Nothing was delivered

As I'm undertaking my research semester, spending three months in Germany, I'm beginning to realize more and more that the project I have chosen to investigate has a lot do with my personal history and my subject position. To some extent, this was true for my first book, where I applied my own history of having attended blues concerts at a young age and about my evolving consciousness of racialization processes and racial contentions, but it's much more true for my Krautrock project, as it deals with issues of national identity and belonging. Having brought my 6-headed German-American family with me to Germany, it brings up questions of what "home" means and how American/European ethnic identities are formed and transformed.

To put it in a different way: I catch myself being surprised at how little I have "accomplished" so far, how little I am interested in pursuing specific research tasks such as conducting interviews and going to archives and how much I am trapped in dealing with deceivingly simple issues such as who I am as an individual and who we are as a family. Don't get me wrong, I'm keeping busy writing book reviews, reader reports, preparing for a string of guest lectures at German universities, contemplating possible options of publishing my research as a book. What's becoming more important to me, however, is not so much that I can successfully continue to play the academic game and do all those things you need to do to get tenure, but that I am working on something that is meaningful to both me and an audience (no matter how small that audience may be). More meaningful than "just" getting tenure.

An den Landungsbrücken raus...

And so the research semester begins. I've been thinking a lot about how my autobiography connects to my topic. I opened my second article about krautrock that got accepted, a piece on the musicians from Neu! for the Journal of Popular Music Studies, with some personal stories -- how I didn't know much about this music growing up in Hamburg and how I really only came to appreciate it by moving to the U.S. and realizing what a huge impact a band like Neu! had on musicians outside the U.S. (finding all of their three major releases at the Iowa City Public Library). But what's also important is that Neu! and many other krautrock groups also express a specific sense of national identity, something that has become so much more important for me after I became an expatriate. It's exactly what I'm struggling with right now, preparing for a three-month return to my "homeland." I've been reading Döblin's Berlin, Alexanderplatz, I've re-watched most of Edgar Reitz's TV series Heimat with my 13-year-old daughter who is excited about getting out of Laramie to a country she feels she belongs to although she left it when she was three years old, but, most importantly, I've been listening to a lot of German music, and not just what would be labeled as krautrock. The Hamburg band Kettcar, in particular, expresses the conflicted feelings I have for the place I've left behind but will be returning to. Hamburg, the city I love but the city that wipes the smile off your face. A city so globalized that you can see containers from its companies rumble by on the railroad right here in Laramie, Wyoming -- yet, a place so parochial that even moving to Berlin can be considered a sell-out. Kettcar is playing two sold-out shows while I'm over there. I'm still trying to get a ticket.