The American Culture Conundrum

My departure to Germany is (finally) mere days away. As I’ve said before, I’ve had more than ample time during the waiting process to think about what living in Germany will be like. One particular thing I’ve been pondering lately is the extent to which I want to stay up-to-date with U.S. happenings while I’m abroad. I’m fortunate enough to have the language proficiency that would enable me, if I so chose, to go “cold turkey” on all things American: current events, politics, pop culture. But, culture junkie that I am, cutting myself off so completely may prove a challenge.

Placing myself on a strict German-only media diet is a tempting proposition, largely because it would help me to advance my language abilities even further, and put me on the fast track toward more instinctive, idiomatic German. The goal is to be able converse with Germans without having them automatically switching to English when they hear me speak. The more diligently I apply myself to reading German news sites, watching German television and reading German books, the more quickly the desired level of fluency is likely to occur. It’s hard to think of any time I might spend perusing the pages of the New York Times or NPR or People.com while in Germany as anything other than time that might have been better spent learning my way around Frankfurt, interacting with native speakers or, at the very least, perusing Die Zeit, FAZ, or Deutsche Welle instead. It seems like cheating, somehow, and a waste of the opportunity I’ve been given.

Of course, there are some aspects of the U.S. cultural landscape that would be easier to swear off than others: politics, for example—I can’t congratulate myself enough on contriving to be out of the country come election day; or celebrity gossip—who’s dating whom, who’s having whose baby, what the Kardashians are doing RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE. These are things I can surrender with very little regret.

But music, on the other hand. And books. And movies and television… I’m already compiling a list of the movies that are set to be released while I’m in Germany: big ones like The Hobbit, Les Miserables, and the newest James Bond, and smaller ones like Liberal Arts, which was filmed almost entirely at Kenyon. Speaking of Josh Radnor, Ted Mosby is set to finally meet the mother while I’m overseas. There will be new seasons of Modern Family and Grey’s Anatomy (yes, I still watch that schlock). True, many if not most of these things will find their way to Germany eventually, and what isn’t readily available in Germany I can always seek out on the Internet. But that’s exactly why I feel like I have to make a conscious choice about the amount of American culture I retain in my life: if I’m not careful, I could find myself watching only American television and listening to only American music, and in doing that I can’t shake the feeling that I would be doing myself a huge disservice. I keep trying to remind myself that all of these things—the American TV series and movies and albums and books I’m interested in—will still be waiting for me when I come back to the U.S. The chance to have such unlimited access to their German counterparts, however, may only come this once.

There are other obstacles to the all-German-all-the-time scheme, in addition to my own reluctance to give up certain American “comfort foods”. With the internet, it’s a lot harder to go radio silent on U.S. happenings than it was, say, twenty years ago, when my professor had to seek out an ink-and-paper copy of the New York Times every day to get his fix of American news. Now, it’s just a matter of a few mouse clicks. And American news does still seem to be news elsewhere in the world, too: more often than not, there’s an American news story at the top of Die Zeit’s homepage anyway.  Also, my job may require me to stay on top of all things American so I can tell my students, “These are the pop songs/TV shows/movies that are popular in the U.S. right now,” etc. A teacher at the Gymnasium I will be teaching at has already told me that she and the other teachers are looking forward to the opportunity to practice their English with a native speaker. And let’s not forget that Frankfurt has a fairly sizable English-speaking and American-expat contingent, so there are plenty of English-language bars, English-language cinemas, English-language bookstores, and English-language people that it will be almost too easy to seek out.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s still unclear how much homesickness I will have to contend with: I may find myself, in moments of loneliness, turning to American culture as a kind of security blanket. I’m already taking steps to ensure I don’t end up back on American websites out of boredom or habit: I’ve replaced all the English-language bookmarks at the top of my web browser with German-language ones. The theory is that, with time, browsing these German websites will become the same knee-jerk reaction that browsing NPR, Slate, or The Huffington Post is now. But homesickness is a whole different story than boredom, and I can easily imagine myself seeking out the latest Kardashian gossip purely for the sake of a little taste of home.

One site I will definitely not be foregoing, of course, is Facebook, and I imagine I’ll glean a fair amount of news just through the status updates of various friends and acquaintances. Skype, too, will doubtless provide glimpses of the homefront, however much I decide to keep up with on my own.

Aside from it just being the right and responsible thing for me to do as a student of German culture, I like the idea of leaving American culture to its own devices for the next ten-odd months because I like the idea of being able to come back to the U.S.  at the end of that time and look at it with completely fresh eyes. I want, in a sense, to ensure the greatest amount of culture shock possible for myself. One of the benefits of travel, so I’m told, is that it helps you to see where you come from more clearly, and I hope, by stepping away as much as can be managed, to provide myself with the clearest possible vision.