In other words, dinner went great.
“What would you tell one of your students if he asked you to recommend good Ph.D. programs in German?” asked my never-to-be-future-colleague Boris, as I ripped into my bread pudding with chocolate sauce.
“Honestly? I would say: Under no circumstances should you do this.”
Two weeks later, I got a kindly worded e-mail from the department chair letting me know they’d made a hire, a woman who already worked there as a well-liked visiting professor (visiting from nowhere; it’s a euphemistic title for “adjunct with health insurance”). In academic parlance, she was an “inside candidate.” That explained everything: the finalist from a short drive away who wouldn’t need airfare; the awkward teaching slot, as I wouldn’t have been allowed to take over the insider’s class or even be on campus at the same time she was; the lack of attendance at my talk. There was never any mousetrap. There was never any wrong direction to run. There was only the cat.
Yes, I had spent the past four years getting incrementally closer to the goal of becoming a German professor. Sure, I liked being a German professor fine (with my own students, who didn’t hate me). I was also pretty good at it, despite the two days I’d just spent proving that I was bad at it. But I was now a thirty-six-year-old apprentice who would be expected to keep apprenticing for as long as it took. How did I get here? Who the hell was I? Where was the person who’d spent her nights playing on the indoor swing hanging from the ceiling of her Kreuzberg loft? The person whose Friday nights were not spent writing her book’s seven hundredth footnote until one in the morning—not because she was behind in her work, but because she could think of nothing else to do with herself? The person whose relationship had a fun-percentage higher than five? Who, for that matter, had any human contact whatsoever, outside of her nineteen-year-old students and emergency-room personnel? I know “A Little Fable” doesn’t really have a moral, but I still think the cat was onto something. Yes, of course I was just going to die in the end—we all are—but somewhere between declaring a German major in college and pulling on my ill-fitting Banana Republic suit for that campus visit, I had gone severely off track. And the walls were closing in.
Or were they? Because here’s the thing. That cat, carnivorous four-legged embodiment of Schadenfreude that she was, also had another good point. It wasn’t just that I’d made bad choices, which everybody does. It was that I was looking at the maze all wrong. Understanding something and misunderstanding the same thing can happen at the same time. The mouse insists that the walls closed in on her until there was no room left. But what happens, really, when those walls close all the way in? They disappear.
And guess what else, cat? Every German compound word is easily distilled back into the words that made it, and Schadenfreude is no different. If your life is somehow, either through your own ignominious choices or bad luck, subject to malicious happiness, either from others or yourself, you still have a choice. You can choose the Schaden, the misfortune, the pewter lungs around the neck. Or you can say fuck it, and go for the Freude—decide, after all of that, in spite of (perhaps because of) everything, on joy.
Which did I choose? The answer is simple. And just on the other side of this door.
Nachwort
n. epilogue, from after and word.
All right. I’m not Franz Kafka, and I’m now to the point in my life where I know that’s a good thing. I’m not going to leave this like he did The Castle, at an unceremonious dropping-off midsentence. I’m going say that everything turned out fine in the end.
Around the time of my doomed campus visit, I got back in touch with a long-lost acquaintance from New York, who was a senior editor at an online magazine with a very large readership (now, it seemed, it was writing for print that didn’t count). He suggested I expand some of my bile-shooting Facebook posts about the job market into fifteen hundred words, which he would both publish on the Internet and exchange for actual money. What resulted was an article that implored readers who thought it might be fun to get a Ph.D. in literature to, well, maybe not do that, on account of it would ruin their lives. To my shock, the article racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and in the space of two days I went from wishing that any academic anywhere knew my name to wishing that more of them didn’t. Still, though, it was for the best: with those fifteen hundred words, I had at long last silenced everyone who had spent all those years insisting I keep trying.
In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke describes a nineteenth-century practice to ensure that you didn’t bury someone alive. Namely, if you were pretty sure someone was dead but not 100 percent sure, you stuck a needle through his heart. That way, if he had still been alive (but barely so, and not fooling anybody), he wasn’t anymore. I had known my academic career was dead for some time, and I was sick of everyone I knew insisting I keep trying to perform CPR on a corpse.
