The first was an African American minister in Atlanta, Georgia.

I was nineteen and he told me about his Baptist church before inviting me to the service.

A few years later, an Indigenous gas station attendant in Rockwell, New Mexico, spent more than two hours laying out his plans for a UFO observing station to be built on his land under those wonderfully clear skies;

then a Jewish copy shop owner in New York whose two hobbies—rescuing dogs in Central Park and reading every Vietnam War novel ever published—kept him busy around the clock;

an elderly lady in San Francisco who put me up in her small apartment for four days without knowing me;

and of course my longtime friend Roger from the American Northwest Coast,

a Buddhist and psychotherapist who has become a marksman in recent years because he believes it shouldn't "depend on a violent person's whim whether I live or die."

Today Roger owns four handguns, a rifle and a shotgun.

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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These people and many others have conveyed to the visitor that personal encounters always go far beyond what can be known, predicted and even more so lectured on from above about Americans.

You simply can't do that without your own experience: you can't study the country from afar.

One cannot understand the individualism in American behavior without studying America's individuals.

Travelers to the USA know that old judgments are confirmed every now and then, from the garish advertising to the limp coffee;

but much more often one experiences surprises in terms of courage, originality and optimism.

Passionate testimony

Perhaps it is the latter quality that most distinguishes Americans from Germans: while we are anxious, aging and security-conscious, we look to the welfare state for help and the elderly no longer see anything strange in sitting in the same office chair for thirty years, believe Residents of an immigration country - even those who are materially worse off than us - intuitively think of the power of change.

When this power is again concentrated, as in Amanda Gorman's public recitation of a poem at Joe Biden's inauguration, we feel three things: surprise that pathos is still possible despite everything;

embarrassment that a large part of the nation seems to share the moment of pathos as a matter of course;

and, if we're honest, a certain envy of the USA, because pathos is frowned upon in Germany for historical, mentality-specific and other reasons.

Pathos is passionately expressed emotion.

So instead of having a clue about America, we tend to cultivate a moralizing, nagging anti-Americanism that doesn't care about cultural peculiarities or national history and particularly likes to make judgments like that Americans are "superficial" - which is what Germans really think for that reason , because Americans consistently use politeness that Germans misunderstand, just as almost the entire rest of the world is more polite than we are.

There is also the boasting of self-proclaimed German America connoisseurs, who feel far superior to their compatriots because they are familiar with one or the other specific feature of the USA.

Where there is a lack of deeper knowledge of American cultural history, Germany also sees Thomas Gottschalk as an expert, which Gottschalk should not be blamed for.

What have we learned from novels?

Of course we get a lot from this country.

A constant flow of goods from there to here keeps us supplied.

It seems, however, that we have learned little, for example, from the many American novels that have given us messages from this contradictory, contested, ever-changing world for decades: formerly the Faulkner epics about the poor whites whose descendants are guaranteed to have voted for Donald Trump;

then from the novels by James Baldwin, John Updike, Toni Morrison and Richard Ford, by Junot Diaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Ayad Akhtar.

What happens now after the midterms?

Two years ago, Ezra Klein wrote in his book "The Deep Trench: The History of the Divided States of America" ​​about the future task of everyone: "We have to reform our political system so that it can function under conditions of polarization." America's realism we can learn something.