{"id":69762,"date":"2023-09-13T16:16:51","date_gmt":"2023-09-13T23:16:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=69762"},"modified":"2023-09-13T16:16:51","modified_gmt":"2023-09-13T23:16:51","slug":"krondorfer-citizenship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/krondorfer-citizenship\/","title":{"rendered":"Becoming American: A 40-year (and counting) process"},"content":{"rendered":"

*Editor\u2019s Note: The \u201cViews from NAU\u201d blog series highlights the thoughts of different people affiliated with NAU, including faculty members sharing opinions or research in their areas of expertise. The views expressed reflect the authors\u2019 own personal perspectives.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

\"Bj\u00f6rnBy Bj\u00f6rn Krondorfer<\/h3>\n

Regents\u2019 professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies and director of the Martin-Springer Institute<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

Dr. <\/span>Bj\u00f6rn Krondorfer <\/span>studies religion, gender and culture and post-Holocaust and reconciliation studies; his scholarship helped define the field of critical men\u2019s studies in religions. He is the author of\u202f<\/span>Unsettling Empathy: Working with Groups in Conflict<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Reconciliation in Global Context: Why it is Needed and How it Works<\/span><\/i>\u202fand\u202f<\/span>Remembrance and Reconciliation<\/span><\/i>, among many other works.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The date stamped in my now-defunct German passport reads, \u201cU.S. Immigration, New York, NY, August 8, 1983.\u201d That day, I took my first step on U.S. soil to start a one-year graduate study program in Philadelphia. Little did I know I would still be in America 40 years later. That was not how I imagined my life to turn out\u2014an experience, I think, many people share who arrive on America\u2019s shores and stay.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I watched <\/span>Oppenheimer<\/span><\/i> in a Flagstaff movie theater this summer\u2014the biopic about the creation of the first atomic bomb near Alamo, New Mexico\u2014the memory of arriving in New York in 1983 resurfaced. Back then, I was fully aware of Aug. 8 being sandwiched between the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on Aug. 6 and 9, respectively. Many young Germans at the time were involved in anti-nuclear protests, opposing the planned installation of the Pershing II rockets at American military installations in Germany, capable of carrying thermonuclear warheads. The Cold War was still in full swing. When I got to Philadelphia, I was flummoxed by the apathy among Americans I met regarding the nuclear threat. It felt as if I were betraying my politically engaged friends back home. I would only be here for one year, I comforted myself. That was 40 years ago, and today we are alerted anew to the specter of nuclear war in light of Putin\u2019s saber-rattling and China and North Korea\u2019s growing nuclear arsenals.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Forty is a number of biblical proportions, signaling a long time of wandering and wondering. The tired metaphor of a \u201cpromised land\u201d may suggest itself when looking back at all these years, but it is really about the constant moving without ever fully arriving that marks the experience of many migrants. I came voluntarily from Europe, not forced to leave, not brown-skinned, not persecuted, not poor and without options. Yet, settling in a new country is always a struggle. It is the exhaustive work of constantly deciphering codes, living vulnerably, learning to adjust and slowly metamorphizing into new, untested selves.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At first, there are language issues. In retrospect, they are funny, like asking my American hosts the first night in Philadelphia whether I can \u201chave a douche,\u201d believing that this is the equivalent for the German word \u201cDusche,\u201d for taking a shower. Their irritated look, then laughter, left me dumbfounded. Plenty of those moments. At the Ph.D. defense seven years later, my friends congratulated me for finally speaking English.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then there are identity issues. When arriving in 1983, I thought of myself as \u201cBj\u00f6rn,\u201d an individual who happened to have grown up in Germany. As Bj\u00f6rn, I explored my new environment. I registered for an African dance class (as the only man and only white person), then a small Jewish modern dance ensemble (as the only non-Jew). I did not think much of it at the time. I soon met and mingled with Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and I became \u201cGerman.\u201d Who I was as an individual mattered only to the extent that I was able to account for German history and, particularly, for my family history. \u201cWhat did your grandparents do? Who are your parents?\u201d I knew embarrassingly little. Reckoning with Germany\u2019s lethal past, and locating myself within it, turned out to be a hard but necessary and rewarding lesson.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While the process of becoming \u201cGerman\u201d happened early on, it took longer to become \u201cwhite.\u201d As strange as this may sound today, in the 1980s I was both colorblind and hyperaware of America\u2019s race-based classifications, yet I moved easily in and out of different communities. As soon as I opened my mouth, Black Americans on the East Coast related to me as a \u201cGerman\u201d guest (often because of their overall positive experiences serving in the U.S. armed forces in Germany). It seemed uncomplicated. However, living in this country for long, I eventually became \u201cwhite,\u201d a process neither willed nor wanted. It is not forced upon you, but the codes that signify racial divisions are inescapable and powerful social dynamics. We notice them when encounters unexpectedly turn knotty, when choosing words carefully, when being pushed into modes of behavioral caution we don\u2019t agree with but can\u2019t escape.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It takes a generation and more to find \u201chome\u201d again. It is the next generation that signifies most clearly this change\u2014and that is perhaps the secret of the 40 years of wandering. It is the next generation that truly arrives. The moment my daughters were born in this country, I realized the profound change. They could become \u201cAmericans\u201d in a way I never would. It was my professional self that kept me here, now directing a center at NAU founded by a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor. There is an irony in all of this, especially given the fact that my father had been stationed as a young soldier in Hitler\u2019s army in 1944 in a region close to where Doris Martin, the founder of NAU\u2019s Martin-Springer Institute, survived in a forced labor camp for Jewish women.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There were moments when I regretted not being in Germany, like witnessing in person the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which heralded the end of the Cold War, holding out the promise of a diminished nuclear threat. At some point I stopped reading German newspapers on a regular basis and began to \u201cread\u201d the world through the reporting of trustworthy U.S. outlets. I legally became an American citizen the year Obama was elected the first black president of the United States. It was good to regain political agency. When I accepted the director position at the Martin-Springer Institute in 2012, I moved closer to the geography of <\/span>Oppenheimer<\/span><\/i>, the test site in New Mexico. Living in the Southwest made me more aware of what the movie does not show: the Indigenous people who worked in the uranium mines, those who lived in areas affected by the nuclear fallout, the minority populations who built and maintained Alamo, Japanese-American internment camps in the Southwest and the victims of the bombing in Japan itself.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For a long time, I felt that if things go really wrong in the United States, I can return to Europe. Today, I don\u2019t think any more of this escape route, though I deeply worry about the future of my adopted home. And this includes the amplification of antisemitic sentiments and actual hate acts, something that seemed inconceivable in 1983 in a country that compelled me to take a deep, sobering look at the shameful history of the country of my birth.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am here now. I appreciate NAU\u2019s renewed commitment to acknowledging and celebrating diversity. But when I enter a store in Flagstaff, say hello and am asked, \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d I know it is still a journey, an ever-suspended, not-quite-yet arrival.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

*Editor\u2019s Note: The \u201cViews from NAU\u201d blog series highlights the thoughts of different people affiliated with NAU, including faculty members sharing opinions or research in their areas of expertise. The views expressed reflect the authors\u2019 own personal perspectives. By Bj\u00f6rn Krondorfer Regents\u2019 professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies and director of the Martin-Springer…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":69984,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-views-from-nau"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}