“I assure you I am not going back on the job market ever again,” I would say.
“Don’t put that on your Facebook!” they’d say. “A search committee might see it.”
“I’m not ever going back on the job market,” I’d say. “I don’t give a fuck what any search committee thinks about my Facebook.”
“Shh!” they’d say. “Rebecca! What would a search committee think if they heard you say that?”
I put a stop to that shit at last by creating an indelible paper trail of unhireability—in academia, and possibly everywhere else.
But with that article, I’d also committed my last (to date) act of Kafkan perspective shift. I went from professional failure—as in, failure at my profession—to professional failure, as in failure as a profession. Antipathy and loserdom were my new business, and business was terrible, which meant it was great. And indeed, a few months after my questionable debut, the magazine brought me on as a columnist. It was now my job to detail my failures and academia’s vicissitudes—and, when it was newsworthy, I could write about Germany, Austria, and even Franz Kafka.
My new career as a professional train wreck also meant I could dwell in wreckage wherever I wanted—preferably somewhere very cheap, as Internet magazine writing is enjoyable but not lucrative. As it happened, Witold was in year six of his one-year job in St. Louis. He’d won Non-Tenure-Track Faculty of the Year; he’d been made director of undergraduate studies—basically, barring a cataclysm, his job would be lived out in one-year increments in perpetuity. (That, by the way, is what we call “the new tenure.”) Before I moved to Ohio, he’d even bought a two-bedroom condo in a lovely neighborhood, in cash, for approximately the price I paid for my top-of-the-line Discman in 1996. No mortgage for him equaled no rent for me—not to mention, perhaps, the return of cohabitation, which might tick the fun percentage of a certain relationship up into the double digits.
“This place,” he said in the spring of 2013, as I grappled with being newly “academic-famous” (that is, not at all famous), and we lugged what remained of my personal effects out of the beat-up 2000 Saturn on the back end of our very last stultifying four-hundred-mile journey down I-70 from Ohio, “is exactly the right size for a young family.”
“Wow,” I said. “Are you proposing?”
“No!” he said.
“We’ve only been together seven years. Wouldn’t want to do anything rash.”
“Are you serious?” he said. “I thought you weren’t the marrying sort.”
I shrugged.
“And I quote: ‘I have no interest in participating in a patriarchal ownership ritual, thank you very much.’”
“Well, it’s not like I’d take your name.”
“‘I am nobody’s help-meet!’”
“All I’m saying is that I could really use some health insurance.”
On the heels of that grand romantic gesture, Witold and I were married at City Hall in a ninety-second ceremony. He did not shave for the august occasion. By our first anniversary, and shortly before my thirty-eighth birthday, that health insurance had already come in quite handy, given that I was three months pregnant. (Six months after that, it came in handier still, when the Schuman progeny had to be wrested from my uncooperative torso by brute surgical force.)
Our daughter was born in St. Louis on what would have been my grandfather’s one hundredth birthday. We gave her a weird Polish name. When she is old enough to withstand an international flight (or, more accurately, when she is old enough for me to withstand bringing her on an international flight), we will take her to Germany, and Austria, and Prague. I will point out the window of the train as the landscape rolls by—craggy mountains and defunct nuclear power plants; painfully bucolic villages and electric-green rolling hills; buildings that look older than God and that will make her think about believing in Him. I will show her Kafka’s grave (but probably not the mental-institution-turned-hotel where I nearly conceived her twenty-years-older sibling with a guy I didn’t even like). I will remind her that the ground floor is “Floor Zero” and the first floor is the second floor. I will extol the virtues of room-temperature mineral water. I will show her how to skin cooked potatoes with a knife and fork, and how to weigh her produce at the supermarket before checkout, so as not to get yelled at. When we invariably still do get yelled at, I will explain to her that it’s not personal; she’s not really in trouble; that’s just how Germans express their love. That will be both true and a lie at the same time, and someday, I will explain to her that understanding something and misunderstanding the same thing are not mutually exclusive. Someday, I will tell her all about it, but only when she’s much older. And only after the first time she’s waited outside a door that was created for the sole purpose of slamming in her face.
