Above: Henry James
By Matthew Stevenson:
Watching Americans drift across Europe, I often wonder if the entire country isn’t taking a junior year abroad. As best I can determine, young Americans on their wanderjahr divide their time between not-very-rigorous courses—From Henry James to Jonathan Franzen: Art in Decline—and mad dashes across the continent, to “check out” Greek beaches or Amsterdam coffee shops. In a similar vein, whenever President Barack Obama dignifies Europe with a brief stopover, what seems to matter most is picking the right restaurant in Paris or showing the kids the Wall in Berlin.
In both cases Europe is a stage set—a charming backdrop on a Christmas card or a press release about the evils of insolvency—if not a grand summer tour.
No wonder the NSA was instructed, in one month, to tap more than 80 million phone calls in Spain and France. What with the feuds on the Miami Dolphins offensive line, who in the U.S. has any time to learn any European languages or read its history?
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Because I have lived in Europe for almost twenty-five years, I am well acquainted with the travel habits of roaming Americans.
As a rule, businessmen come to Europe so they can change their plans. Put more than two or three American executives in a conference room anywhere in Europe, and you can be sure that secretaries will be summoned to change flight, hotel, or dinner reservations.
Without such requests, who would know of their importance, their upgrades in business class, or the name of their five-star hotel? Usually it is some crisis in the American home office that requires them to “get back early.”
Students abroad have the same catlike attention span. Because classes don’t meet on Fridays or saint days, there is ample time for the Munich beer festival or Ibiza.
Generally, traveling students seek out, not French battlefields or Polish ghettos, but other Americans abroad, and they usually find them at raucous hostels in Barcelona and Rome.
As Daisy Miller, the archetypal junior abroad, says defensively in Henry James’s novel about American innocence in Europe: “Well, I have seen the Colosseum by moonlight!”
James, the quintessential expatriate, also said to a friend: “If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.” For the record, James was born in New York City.
I can’t tell you how many young Americans I have welcomed to Europe, only to find, as we sit in the front of the fireplace to talk about their route, that they have crossed the ocean without a guidebook or a map, let alone Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.
Some come with ideas to “see a little of France” or maybe the coastline of Croatia, but rarely is anyone traveling to find a chapter in a book or an image in a painting. Europe is a theme park, and what concerns many is to find the shortest lines and the water slides.
Nor are students any longer confined to dingy transcontinental trains. Now that Europe is a patchwork of discount airlines, even students on a budget can make an appearance in Riga, Lisbon, Split, and Naples during a short semester. To paraphrase Huey Long, every man a president and his peripatetic dashes around the continent. (“If this is Tuesday, you must be the queen of Denmark.”)
The reason these study-abroad programs are so popular is because everyone wins for little effort. American colleges get their $40,000 in tuition fees, and in exchange offer a few courses on German nationalism from a dreary center in Dresden.
Underage American students have few papers to write and get unlimited access to European bars. Professors renew their love of Venice or Heidelberg, or at least their affections for each other. Parents get to bask in the good feeling that their children are acquiring continental sophistication.
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The same easy credits dictate American diplomacy in Europe. President Obama needed the NSA to tape Angela Merkel’s cell phone for six years, not because she was whispering state secrets to the Russians, but because it is like buying a term paper on the Internet or getting a ghost writer to brush up your memoirs. He’ll get a better grade and not have to bother reading The Magic Mountain (which is about extended healthcare coverage in the Swiss Alps).
Obama speaks none of the continent’s languages nor shows intimacy with its history and culture. He has “people” to do that for him, even if most them are trying to divine truth in tapped phone logs. They would have more luck with Balzac’s novels.
Obama’s primary concern is that the Euro not fail and by extension hurt the U.S. economy, as if it could be brought down by a profligate overseas subsidiary. When he spoke in Berlin (“The journey that led me here is improbable. . . .”), it was largely about himself.
Listening to most American politicians make pronouncements in Europe, I am reminded of what Andre Malraux writes in Man’s Fate: “Europeans never understand anything of China that does not resemble themselves.”
Moreover, Obama’s trips to G8 summits or climate change conferences usually end abruptly so that he can get home for the weekend. Last time over he arrived in Stockholm on September 4, went to St. Petersburg on the 5th, and flew home on Friday the 6th—in time for golf on Saturday morning.
Before leaving he usually lectures the Europeans about the shortcomings of their currency, banks, budgets, bonds, martial spirit, or dirty air.
As Twain writes in The Innocents Abroad: “In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”
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As a further metaphor for American innocence in Europe, the Amanda Knox murder case in Italy is hard to beat. Knox is the Seattle college girl who went to learn Italian in Perugia, where her British roommate was murdered.
Knox was charged with the crime, with the allegation that it came at the end of sex games gone horribly wrong. American college students do strange things, but “sex games” with a roommate isn’t one of them. Dirty socks aren’t that seductive.
Knox spent four years in jail until she was released on appeal, only in recent weeks to stand trial again on the same fanciful charges. For the American media, the trial is a digital remake of a damsel in distress, with the Seattle princess locked away in Italian dungeons and held captive by evil dwarves.
Unlike many American students abroad, Knox learned a lot from her foreign studies. In prison, she mastered Italian fluently, enough to speak eloquently at her trials. Her writing improved sufficiently so she could publish her term paper, Waiting to be Heard.
While not exactly studying law and politics, she learned what Machiavelli might have taught her: that Italian police fabricate evidence and murder weapons and that prosecutors work in the entertainment business. Unfortunately for her, false charges and imprisonment were more tuition than she expected she would have to pay. Nor could she get a rail pass.
Because I take it as a given that Italian justice is a traveling circus—after all Silvio Berlusconi ran the country for nine years—those I blame most for Knox’s misfortunes are her parents.
Early in the local hunt for a sacrificial virgin, they allowed her to undergo intense questioning for hours and days with Italian police (keen to solve a sensational murder on all the front pages), but without the presence of a lawyer.
Did the parents think of Perugia’s prosecutors as the equivalent of enthusiastic local professors, eager to show Amanda medieval treasures or some of Michelangelo’s less well-known sketches?
“It’s a complex fate,” Henry James wrote, “being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.”
Because of the lavish show trials produced at Knox’s expense in the Perugia courts, the Italian public continues to view her as a she-devil, a vixen who came to Europe to engage in ritualistic slaughter and seduce god-fearing Italian boys. (“Over paid, over sexed, and over here.”)
In this case her lover was the cherubic Raphael Sollecito, who was himself dragged into the prosecutorial and media snare (yet another tedious Italian triptych of a crucifixion).
No wonder it was about this time that the Italian papers were reporting that Mona Lisa was a prostitute. In the prime-time paintings of Knox, she became an errant Venus, reclining on many sofas of easy virtue. Let’s hope at least she got some art history credits for her time spent being ravished on Italian canvasses.
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If Americans see continentals as EuroDisney waiters in colorful dress serving wine, many Europeans see Americans as a corrupting influence in their affairs—a people that comes abroad to tap phones, corner markets, drain bank accounts, or peddle arms or wars in the Middle East.
Knox and Barack Obama may look like innocents abroad when they cross the ocean to pursue self-fulfillment dreams (“In attending the G20 summit it is my hope that I might expose myself to different peoples and cultures so that later I will have a better understanding. . .”), but they arrive with many stickers on their trunks.
Too bad they rarely come with a map, a history, the novels of Edith Wharton, or a sense of where they are. Having to tap 80 million phones a month is an expensive way to get directions to the train station or the youth hostel.
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Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of “Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited,” a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.