“A package truck. You know, like on The King of Queens.”

I told Matthias that despite my job as a professionelle Fernsehzuschauerin (professional TV watcher), I had only seen a few episodes of The King of Queens and I didn’t like it.

“Echt?” he said in disbelief. “It’s the funniest show in the world.” Germans love terrible American television for reasons I will never understand (I, in turn, love terrible German television), so this was not the deal-breaker it would have been on domestic soil. As the sun finally began to set, Matthias suggested we all meet up in a few hours out at Krumme Lanke, which sounds like “crummy lake,” but it is actually a quite lovely place to go, down in the leafy southwestern suburb of Dahlem. “I can bring my guitar and some candles, and we can sing and hang out.” This was exactly the kind of weird adventure I’d been expecting since I walked off the plane, and if I had to withstand some German-language recounting of Kevin James jokes, so be it.

Three hours later, I alighted at the Krumme Lanke station, the end of the U1 line that I used to ride to my Bertolt Brecht seminar. I expected to see the same ragtag crowd of internationals as before, but instead it was just Matthias. “Nobody else is coming,” he explained. He was, as promised, carrying his guitar and three small tea lights. I had, as promised, brought a bottle of red wine and an opener. We were, I realized with what turned out to be a very slow mind, on a date. Berlin was nearly unrecognizable to me now, full of expensive boutiques and nightclubs with international reputations that wouldn’t let someone like me in. (Not that I was a fan of German techno, which sounds like a Volkswagen and a record player challenging each other to a duel, or dancing to German techno, which primarily involves jumping up and down in one place.) I was older, too, no longer able to glom onto amorphous groups of students up to no good. But I was pleased to see that fortunes there could still turn in forty-five seconds, that a picnic with a bunch of dorks could morph into a romantic lakeside date with no warning. What’s better, I could do the whole thing in German, which would be great practice. The competitiveness of my early youth had recently resurfaced, and since I had recently discovered that German wasn’t actually that hard to learn if only one actually spent any time studying, I’d shot to the top of Oberstufe. This also had the pleasant side effect of unnerving Goran and Hsu, who were used to being the best at everything and, at least in Goran’s case, distraught to be schooled by a girl. Who knew that the key to linguistic and academic success was, you know, effort? And now here I was on some top-notch cultural immersion, if I did say so myself.

Except then, as we settled in by the lake and Matthias asked me exactly why breaking up with my boyfriend had made me so sad, before I could answer, he said, in English: “You know what? Let’s switch. I find it much easier to speak about my emotions in English.”

God dammit. Turns out he’d spent a year of high school in Ireland and spoke English as well as I did. I wanted to say that I’d rather not speak about emotions if it was going to interfere with my linguistic process. But that sentence had some tricky subjunctive constructions I wanted to get just right—plus I had to search a second for the word for “progress,” Fortschritt, literally “a step forward”—and I accidentally created about four seconds of awkward silence. Matthias took this as his cue to make a move, and asked, in English, if he could kiss me. I hesitated, but only for an instant. I knew that nothing about this evening would really take away any of my pain, my loneliness, my insecurity. But, I had also never had relations on the banks of a lake by candlelight before—and if I did, its adventure-cache would finally begin to make up for all the previous evenings spent watching German Phoebe sing “Schmuddelkatz.”

“How much longer are you going to be here?” Matthias asked later, as we rode the night bus back to Schöneberg and I inspected the abrasions on my knees caused by the rough sand.

“About two weeks,” I said.

That was his German way of informing me that we would be dating for those two weeks. He introduced me to all of his friends and took me to hang out at a sort of unstaffed informal club near the FU, where I learned to play a board game called Therapy, which plays off the general German disapproval of the mental health profession and those who partake in its practitioners.

Matthias’s friends were nice enough, with the exception of Hanno, who, when he learned that I was about to start a doctorate and enjoyed the fiction of Franz Kafka and the political theory of Walter Benjamin, just kept shaking his head and going “ACH DU SCHEISSE!” When it was my turn to read off one of the questions in Therapy, he would mimic my slight accent until whatever confidence Oberstufe had bestowed was duly obliterated. Scheiße indeed.