Acknowledgments
Many unsuspecting (and suspecting) individuals appear in this book, in forms they may or may not recognize, and it is them I thank most of all. They are not mere supporting characters in some loser’s narrative. (Especially the Germans: Ganz vielen Dank, und es tut mir Leid.) They are complex and real, with their own stories, and I hope that they do not object too strenuously to their roles in mine.
My oldest friend, most unjudging confidante, and staunchest supporter, Amy Boutell, good-naturedly hectored me to write a memoir “about all those losers you dated, etc.” For years. Well Amy, as you can see, I have many serious problems, and now they’re immortalized in print, like this.
Alia Hanna Habib is the fiercest and smartest literary agent in the world. I wish I could mail-order her a Sachertorte every day. Bob Miller, Big Boss at Flatiron Books, was willing to bet that readers might actually be interested in Germany. Colin Dickerman, my editor, is as insightful and supportive as he is merciless; the cohesive work of narrative nonfiction that you hold in your mitts is due to his sharp, diligent eye. (What is legally classifiable as nonfiction, that is—a distinction, among others, I learned from ace lawyer Mark A. Fowler.) I also owe an infinite debt to James Melia, who is better at his job than I once was at a very similar job in the same building; he is a wonderful and incisive reader, whose delightful well-bred Gentile millennial maleness also prodded me to clarify such mysteries as youth hostels, public school, Eastern European Jewish immigration, and urinary tract infections. The cover design for this book is by Darren Haggar, and the illustration is by Alice Pattullo who was given direction to “make the cockroach cuter” and did not resign on the spot. The lovely production design is by Donna Noetzel, and the production manager, David Lott, is the only reason this is an actual book and not a collection of chicken-scratches on a stack of index cards. Greg Villepique went above and beyond his job as copy editor. Steven Boriack has the not-enviable task of organizing publicity for an inveterate misanthrope who can’t go anywhere without a miniature person in tow. And Kersten Horn managed not to be a condescending pedant about my German, whilst still saving me from claiming that his Landsleute regularly go around saying, “Hey, you: shit!”
Dan Kois, my first editor at Slate, is my hero, and I’m sorry that I was Max Brod to his Kafka and disobeyed his only (VERY REASONABLE) wish, which was that he be credited as Bob Ass. David Haglund allowed me to file at least a dozen Slate posts about utterly random German things, which provided the basis for this book. Jean Tamarin, Brock Read, Gabriela Montell, and Denise Magner have been wonderful to work with at the Chronicle of Higher Education and Vitae.
In my very first conversation with Kai Evers, my doctoral dissertation adviser at UC-Irvine, he said to me: “I like to read things that punish me.” I hope this qualifies. John H. Smith’s Ereignis seminar proved stimulating long beyond the classroom; David Tse-Chien Pan still insists that I could get an academic job if I really wanted one; Gail K. Hart taught me about Schiller’s skull and the Bürgerliches Trauerspiel (and the unfortunate fact about force-lactating suspected infanticides); Anke Biendarra never bullshat about the job market; Glenn Levine taught me to teach. My associates at the IFK in Vienna (special shout-out to Björn Blauensteiner) were lovingly described in a chapter that got cut; my associates at USML and OSU made it in; thank you (or sorry). Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, Samuel Frederick, and Bob Lemon kept me from wanting to set the entire profession of academia on fire, Michael-Kohlhaas-style (or possibly Billy-Madison-style); Sarah Kendzior, Karen Kelsky, William Pannapacker, Joe Fruscione, Liana Silva, Annemarie Perez, Dorothy Kim, and Adeline Koh remind me that I did the right thing when I left.
