My American Refuge In Germany — And One More Door That Trump Has Closed

BERLIN — As a child, Germany was easier for me to bear because I could always go to America. I didn’t need to get on a plane, cross an ocean, or break through a space-time continuum. The alternative I’m talking about was only about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) away from the village in the Odenwald region where we lived during the 1970s and 1980s.

That other world was waiting just behind a barbed-wire fence: the U.S. Army Base in Mannheim, the American military installation where my mother took me with her to work. Switching from one cosmos to the other was only a 30-minute drive. Then we were in.

You could think of the Army Base as a miniature version of the United States, right in the middle of the Baden-Württemberg states. An America of apartment blocks, snack bars and shops where you paid in dollars, where strangers greeted one another with “Hi, sweetheart,” where not only men but also women carried assault rifles, where peanut butter, artichokes and other foods unheard of in the Odenwald were readily available at low prices, where a tub of ice cream could fill half a moving box, where I later got my first Sony Walkman and rap cassettes, and where, above all, there was a feeling of lightness in the air. Even if it was military ground, the buildings were former Wehrmacht barracks, and the Cold War raged just beyond the gates.

An American attitude

The Army Base was more modern than the small town of one thousand souls nestled in deep green countryside where we lived at the time. But above all, it was the bright mood that made the base so appealing. A laid-back friendliness that made people behind counters and cash registers call out, “Hey, how are you today?” An openness that gave you, at least on the surface, the feeling that you weren’t just a nobody, maybe even that you were welcome. Unlike in the Odenwald.

And it’s exactly that attitude that is being done away with in today’s America. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, walls are going up. No one gets the benefit of the doubt anymore. Trump’s claims that the United States is being exploited and betrayed, his insinuations and retaliatory measures, are the exact opposite of what long defined the country: the generous view of people and things, the promise that with respect, ambition, pop culture, consumption, and democratic values, everything would eventually move upward into something better. That was the path the U.S. had chosen. One that Germany had gradually taken up for itself. One that made life more pleasant.

So what are Trump and his supporters doing now with happy life and friendliness? In all the turmoil over the ever-shifting world order, that question arises for Germany, a country that has taken the U.S. as a model in so many ways. For the U.S. soldiers who remained after the Cold War and are still stationed here. For the America that lives in my mind.

I wanted to visit a U.S. base again, to make some kind of comparison between then and now. But the Army Base in Mannheim no longer exists. The last American soldiers left in 2015. The city has since built new housing and a business park on the site.

The Americans were just as they used to be: friendly, open, helpful.

So I looked for an alternative. One of the largest remaining U.S. military installations in Europe is now in Stuttgart. I called them. Trump had just insulted the Ukrainian president during his visit to the White House. He was already in the process of dismantling democratic institutions. I doubted whether a visit to the Stuttgart Army Base would be possible.

I reached a U.S. Army press officer on the phone. The conversation went surprisingly well. In fact, that day he was the nicest press officer in the world. He said a visit wouldn’t be a problem at all. He could show me around, take me to the shops, set up a few conversations, and even offered me an interview with the base commander. I was surprised. The Americans were just as they used to be: friendly, open, helpful.

In the 1970s, it had been my mother’s job that brought us to the Army Base. She was a teacher at the University of Maryland, which had a satellite campus on the base. My mother is American, my father is German. They met at university in Heidelberg, where my mother had arrived on a study-abroad scholarship. Staying and building a life here was made easier for her partly because her work at the Army Base allowed her to stay connected to the optimistic outlook she associated with the United States. The German mentality still feels a bit foreign to my mother even today. She still finds Germans too serious, far too uptight.

On the Army Base, she could engage in small talk and express the cheerful enthusiasm that often clashed with everyday life in Germany. In the Odenwald, the supermarket cashier would give her a puzzled look when my mother complimented her earrings or wished her a great day. That simply wasn’t the kind of thing customers did in Germany back then. It wasn’t how people interacted.

My mother taught courses in American literature at the Army Base. When I was little, I would often sit in the back of the classroom while she taught, doodling with felt-tip pens. It could have been boring, but the base offered a refreshing change from life in the Odenwald. The soldiers who attended my mother’s classes were different from the people in our village. They spoke in slang, had different skin colors, were fit, and wore their hair in braids or close-cropped styles. They exchanged complicated handshakes and brought sticky popcorn or marshmallows with them.

Some had come into the Army from city slums, others from reservations or from the desolate reaches of the Midwest. The easy way they clanked off their weapons at the start of class and slung them over the backs of their chairs before my mother began discussing narrative perspective was, in its own way, a testament to the system’s lack of prejudice, to the possibilities that seemed to exist in the American universe. You could get out of your circumstances. Do something else. Even the American military was a warm and welcoming place.

