THEODOR FONTANE HAD GOOD REASON to like the word “deplaciert.” He was a descendant of French Huguenot immigrants to Berlin and, after returning from a temporary residence in London, did not always feel fully comfortable with his political surroundings. I invoke him here because all Americans—and especially American Germanists—are in a certain sense “deplaciert.” Americans are, after all, all immigrants to North America, whether we came ourselves, whether our ancestors came a century ago, or three centuries ago, or even millennia ago across the Bering land bridge. Indeed, in terms of what we know about human evolution, almost all humans are probably immigrants of some sort, wherever we live today. Goethe got it right in Lenardo's “Wanderrede” in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre: moving from one place to another is essential to being human. Germanists in America are more specifically “deplaciert.” Even those of us not immigrants or refugees nevertheless tend to seem campus oddities, whether for our unusual linguistic skills, for the reputation of foreign-language departments as “zoos,” for the unfortunate macabre reputation that still adheres to things German in some quarters of the internet, or simply for the fact that we study a culture on the far side of the Atlantic.

Many of us are doubtless accustomed to the question that I, even in retirement, am still asked all the time, “Why would an American become a Germanist?” It is always immediately followed by the question, “Is your family German?,” to which a “no” results in an abrupt change of topic. As a student in Germany in 1965 I encountered the identical questions. There I quickly learned not to say, “I am studying Germanistik because I love Goethe”—that did not fly among my Kommilitonen. Germans inevitably also asked what I as an American thought I had to offer Germans (or anyone else) about their own culture. Preferring not to point out that German culture was still in need of advocates twenty years after World War II, I argued instead that I might be able to see things from a different point of view, to see German literature from another, perhaps enriching, perspective.