Peace and War Games ...

I'm an American.

I'm an American in the same way in which I am an employee of Space Cadet Central or a participant in my church. It's my country, but, in a way, it's not my country. Ironically, and in a typically American, utilitarian way, I became a citizen almost three years ago because my job required it. Until then, I had been perfectly happy with just my Green Card and my EU passport and the knowledge that I wouldn't have to pay any visa taxes when travelling anywhere in Europe. Then, in 2003, I found out about a specific German law, passed in 2000, for Germans employed in the high tech industry in the U.S. This law allowed me to apply to retain my German citizenship and, once that process was finished, to apply for American citizenship without losing my shiny red passport--which I did. And which makes me a dual citizen still employed at Space Cadet Central.

In contrast to other immigrants who come here with just a shirt on their back and hardly a penny to their name, I came here with a comparatively solid economic background in Germany, but without a chance to follow the highschool teaching career for which I had studied ("Lehrerschwemme" is what the media had dubbed the phenomenon in the '90s). I had run my own translation and interpretation business for a while, and plan B, if I hadn't been accepted to grad school here, had been to launch a franchise of a large Europe-wide language school in Northern Germany while finishing my Ph.D. there. I liked the idea of the corner office, especially in an institution of "higher" (i.e. postsecondary) learning. Good stuff.

Instead, I was accepted to, among others, Toadtunnel Toontown's grad school--not without The Ex signing away his life savings as my F-1 visa sponsor (for which I will forever be grateful!)--and decided to launch an academic career whose final outcome might have brought me back to Europe (East Anglia, to be precise, or, *gasp*, the Sorbonne. Hey, a girl can dream, can't she?). Fine, things didn't work out that way, which meant that, at the end of grad school, I've had to redefine that academic identity into a corporate one and take things from here. Why not return to Germany at that point? Honestly, at the end of the 90s, I was simply tired: From taking exams and quals, from being really the sole breadwinner and working between three and four different jobs at at time, from another form of "Lehrerschwemme" (this time called "Ph.D. glut") catching up with my professional plans for world conquest. It simply was easier to get a corporate job here in the U.S. than to try the same thing in Europe.

Throughout all this, I have nonetheless remained attached to my European identity. As a German teen in the 1980s, I went on peace demonstrations, Easter marches, what have you, to help stave off Cruise Missiles and SS-20 on both, Eastern and Western, German soil. I studied the beauty of German poetry, of German music, and of the German resistance against the Third Reich (just incase any of you are jumping to Nazi conclusions), and I was proud to be born in the country of Brahms, Siemens, and BMW, not to speak of Riesling and the Frankfurt School. This hasn't changed. While I'm still a passionate German, with a personal history very much invested in my national identity, I am, at this point, a rather lukewarm American, without an overly passionate personal or political history here.

That's why things like "Veterans Day" fall in with peanut butter and Santa Claus for me--as something foreign and American. While I respect that most of you may have lost a friend or family member in one of the wars (or in Mr. Bush's conquistadorial self-masturbation that is Iraq), and while I grieve with you because violent deaths of whatever nation or political persuasion must be mourned, I find myself hard-pressed to celebrate "the military" or war veterans that fought for "'our' freedom." Because that freedom, which politicians of both persuasions and whatever usually right-wing nationalist rhetoricians call "our," it's also always someone else's freedom, or more likely the loss thereof. In its present form, this holiday is about wars past and, let's face it, future.

So, being the German I am, I did my research again (just as I did with Labor Day), and wouldn't you know it, the original purpose of this date was to commemorate Armistice Day--that is, the day when World War I ended on the Western Front with Paul von Hindenburg's signature at Compiègne Forest, on 11/11/1918 (at 11 am Paris time), a treaty which left Germany completely demilitarized. So, this day, with whose celebrations "we" now honor war, it used to be a day at which "the other we" used to celebrate the end of war and the end of the military in of my home country. Ironic, isn't it? And yet, it's something I can get behind because it bespeaks peace, swords to ploughshares, whatever you call it. It's that day, and its spirit (despite its harrowing historical follow-on of which I am well aware) that I'd rather celebrate.