There were a lot of downsides to my two-week relationship with Matthias. First of all, he was the opposite of Johannes and Paul—and for that matter, any German I had ever met—when it came to his cigarettes. I was under the impression that German smokers offered cigarettes to other smokers no matter what the pretense, but after I’d bummed about three, he turned to me and said, in poorly ordered English that was out of character: “Not to be an asshole, but, maybe you buy also cigarettes?” And he, like many twenty-four-year-old Germans, still lived with his parents. This meant that if I ever wanted to have relations with him indoors, I would have to do so in his childhood twin bed. Whereas the act of bringing home a sex-companion about whom one is decidedly unserious, and parading her in front of one’s parents, is the subject of many a prudish American advice column, adult Germans who live with their parents often enjoy a relationship more akin to flatmates (except the parents still pay for all the rent and the food, and, in Matthias’s case, still cleaned and ironed his underwear).

That is why, on my penultimate morning in Berlin, as I tiptoed petrified into Matthias’s living room, he couldn’t at all see what the big deal was.

“It’s just my mum,” he scoffed in English. “She’s nice.”

I tried to take it as yet another opportunity to interact Germanically with Germans in their natural milieu. Germans are not uptight Puritans about sex. German TV plays soft-core porn after 10:00 P.M.! Germans expect their adult children to be adults. This is acceptable. Here goes. Mattias’s Mutti, on the other hand, had apparently not been told anything about me except that I was American. So when I shuffled into her dining room and mustered up my least-awkward “Morgen,” she replied at about ninety-billion decibels and a speed slower than my classmate Hsu.

“GUTEN MORGEN!!!” She pointed outside to the sky, so that I could figure out, from its morningness, what she meant.

“Hallo,” I answered, “ich bin die Rebecca.” This is the excellent way that Germans casually introduce themselves, because it contains the definite article. “I am THE Rebecca,” as if I am the only one. All foreigners immediately start doing this all the time as soon as they learn how, because everyone wants to be THE only one of themselves, and also everyone wants to signal to their interlocutor that they are no Mein Bett ist geschlossen–mumbling beginners. I might not be a native speaker—as Matthias’s dick friend Hanno never stopped pointing out—but I was fluent in German, goddammit, and I would have the friendly German Frühstück (breakfast; literally, “early piece”) that I’d squandered back at the Herrmanns’, and if I had to do it with a King of Queens fan to accomplish this, so be it, goddammit.

“OH!!!” Matthias’s mother answered, again with the face-splitting grin of the person who conflates being foreign with possessing a severe intellectual hindrance. “SPRICHST DU ETWAS DEUTSCH?!?!”

“Ach, Mama,” Matthias said sheepishly. “She studies Germanistik; of course she speaks German.”

“Ich spreche eigentlich ziemlich fließend Deutsch,” I said, but with the most confidence I could muster. (“I actually speak fairly fluent German.”)

“SURE YOU DO, DEAR!” she replied. “WE HAVE BREAKFAST IN THE OTHER ROOM FOR YOU! FRÜHSTÜCK? DO YOU KNOW WHAT ‘FRÜHSTÜCK’ MEANS?”

The good news, I realized as I sipped Matthias’s mom’s fortuitously strong coffee and affixed cheese to my Brötchen with a healthy slathering of butter, was that I had at long last managed to chip away just slightly at my Love Grief. This would have made the trip to Berlin a rousing success, if only I were about to go for a Ph.D. in being on the rebound. But alas, the linguistic confidence for which I had just paid a healthy sum still eluded me, and I returned to the U.S., left New York, moved—at the age of twenty-eight—back in with my parents for the summer, and moped about Eugene, fairly sure that I was about to begin doctoral-level study in a language in which nobody would believe I knew the word for “breakfast.”

8.

Ereignis

n. event, from the nominalized form of the verb to befall.

ex. In the OC, it is a major Ereignis to walk more than a city block. (Or to see an actual city, divided into blocks.)

