To call myself a writer in exile is something of a romanticization. I am no Thomas Mann. For one thing, I am a writer who does not write very much -- especially if you don’t count tweets. Mann and I also moved in opposite directions, and for very different reasons. The famously prolific Mann famously left his native Germany, where I now reside, to escape the Nazis. My own exile is voluntary, if not exactly apolitical. After a brief sojourn in Zurich, where I too lived for many years, Mann settled, uneasily, in my homeland, the United States. In the end, Mann returned to Switzerland, where he is buried. Throughout his last years, Mann suffered greatly not only from the abandonment of his comfortable home and familiar surroundings, but perhaps most of all from the distance to his adoring public, a chasm that was harder to bridge in those pre-internet days.
Exile is by its nature a lonely state, which many people in my life have shared – not always with me. My father lived most of his adult life in Australia, where he died a year ago. My favorite uncle spent many years living and writing in Iceland; I attended his funeral in Reykjavik in September, on my birthday. Even closer to home, my older son lives in New York, an ocean away from us. At 16, he left for what was supposed to be a semester abroad. That was 8 years ago, right before Trump was elected. His acceptance letter to the arts school he’d dreamed of attending arrived November 9, 2016. I had always joked that if Trump won, he wouldn’t be going anywhere. In the end, my firstborn took flight, and I threw myself into organizing the Women’s March in Heidelberg, about an hour from where I live, with a small group of equally outraged and heartbroken American mothers.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my son is the heir to a family legacy of exile. My mother was sent to Germany at the age of 16 to live with her brother, the one who later became my favorite uncle. He was stationed in Heidelberg at the time, which was the time of the Vietnam war. The youngest of seven children, my mother was unhappy in high school and eager to fly the nest. Her parents, exhausted and looking forward to life beyond their epic childrearing, didn’t need much convincing. When I proved challenging to my mother in my own final year of high school, she sent me to Germany too. I was 17. I returned to the US for college, only to return for my junior year abroad, where I met the German man who would become my husband.
In this roundabout way, it was my uncle’s service that led me to the place I write from today. Scratch an American in Germany, at least of my generation, and you are bound to find a history with the military. But it was globalization that brought us back to Europe. My husband works for an airline, and we raised our two boys here: Brussels, Zurich, and now Wiesbaden, the site of the largest US military base in Germany, even if we have little to do with it. Security is much tighter on the base than it was when we arrived 16 years ago, and it’s not worth the trouble. The bowling alley doesn’t even serve fountain drinks, one of the things I most miss from home.
There is a great deal to say about the relationship between writing and homesickness, and I plan to say at least some of it here. But I don’t want to close this first entry without noting that writing, no matter where it comes from, almost always connotes a less literal kind of exile, distance, alienation, or simply missing the mark. The origin of writing, I was taught, is presumed to have been a rough kind of accounting. Just as those scratches on clay tablets marked the place of where money was not but should be, the virtual ink we spill on ethereal paper – or on “X” – are (often poor) substitutes for the value we are owed as our human birthright: if not meaning, then at least connection. Indeed, although I have never been even close to famous, I empathize with Mann’s most profound loss when he fled his native land, that of his German-speaking public. Not knowing who would want to read our scratches is a feeling common to most writers, at home and abroad. I’ve decided to go ahead and make them anyway, unsure of who the addressee is, or if there will be any return.
I haven’t yet touched upon a key difference between Thomas Mann and myself. While Mann’s sexuality has become a matter of great interest, he was a Mann in every sense. There are few aspects of my life – certainly not writing -- that remain untouched by the fact that I am not. Whether far from home or stuck in it (or both), women who write are steeped in their own kind of wandering, sometimes lonely, sometimes surrounded by ghosts, sometimes ringed by all-too-real bodies, big and small, sweaty and sweet, hungry and demanding. Women who write set out for uncharted territory, which always means they might not be back; and even at this late date in our collective history, turning your back on people lands as a very different gesture when it comes from a woman. From the time we’re little girls, we’re taught not to do it, at the risk of inviting violent retribution.
So that’s where I’m coming from, and indeed where I come from (quite literally, since my parents met in German class): writing while far from home, from others, from desire, even from oneself. I’ll chime in again soon. Thanks for reading.