A better world starts in New York

In the bookstore I looked for comfort in these difficult times. After fifteen minutes of browsing I came across The other side. Living and researching between New York and Berlin, written by one Wolfgang Schivelbusch (Berlin, 1941). And because I thought that name was so funny and I love New York as well as Berlin, I bought it. Once home, I read it in one go.

The other side is a fascinating cultural history of post-war Germany and America from the 1970s in the form of interviews with the author. After Donald Trump’s election as president of America, Schivelbusch, who lives half of the year in New York and the other half in Berlin, was asked by his publisher to write about his personal impressions of America now that Trump suddenly had changed. Schivelbusch agreed, but at the time was suffering from writer’s block. The publisher then suggested to do it in the form of interviews.

Schivelbusch is a cosmopolitan intellectual who feels at home in both his cities because they are polar opposites. His book therefore provides an analysis of dynamic America versus old Europe. Trump’s America is very similar to Nixon’s, and …. in the twilight of the Weimar Republic.

It is an original comparison, especially when Schivelbusch compares Nixon with the German president Von Hindenburg, who gave Hitler free rein in 1933. He does not call this Hindenburg a fascist, but the reactionary gravedigger of liberal democracy, which in turn can also be said of Nixon and Trump.

Before going to America for the first time in 1970 and ending up between the Vietnam and civil rights protests, Schivelbusch talks about his years in Germany. As a student, he befriends the Hungarian-Jewish literary scholar Peter Szondi, who is a major influence on him. Szondi, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, is an expert on Walter Benjamin’s work and, like the cultural philosopher, commits suicide.

Schivelbusch, who obtained his doctorate in Brecht’s stage work, has never worked at a university, but with the support of stipends and assignments he has written a series of special books that many university lecturers can envy. His most famous work is History of Railway Travel. On the industrialization of space and time in the 19th century (1977). It is an original history of culture and technology, in which he examines the interaction between man and machine, emphasizing the destruction of the familiar old during the creation of the new. In 2005 he caused a real riot with a book about the similarities between fascism, National Socialism and Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.

He conducts research for his books at the New York Public Library or the Library of Congress. America in that respect, unlike Germany, is the library of Alexandria.

Guilt and shame form a common thread in his books, which has everything to do with the German feeling of guilt about the Holocaust. Only the realization that the cultural and intellectual Weimar Republic emigrated to America after 1933 offers him comfort. Resulting in a fascinating double life.