Irvine, California, is not so much a city as an amorphous blob of identical carpeted apartments and prefab miniature mansions built in at least three clashing architectural styles, located about fifty miles south of Los Angeles. It is a mass that sprawls indistinguishably into the never-ending tangle of freeways and strip malls that make up parched, moneyed Orange County. Irvine’s streets are twisting, highway-fast arterials that often go two miles without a turnoff or turnaround, punctuated only by cul-de-sac planned communities and chain businesses, all with addresses like 50955 Vista Bonita Drive, where the eponymous view has long been bulldozed away to build a SoulCycle studio.

Surrounded on all sides by four of these mini-highways is the campus of the University of California at Irvine, which is secondarily famous for being the ninth-ranked public research university in the United States, and primarily famous for its excellent (or terrifying, depending on your aesthetic) examples of brutalist architecture. The William Pereira originals that comprise most of the core campus were so futuristic-looking at the time they were built, in the 1960s, that they were used as set pieces in a 1972 Planet of the Apes sequel. The squat, concrete assemblages of cubbyhole windows are arranged in a circle around a large, hilly park shaded by towering and fragrant eucalyptus trees. This park is beautiful, but according to campus lore, it was designed in the early 1960s to be inhospitable to students hanging out in large numbers—you know, to prevent protesting, sitting-in, troublemaking, rabble-rousing, communism, etc. Today, almost all of Irvine’s graduate students live in subsidized housing on the outskirts of campus, because they can’t afford private apartments anywhere near the place. As a result, the university is an isolated haven of research and angst, inchoate but nevertheless hermetically sealed, inside one of the most vacuous communities in the world.

Moving to Southern California from New York to start graduate school in German at the age of twenty-nine was like being buried alive in Chanel logos. For the past eight years, I’d just had to step out the door of my building to be surrounded by diversity and energy and life. I’d been a cheap subway ride away from interesting things—and if I found myself tipsy and alone in a strange neighborhood in the middle of the night, I could get into a cab and feel relatively confident about getting home safe. Now, suddenly, I was living in that subsidized grad housing—whose primary construction materials seemed to be particleboard and not giving a shit—surrounded by twenty-two-year-old strangers. My randomly assigned roommate, Beryl, was a tiny beauty from Turkey who spent most of her time lighting hookah coals on our electric stove and complaining about how cold it was; our ever-present neighbor, Elena, was an unrepentant semifunctioning opiate addict from Boston whose gaunt body and giant brown eyes attracted every burnout and predatory dickbag within a ninety-mile radius. I’m not saying this in judgment of them; quite the contrary: they were wonderful people, really, and they gave the place its only character.

And that was fortunate, because I was trapped at home a lot of the time, dependent as I was on my 1990 Volvo, my long-dormant driving abilities, and my nonexistent gasoline budget to go anywhere outside of campus—and, further, since Orange County’s businesses primarily catered to the cosmetically augmented housewives of wealthy Republican businessmen (often themselves cosmetic surgeons), there wasn’t much of anywhere to go. There were no dive bars or cool coffee shops within walking distance of campus, both because if you asked where a cool coffee shop was, OC residents would say “You mean, like, Panera?” and because nothing was within walking distance of anything, and nobody walked anywhere. Despite living in beautiful walking weather literally every single day of the year, people in Orange County regularly—I mean regularly—drove to different points in the same shopping mall.

Living in the OC was like being stuck in the backseat of a car with a too-smooth automatic transmission and overpowering new car smell, on a road trip through an airless nothing-space, for infinity, because (in true Kafkan fashion), the road trip was the destination. The only recreation my fellow grad students seemed to enjoy was an identical series of house parties held in identical flimsy apartments, where we sipped identical putrid glasses of Charles Shaw wine (“Two-Buck Chuck,” purveyed for $1.99 plus tax at Trader Joe’s), out of identical red Solo cups.

