Notes on an American Dream
_ Boris Ewenstein

“Back in the day when I was young, I’m not a kid anymore, but some days I sit and wish I was a kid again.”
Ahmad, Back in the day, 1994, Giant Rec.

     There’s a simple logic of desire. No added psychoanalysis needed. You desire because you lack. You desire what you lack. The bigger the distance between yourself and the object of desire, the stronger the sentiment. My desire was pretty intense, revealing itself not in the form of concrete pangs of jealousy, Chinese burns around the soul, but as sporadic leaps of the heart with the stomach still attached to it. A harmless kind of joy. A kid’s sudden euphoria at the thought of an interminable weekend, complete with ambitious plans to be forged and adventures to be had. It was clear then, as it is clear now, that the language of my childhood daydreams was English, no American. They spoke of a romantic and passionate way of life, demystified and challenged only years later. How could I have questioned it? I was intrigued, though ultimately denied access, membership. As a German boy, I could never belong to them and their self-contented life-world. I couldn’t be whole in that sense and thus faced/ felt lack. Surely this was the engine of my childhood fascination with what I could see of American culture. And so I stared hard, a consumptive gaze…

The poetics of the lunch box
     The poetics of the lunch box becomes a metonymy, a part for a whole, signifying a wider fascination with American pop culture. Not so much its TV programmes, music acts and fashion styles, but the more ordinary texture of everyday life on which such cultural expressions are built. Ordinary and yet spectacular. And so I stared at the spectacle of 10min snack breaks that saw awesome equipment, action gear for little 3rd grade troops, materialise on top of desks. Themed thermos and box: the attaché case of the 8 yr old, slit in a slanted way, for easy packing and delivery of goods. How efficiently these lunch boxes were packed. The thermos with its cap-as-cup and foldaway nozzle, stowed safely in a little bay, next to brown-bagged white-bread peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Apple juice or lukewarm chicken soup, nothing too exotic, we know what our kids like, thank you very much. Then: the staple fruit for good measure, always ridiculed and discarded in the face of those little entities that demanded all the remaining auratic energy (whatever was left by lunch box and thermos). Boxed snack kits, wrapped candy. Functionally designed cracker and cheese-spread combos, all complete with the necessary preparation instruments. Peanut butter brittle, served in neat paper cups. Then those miniature boxes of raisins. The scaled-down logo from the family-size drum, the self-indulgence of bothering to create a single-unit package for about 24 individual raisins. Yes, shameless commodification, but yes, also fascination. A toy, a kit, a gimmick, a gadget, an asset, a status symbol. Why? Well, we German kids – a German/ American school, you see – we had sensible grey-bread sandwiches wrapped in greasy wax paper. We had conspicuous toppings like roasted vegetables, unpleasantly noticeable by their dodgy looks and sometimes by their unusual smell. Yes, there was also the odd mushy banana, which tended to disintegrate within the school bag.
     It’s not hard to see why theirs was hot and ours wasn’t. Their comic-hero lunch boxes were exciting and promising. They were at home in the same mythical realm as fantastic (in the twin sense of imaginary and amazing) toys and the adventures they promised. From my point of view, their snack break became a liminal zone of transcendence, of sliding into a more passionate life; while ours, it seemed, became a zone of ‘descendance’, gliding further into the morass of the grey everyday. Sober and sensible vs. objectified and aestheticised. Dull vs. sparkling. I felt unwittingly what a century before Marx had termed the fetish of the commodity.

The colony
     To understand this fascination, which was not simply the falling pray of hapless kids to cheap thrills and hollow spectacles, a few historical and social details might be noted. Post-war Berlin has been a divided city; not just into east and west by the Berlin Wall but into sectors under allied control. The German/ American school I went to, catering specifically to children of military or diplomatic families, was located in the American sector in southwest Berlin. Arguably, the cultural centre of this sector were the tenements and amenities around the site of the old embassy. Most significantly: the PX, the main exchange, a fenced off, highly restricted commissary area, containing things nowhere to be seen beyond its gates. There was a Baskin & Robbins ice cream parlour, we knew from tales of lucky ones who either managed to talk their way in or even luckier ones who had that ultimate of distinction machines, the US-issued ID card. There was a pizza place that sold soggy NY-style fat-crust pizza – while I remember deep-freeze margheritas thin, bland and hopeless. There were snack machines that sold the treasures from the lunch boxes. You paid for anything and everything in dollars.
     It was detached. It no longer bared any connection to Berlin or Germany, though it stood on Berlin soil. Foucault might have called the PX area a heterotopia. It was another world, a mythical place, though at the same time real, material, physically part of Berlin. This heterotopic status surely accelerated our fascination with the “American” way of life (singular, as there was no room yet to appreciate multiplicity and difference). Their life was above and beyond ours; we were stopped and rejected at the (pearly?) gates. Simultaneously, we desired their goods, unavailable, rarefied, mythical and out of reach. In your face, but out of reach. Unless, of course, someone purchased something for you. This was an adventurous and risky endeavour surrounded by an air of black market/ back alley trade. How frivolous to ask the righteous burghers that stepped into the PX with stoic strides.

