“I never realized how much fear, how much suspicion my country still evokes, until I came to America five years ago. Fifty years after a decade of darkness is not a long time. I knew that. And yet it often left me confounded to read how my country was perceived. I started clipping stories from the papers. I have a thick folder labeled ‘German’ now. There is not a single article about my country in it that does not include the words ‘Nazis,’ ‘past,’ ‘guilt,’ ‘uneasy,’ ‘anti-Semitic,’ ‘troubling,’ ‘disturbed,’ or ‘alarm.’ Most of the stories ‘evoke the past’ or ‘raise troubling questions’ about my country.”