So what in the ever-loving fuck was I doing there? Well, besides the small matter of the hundred thousand dollars the German department had given me to come be allegedly smart in their midst, the OC did have its selling points, even to someone as pale and surly as me: the vegetarian food was spectacular; there were pockets and exurbs that weren’t inhabited only by surgically enhanced wealthy white assholes, if you knew where to look; I could ride my bike to the same beach that the Bluths visit on Arrested Development; it was never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever cold. And, as a special bonus, after being dumped and disillusioned, I could start my life over not knowing a single soul.

And yet. Were those good enough reasons? Where was my all-consuming love for the German canon? A reverence that hovered somewhere between religious and sexual ecstasy, culminating in the steadfast knowledge that even if nobody ever paid me a cent, I would sit around writing lengthy research essays about Goethe and Schiller and Rilke in my spare time for fun? I wasn’t sure I had it. Yet? At all? I certainly found German literature interesting—and German philosophy, and language, and culture, and art, and architecture; I was a grown-up now with a modicum of intellectual curiosity and maturity, and had legitimate favorites in each of those categories. (Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense”; the word angeblich, or “allegedly”; tiny eyeglasses and ubiquitous bicyclists; Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia Hardin; anything Bauhaus.) I also, in my intellectually mature adulthood, actually enjoyed working through very difficult texts that few other people had heard of (much less understood), simply for the challenge and the uniqueness. I even enjoyed this enough to do it for thirteen hours at a time, which was lucky, because that is often how my days went down. (Good thing I had nowhere to go and no money to get there.)

But still: Was any of this sufficient? Should I really make German studies a career? I thought. Could a person even do that? But I was staring down thirty and had not, as of yet, found anything I wanted to do enough to keep doing it for more than a few years. I quit jobs, I moved out of apartments, relationships self-destructed (or I destroyed them), and now suddenly here I was at the age most people are at least in middle management. All I knew, as I began a journey that would last at least a half-decade and likely shrink my career prospects to even smaller than they already were, was that I wanted to dedicate myself as fully as possible to something really, truly rigorous. Or at any rate, I didn’t not want it badly enough not to do it.

“I cannot fathom why anyone would want to do this,” said Anja, the Irvine German department’s newest professorial hire, on the first day of my first graduate seminar ever, of the education that she herself had recently finished and the academic position that she herself had. “The job market is terrible—I mean, terrible. There are no jobs. And this is such a difficult and obscure subject. So I’d like to know, really know—why are all of you here, studying this subject, at this time?” Anja was German, and—as everyone from the Herrmanns of Münster and the unemployed room-renters of Berlin had helpfully informed me over the years—nobody has less understanding of why non-Germans want to study Germans than Germans.

But she was right. The doctorate was a massive commitment. One hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money to get paid to read and learn (and teach, when you don’t know how to teach)—but divide it by several years, and then subtract the cost of tuition, fees, and health insurance, and suddenly you’re looking at a living stipend of less than fifteen grand a year. (“Technically it’s only for the nine months you’re here,” our professors bristled if anyone dared mention penury. “In the summer, you’ll have to wait tables or something.” How we were supposed to do that while studying thirteen hours a day for our comprehensives was left to our imaginations.)

On that first day of Anja’s seminar, my classmates—they were named Eileen, Evan, and Christiane—all dutifully reported their Germanist creation stories. Evan was a former opera singer who had begun studying German as part of his training as a Heldentenor—and then read one Schiller play and couldn’t resist the lure. He had a ponytail that reminded me a little too much of the one Bart cuts off a Ph.D. student in an episode of The Simpsons. (“I’m a grad student! I’m thirty and I made six hundred dollars last year,” says Bart, wiggling the hair behind his own head. Then Marge says: “Bart, don’t make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice.”) Eileen had moved to Germany after college to be with her German boyfriend, gotten super-fluent, but then became bored teaching English for a corporate language school; she would use her student loans to finance summer trips back to the Vaterland. Christiane was German, so her reasons weren’t questioned. It got to be my turn, and my throat squeezed itself shut. I didn’t know what to say. I cycled between rage and panic. My relationship with German literature was private and intimate, goddammit, and none of these strangers’ beeswax. And, also—two contrary opinions at once, Herr Dr. Kafka—my relationship with German literature, especially vis-à-vis pursuing it as a permanent profession, was completely unclear. So what should I say?

