In fact, my original intention was not to write about Germany at all, unless something profoundly significant happened while I was here (such as an uprising at a Bavarian wind farm or the political assassination of Detlef Schrempf). However, I'm going to break my own imaginary policy. I've decided to write about which Americans are (evidently) fascinating to twenty-year-old Germans, mostly because these allegedly fascinating people serve as examples of how arbitrarily the mass media represents our society to the rest of the world.
Here's what happened: I'm teaching a class on twentieth-century popular culture at the University of Leipzig. I don't know why the school asked me to do this, but it did. And it turns out that any seminar on U. S. consumer culture is extremely attractive to every non-American kid majoring in American studies, because ninety-six students signed up for the class in the span of three days. Due to the size of the classroom, I was forced to immediately reduce this number to twenty. I was unsure how to do that fairly, so I decided to give them a competitive online essay test before the first day of class. The question was this: "Who do you consider the most interesting twentieth-century American -- not necessarily the most historically important, but the individual you find most personally compelling?" The responses were well written, habitually understated, and devoid of any pattern whatsoever. For example:
- Michael Jackson had more essays written about him than anyone else, which didn't shock me. What did surprise me was how sympathetically he is viewed: The general consensus seems to be that Jackson is an eccentric, philanthropic genius whose nation has turned against him, possibly due to racist motives. However, they do assume he's a child molester. Europeans are open-minded in unorthodox ways.
- George Gershwin did unusually well in this sampling, with two votes and a tangential mention in a third. In all three cases, Gershwin was closely associated with "the American dream," which may or may not exist.
- Kurt Cobain was not selected by anyone. Dave Grohl, however, was. Cobain was also referenced -- somewhat negatively -- in a paper focused on Taylor Hanson.
Every significant Beat writer seemed to get one vote. Hunter S. Thompson got two.
There was a female student who selected Jared Leto. I must admit -- I did not see this one coming. He is perceived as a triple threat of acting, music, and environmental awareness (apparently, his tour bus runs on vegetable oil). Another girl selected Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20, although part of her argument may have been that Thomas was born on a German military base in 1972. - One person wrote about the first black woman in outer space. This individual is named Mae Jemison, which was news to me.
- The only presidents referenced were Richard Nixon (three times) and Bill Clinton (once).
Bob Dylan and James Dean both had five essays written about them (and for the usual reasons one might expect). But a stranger collection of fellows all received two votes apiece: Andy Warhol, Dennis Rodman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jim Jarmusch, and Ian MacKaye. - One person wrote about the Hummer all-terrain vehicle. This is not technically a human, but I could see her point.
- Sean Penn, Rosa Parks, Francis Ford Coppola, Johnny Depp, mystery-novelist Janet Evanovich, Jon Bon Jovi, Malcolm X, Elvis Presley, and New York Cosmos founder Steve Ross were all equally represented.
- Someone selected Ryan Adams. This made me happy for two reasons. The first is that I suspect Adams is something of an underrated semi-genius, and I like the fact that he's more appreciated in places where nobody cares whether or not Paul Westerberg hates him. The other reason is that I think there's probably a 98 percent likelihood that Ryan Adams will read this sentence, put down the magazine, walk over to his four-track, and immediately write a psychedelic country song titled "Hey Little Leipzig Girl (I'm Glad You Dug Those Whiskeytown Bootlegs)," which I will be able to listen to on the Internet forty minutes from right now.
- Perhaps the most provocative essay argued for a tie between Ernest Hemingway and O. J. Simpson. The author's point seemed to be that Hemingway was "not the typical American," but that Simpson sort of was.
Now, I know these answers don't really prove anything, and I'm aware that ninety-six people in one city don't necessarily reflect the views of a nation of eighty-two million. I also realize that these icons were consciously selected by students who were trying to get into a class about populist mainstream culture, and some were clearly written by kids trying to predict what I might appreciate. (For example, one dude just cut and pasted James Hetfield's Wikipedia entry.) But I also think they illustrate a phenomenon that continues to make modernity more and more confusing: The proliferation of media has made it virtually impossible to tell the difference between a) what information is unilaterally interesting, and b) what information is merely available. I used to think Richard Nixon and Ryan Adams had nothing in common, but I now realize I was wrong -- they both share an equal potential to be randomly fascinating to Germans.
Since my arrival in Leipzig, I have continually been reminded about the way many Germans view American culture. They essentially feel it does not exist. One grad student only half jokingly told me that an entire semester of American cultural studies "should probably take about twenty-five minutes." But this, of course, is crazy. Now more than ever, I feel certain that the United States is as good at manufacturing culture as the rest of the world combined, probably because we often do so accidentally. A lack of culture is not our problem. The problem is we've become too effective at distributing that culture -- at the same time, in the same way, and with the same velocity. It all ends up feeling interchangeable, which makes it all marginally irrelevant. As it turns out, my initial question was beyond impossible. There are no interesting twentieth-century Americans. There can't be, because they all are.