Learning from America

By contrast, the prospects in the Odenwald felt limited. The 1970s and early 1980s could be a grim time in rural West Germany, at least that’s how it seemed to me. The farm kids among my friends came to school in rubber boots that were too tight and smelled of cowsheds. They drove tractors before they were even out of elementary school. Some came to class with bruises. They weren’t allowed to go to secondary school even if they had the grades. Later, they tore down country roads on souped-up mopeds or set off sacks of fertilizer in the woods. It wasn’t an inspiring vision of the future.

We stayed on the margins. Outsiders in a village where it was part of everyday routine for women to put on housecoats and headscarves and toil away on the farm and in the house. The men drove to the district capital in their overalls to work on the assembly line. The two pubs on the main street, where a few regulars stared into their beers, were no place for adventure.

We stood out in that setting. My mother wore jeans, drove a car, earned her own money. My father traveled a lot. At home, we spoke English, sometimes had pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast, listened to Cat Stevens or the Beatles on the record player. We weren’t freaks, we had just moved there. Still, the older villagers nudged each other when they saw us on the street and called us “the Americans.” It wasn’t open hostility or overt exclusion. We got along with people. But there was always a faint sense that we didn’t really belong.

The American spark lit up many lives in Germany, not just mine.

The Army Base balanced things out. That small piece of America inside Germany was better at forging connections than the Odenwald ever was. It actually felt good to use products from the Army Base store to push back against the quiet prejudice in the countryside, to impress at least the other kids in town. The jars of peanut butter, boxes of cookies, and cartons of milk conveyed a sense of superiority just by the sheer boldness of their packaging sizes. They were oversized, exaggerated, simply fantastic. The message they carried was that things were different elsewhere. That idea sustained me for a long time.

An American spark lit up many lives in Germany, not just mine. It helped people shed the weight of West German reality, even if just for the length of a song on the radio. It really was possible to take things more lightly. To have more fun. That was how the U.S. gradually changed the Germans.

Of course, my view of America changed later. I learned about the crimes of the Vietnam War, the interference in Latin America. Then came the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. is also a country marked by racism and sexism, full of inequality and contradictions. America has its dark sides.

Germany has changed, too. It no longer resembles the Odenwald of the 1970s, not even the Odenwald itself is the same anymore. Germany has become more relaxed, more open, maybe even a little less awkward. It has learned a lot from America.

Closing the door

But lately, something has started to shift in my mind. With the new U.S. administration, a vague sense of unease has taken hold. It’s hard to pin down. The unease goes beyond the outrage many in Germany feel about the attacks on democratic institutions and freedoms. It’s not just about the strained transatlantic relationship either, where people are hoping that Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s first visit to Trump won’t end in disaster. It’s about a certain outlook on life that I took with me from the Army Base. The spirit the U.S. had given to the world over the past few decades, which had been good for Germany, too. And now Trump is stealing that feeling.

The abandonment of this basic attitude leaves me genuinely unsettled. Maybe I feel it more because of what happened back then. What exactly do all the accusations and attacks, the lies, the general bad behavior of Trump do to me? I think, in the end, it’s quite simple: it cuts off the path. It closes a door.

A few days before my planned visit to the Army Base in Stuttgart, I get an email from the press officer. He writes that some of the questions I had sent in advance for the commander “touch on political topics.” He adds, “Since our President serves as Commander-in-Chief, we are not authorized to conduct political questions or discussions.” He suggests I revise the questions. “Should you be able to make an appropriate adjustment, we would be happy to further review your visit.”

Maybe it’s an order from Washington. Maybe it’s just fear.

I want the visit to happen. I want to find my old America again, to at least get close to the feelings I had back then. I give in. I write back and say I can leave out the questions they don’t like. For example, the one asking how things have changed for them on the base under Trump’s presidency.

The next day, I get a call from the press officer. His boss is also on the line, and there’s a muffled air of aggression coming through the phone. The boss doesn’t want to have a conversation. She wants to make a statement. She accuses me of having a political agenda. She ignores my offer to change the questions. Instead, she says they’ve had bad experiences with the press. They don’t know Die Zeit. The German media, she adds, have been extremely critical lately. She cancels my visit, curtly saying, “Sorry for the inconvenience.” It doesn’t sound like regret.

It really would have been easy for the U.S. Army’s public affairs team in Germany. They could have walked me around the base, made a little small talk. Maybe I would have been satisfied at the sight of a working snack bar or a few packets of cookies. The colonel could have talked about their good relationship with the local Swabian population, could have raved about the festivals they’ve been celebrating together for decades. Maybe that would have won me over.

Maybe they’re just trying to be preemptively obedient. Maybe it’s an order from Washington. Maybe it’s just fear. The interview with the commander had been the press officer’s idea. Now they’ve changed their minds. They’re in a bad mood. Their behavior fits.

Looks like I’m too late. The Army base has already let Trump in.