2.
A bit of background:My "nationalistic- internationalistic" voice comes from an American immigrant who was brought up as a German. I was eight years old when the power to rule Germany was handed to Adolf Hitler. When his war ended I was twenty years old and in an American prisoner of war camp in France. I went home to a defeated country and studied German literature because I was eager to find out what the country really was after its catastrophe.

Convinced that America was the land of the future, I migrated to Canada, at the age of thirty, because there was a position open that brought me nearer to the desired country. The following year, 1958, thirty three years old, I settled in Houston, Texas. In 1971, as a Professor of German in a California university, I became an American citizen because I wanted to be able to vote against the Vietnam War. I had learned that a part of America was clinging to what had been the German and European affliction, blinded by ideology and addicted to power. I felt that the final success of the protest movement against this war saved the American soul as I understood it, or wanted to understand it, that air of proud individuality, of frankness, of concern for fellow men and women, that generosity linked to its landscapes, the plains, hills, mountains, deserts, skyscrapers, most of all to its thinking. This is my country I do not want to live anywhere else. But, being brought up in a different country, I keep seeing it also from a healthy distance. That is whe I call my view "internationalistic."