The Statue of Liberty in front of the New York skyline
Photo:Bettmann Archives
Wolfgang Koeppen in "America trip"
A flock of amateurs swarmed across the decks, like scared sheep. The Statue of Liberty jutted out of the sea in a torn cloak of mist and was an honest sister of the popular giantesses, Bavaria, Germania or Berolina, whose hollow heads can be stepped into to see the meaningless expanded horizon from their blind eyes, a mother complex of the nation , a matron who sullenly holds a wet torch but does not illuminate anything.
There are two types of travel writer: the one to whom everything is new in a foreign country, and the other to whom everything appears familiar in a foreign country. For the second group there is the cliché. It is roughly what the "Word Suggestions" function is for writing on a smartphone: a prosthesis that feels pleasantly real. New York, for example, almost describes itself for this type of writer: street canyons, melting pot, asphalt jungle, Big Apple; finished.
The first group includes the writer Wolfgang Koeppen, who became known in Germany in the early 1950s with books such as "Tauben im Gras" or "Das Treibhaus". In April 1958, Koeppen set out on a journey of discovery to a country he had never been to before and which he nevertheless knew. Everyone knows America, everyone has a view of this country, even those who have never been there; perhaps those most decided. Hadn't Karl May imagined his wild west in the most colorful way in Saxony? And hadn't Franz Kafka dreamed "the truest dream" of America in his novel, which was missing, as Koeppen writes, although he was never in the USA?
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