How about: I am here because I wanted health insurance for five years while I figured out what to do with myself, and I thought I’d be supported by my movie-star boyfriend, but now I’m not, and I guess I better make a real fucking go of it?

How about: I am here because my childhood boyfriend was into Franz Kafka, and then he dumped me, and I figure by becoming a successful Kafka scholar I will somehow show him once and for all?

How about: I am here because I want a really difficult challenge that means something to me intellectually and emotionally, and someone among you apparently thought I’d be up for it, and that I’d belong with you people, but I do not know if this is the case?

In the end, I said: “I’m sorry. It’s personal.”

Anja shrugged, said, “Interesting. Fair enough.” My classmates stared at me uneasily. I’d made two grave grad-school faux pas by showing any sort of unexpected emotional vulnerability and by defying authority. The move to the OC had been one form of culture shock, but it was inconsequential compared to induction into the doctoral-study milieu.

There were so many new behavioral conventions I wasn’t sure I could adopt them all fast enough. For starters, I had to start dressing differently. Worse. Much, much worse. On my wooing visit to Irvine, I’d spent three hours sitting in on a seminar called “Poetics of Punishment,” whose intellectual rigor made my M.A. courses seem like the fourth grade, but whose sartorial rigor was somewhere on the continuum between halfway house and unintentional self-parody. Students in my M.A. program had the same priorities as Maya Rudolph’s old Donatella Versace character on SNL: to smoke and look cool. Do you know what the Irvine crowd thought was cool? A special weight you drape across a book to hold its pages open.

Franz Kafka was always telling people that he had made an “unshakable” judgment about Felice Bauer within thirty seconds of meeting her. Within two minutes of this seminar starting, I had come to the unshakable realization that real graduate students had reached new levels of not-giving-a-fuckness about their outward appearances. Of course, my future cohort had also made an unshakable judgment about me: I was a snobby, image-obsessed flake who maligned Los Angeles having never lived there, and my research interests in philosophical approaches to Kafka were somehow both “trendy” and “tired.” When we became friends, I assured them that my snooty facial expression was actually displaying crippling intellectual inadequacy, and they explained to me that in graduate school, dressing like a middle-school guidance counselor in 1993 was a mark of intellectual commitment.

Granted, the irony of my vanity during my campus visit was not lost on me, promising literary scholar that I was. For I had, during the second half of my twenties, aggressively cultivated a look that was supposed to show that I didn’t give a fuck what I looked like. This is because if the fashion world had a Geneva Convention, the early aughts in New York would have violated it, so I chose conscientious objection. Every subway ride displayed a nauseating mélange of three-hundred-dollar whisker-faded jeans that exposed butt cleavage, elbow-length hair blown out ruler-straight, and stilettos whose toes were so pointy, they made the wearer look like the Wicked Witch of the East after the house gets dropped on her. So I invented my own aesthetic based on the last time I was cool, and adopted a late-nineties Berlin fashion ethos of Look Like You Slept in Makeup and Sword-Fought with Your Clothes. I honestly believed that there was nobody on earth who gave less of a fuck about looking attractive than I. But that was before I set foot in a real graduate seminar in German, when I would soon realize that I “didn’t care” about my looks in the same way Gustav von Aschenbach “doesn’t care” about his looks in Death in Venice.

The other crucial cultural truth I learned about grad seminar was that the more confident a student sounded, the fuller of shit he probably was. Shortly thereafter I also learned that the professor, brilliant as she may be, is but a human being who has either written, or is in the process of writing, an article or book on the text you’re discussing, and is testing out her thesis on you. But nobody tells you this when you’re just starting out, so the first day of seminar leaves even the brightest young intellectuals feeling like impostors—or at any rate, that’s how I felt.

I’m not supposed to be here, I thought.

All these people know what they’re talking about, and I most certainly do not.

How can anyone have thought I was smart enough to be here?

What the fuck is a subaltern?