafahrten, or American Journeys. It was a chance to reflect seriously on the image of America in Koeppen's writing, and amid CAS's characteristic scholarly calm and Schwabing elegance I had the good fortune to meet several distinguished Koeppen scholars: Walter Erhart, Jrg Dring, Hans-Ulrich Treichel, and the director of the Koeppen archive, Eckhard Schumacher. I am grateful to Walter Erhart for inviting me to contribute an article on Koeppen to the Internationales Archiv fr Sozialgeschichte der Deutschen Literatur, to Sonja Asal for inviting me to release an essay on Koeppen as a CAS E Publication, and to Eckhard Schumacher for his invitation to a spirited roundtable on Amerikafahrt, with Walter Erhart, in Greifswald. There I could see Koeppen's point of departure, his hometown, with my own eyes and get a sense of the rich archival materials gathered in his Geburtshaus.

The LMU's Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) was no passive vehicle for research. On my first day there I learned that almost its entire staff had read Amerikafahrt prior to my arrival in Munich. This is only one way to describe the atmosphere of collegiality and curiosity that reigns at CAS. It was not only a privilege to be a Dachfellow; it was a delight as well, and for everythingthe privilege of ideal working conditions and the delight of intellectual fraternityI have Annette Meyer and Sonja Asal to thank. Lena Bouman and Susanne Schaffrath were kind and keen consultants. I would also like to thank Christof Rapp, CAS's genial director, for his support, and to thank the CAS staff for their hospitality, their professionalism, and their redoubtable humor. So many pages of this translation were happily written and revised on Seestr. 13.

The Catholic University of America, my home institution, has shown a steadfast commitment to this unusual project. It never demanded that I be anything other than the scholar I wish to be, whether this means writing a monograph on twentieth-century U.S. history, authoring a book of literary criticism or translating the unknown travelogue of an unknown writer (in his American context). Such is the freedom Catholic University's history department has guaranteed, and I would like to thank my colleagues in two separate columns. First the Americanists: Tim Meagher, Leslie Tentler, and Steve West; and then the Europeanists: Jennifer Davis, Laura Mayhall, and Caroline Sherman. Jerry Muller deserves a column of his own. We share many of the same interests, and when it comes to scholarship I do my best to meet Jerry's exacting standards. His generosity and encouragement make it easier to do so. Tom and Lisa Cohen are not only dear Washington friends but fellow addicts of literature and of the finely turned sentence.

Beyond my department, I would like to express my gratitude to Dean Larry Poos and Dean James Greene at Catholic University. In the shortest imaginable time, they arranged for a generous and urgently needed grant-in-aid. Ernie Suarez, a colleague in the English department, a friend and a neighbor, is a stalwart comrade in the realm of literature and music.

My peripatetic family is to be thanked in a different register. There is nothing mono-lingual about this family, on the American or the Lithuanian side, and with our family more is gained than lost in translation, as has been the case for me since childhood. My parents criss-cross the Euro-American world, from the East Coast to Russia. My brother Daniel and sister-in-law Melinda have added Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and Alaska to the list. Speaking of lists, the countries-visited competition is still ongoing with my brother-in-law Redas, sister-in-law Indre and with the next generation, Lukas and Guoda. My parents-in-law are the most generous of hosts in Tolkunai, where I have puzzled over Koeppen's words on the veranda in summer and by the wood stove in winter. An ocean away, my parents have created their idyll in Brunswick, Maineone part library, one part yoga studio, and one part refuge for gourmets and cinephiles. I have had access to the Center for Advanced Studies in Munich, while working on this translation, and to more intimate centers of advanced study in Dzukija and New England.