The Campus
     My feelings towards American cultural expressions, be they goods or texts, was surely mediated by the campus experience. Just as the PX, my school was a heterotopic place. It was sealed hermetically, symbolically, cosmologically. The centre of my world and a world of its own. But while the commissary was about symbolic and material forms of exclusion, school allowed belonging. Maybe not membership in the clubs and cliques that formed around the sports teams, the drama groups, the orchestra and band but a legitimate claim to the world that was the campus. Not a part-time world, either. Probably typical for American high schools, forms of association did not disband with the last class of the day only to regroup the following morning. There were extra-curricular activities, there was school spirit, there were fancy dress weeks. Hippy day. Toga day. A closed system, our heroes were the heroes in the yearbooks. We actually went to see our band play and our drama groups perform. Stifling? Maybe. Confined? Yes. Corny? Surely. But there were pleasures to be had: a sense of rightness, purpose and most importantly security. The microcosm of school – again, signifying an “American” way of life by metonymical transfer (pars pro toto) – protected, redeemed, delivered us from the risks and threats of the vast, impersonal beyond. Though school must have been a drag (and only through a kitschy and self-indulgent nostalgia does it appear as I am describing it now), it managed to satisfy a longing. And it did so within the norms and values dominant in American popular culture. Longing and joy were coded, ideologically inscribed. And this in turn informed the reception and negotiation of US cultural expressions.

The home and the good mother
     To fully understand this childhood romance with all things American, we need to travel the distance from hetero- to utopia. If the PX and the school were at once mythical and real, the US family home appeared entirely accomplished, a perfect world (at least from my selective point of view). A progeny of writers have allegorised, sketched and conjured that spiritual abode. And here it was: the house, what a kind and accommodating pal, offering its nooks and caverns, shrubs and trees for play. Patiently it listened to so many bold adventures planned at sleepovers, long after lights-out. Where was the black lab? Not far, its rump parked in complicity between our sleeping bags. There would be fishing, hiking and biking: a Montana dream, probably a nightmare to some. This too was American: the ‘great outdoors’, the pastoral.
     Then there was the executive wife. The good mother. Her subjectification under the strictures and structures of unbalanced gender relations was surely not a topic. And so she made frosted cup cakes and brownies while we got sandy biscuits at home. She was endlessly patient, good-hearted and unassailable. Tradition made her strong. In her steadfastness, she provided comfort and support. When she was around, worries disintegrated and were flushed away. The good mother, she knew how to organise a Halloween party, how to delight everyone with a Thanksgiving dinner that made the Old World blush and the outside world vanish.

Dystopia/ game over
     The more it occurred to me that I could not and would not belong to this life-world, the more I enjoyed, desired and romanticised it and, by extension, the cultural goods that came to symbolise it. My inevitable distance was not a disadvantage; it was a strength, a luxury. From a distance, I could be selective, fetishise what gave me pleasure and paper over what was trite. Receiving US pop culture was not mere passive consumption of experiences and goods. It involved forms of negotiation and ‘active use’. I was playing with – not merely buying into – the mythical. I was imagining and constructing, trying it on for size, whimsically sounding my desires against it. Many of my American friends couldn’t do that. They were stuck in their lives. What was magical for me was often banal to them. Of course, they could never understand the craze about marshmallow fluff.
     And then it was over. What was homely and cosy became stuffy, sexist and moronic. What was glitzy became tasteless and what was adventurous turned provincial. Coming of age brought disillusionment and demystification. And by a strange ruse of history, the material dissolved with the symbolic world. Fewer and fewer Americans composed the student body, the commissary shut, the allies departed.
How sad now, the heroes from the yearbook with their bulky class rings.