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photos by Lauren MacDonald
As children growing up in Winter Haven, Fla., Richard Mann and his brothers pretended to bomb Berlin and Tokyo by throwing pillows from the top of their bunk beds.
World War II was raging, and Germany was the enemy for every patriotic U.S. citizen.
More than half a century later, Mann, 63, is married to a German woman, has two sons with dual German-American citizenship, and lives in Berlin, where he is still a patriotic U.S. citizen.
"I consider myself a better American than most Americans," Mann said.
Many Americans choose to live in Berlin for the sake of the city's cultural diversity, efficient public transportation, low crime rate, and green parks. They have found it surprisingly easy to reconcile their American identities with their German homes.
Alexa Dvorson, 50, is matter-of-fact about being an American expatriate in Berlin, but she bristles when the word is misspelled and misused.
"It's not 'ex-patriot,'" and it doesn't mean she has renounced her American citizenship, even though she lives outside the United States, she said.
Despite their location abroad,
most expatriates still vote in U.S. elections, follow U.S. news media, and
share a concern about the impact of U.S. policy on the rest of the
world.
Mann and Dvorson both belong to the Berlin chapter of American Voices Abroad, an organization of expatriates who feel the Bush Administration is abandoning the rights and freedoms on which the United States was founded.
AVA promotes a return to these traditional American values, said Colin King, chairman of AVA Berlin. AVA members meet regularly, critically follow the American news media and try to improve the international perception of the United States.
The Iraqi War drove a wedge between the United States and many other nations, said King, an assistant professor of philosophy at Berlin's Humboldt University.
The German attitude is "one of misapprehension," King said. "They can no longer see the reason in U.S. foreign policy."
Despite this distance, Germans are still fundamentally open to Americans, he said. He has lived in Germany since 1996 and feels just as comfortable in Berlin as in his birthplace of Freedom, Maine.
In contrast, when Richard Mann visited Germany for the first time in 1966, he was homesick for the United States.
Yet within two weeks of returning home to the University of Florida, he knew he would eventually return to Germany. Compared to America, Germany had superior television, better bread, and finer beer.
Since then, Mann has lived all over the world, and the experience of traveling has made him a better person, he said. As the academic director for the School for International Training study abroad program in Berlin, Mann often helps introduce American students to Germany. He hopes their international experiences will be as life-changing as his own.
"All this travel and study has been good to me, and I owe a lot to the U.S. in this respect," Mann said. "America treated me right."
He is still a part of the American system, he said. He teaches young Americans. He reads American newspapers online and feels better informed than many of his countrymen. He votes regularly in American elections. He visits the U.S. at least once a year.
There are still little things that he misses about the United States, such as standing in the beautiful salt water of Ormond Beach, Fla. He also misses the jokes.
"You know the thinnest book in the world?" Mann asked. It's "the book of German humor." He's done his best to teach his two adult sons about their American heritage by instructing them in The Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges.
But stoic Berliners don't make him regret moving here, he said.
"When you look at other German cities, they don't have the substance of Berlin," which is the biggest city in central Europe and brimming with culture and history, Mann said.
He witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall with his students in 1989. The experience was drug-like: months of delirious euphoria, and then a harsh readjustment as Berliners came down from that high to deal with the difficulties of reunification.
There is still a schism between West Berliners, who believe they have been unfairly burdened with the financial welfare of socialist East Berlin, and the East Berliners, who resent a perceived bias for preserving West Berlin history to the exclusion of their own monuments.
As a focal point for both World War II and the Cold War, Berlin shoulders half the history of the twentieth century and has the monuments to prove it - with, until recently, one exception. |
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