#42: Germany Helped Destroy the Fundamentalist Evangelical Inside Me
When I signed up for a high school exchange program in Germany, I was an extremely reactionary Evangelical Christian. But even if I was afraid to be free, a part of me always wanted to be liberated.
Würzburg, Autumn 2008 (photos my own)
When I first visited Germany as a 17-year-old on an exchange program in 2005, I would never have expected to be there again seventeen years later. Especially not for the purpose of visiting the people I’d met there. I remember the day that our month in Germany with our host families ended in 2005. We were boarding the bus from Bad Neustadt, a small town in northern Bavaria, to the Frankfurt airport, and almost everyone but me was sobbing. Other kids were embracing their host siblings and then walking to their bus seats with tears streaming down their faces. One of my crying friends was walking past me on the way to her seat. Her mouth was wide open, letting out the sounds of her full-on blubbering, and her eyes darted around in despair. They rested on my own for a moment. I returned her miserable expression with my own face, which communicated complete indifference, and she quickly avoided me, moving on to find a more sympathetic seat partner. “I hate Germany,” I thought to myself. When I landed back in America, I told my parents that “at least now I know I will never study abroad.”
Seventeen years later, just this last week, I was sitting in the Hofbräuhaus in Munich with Helena, an old German friend from that program. She had been the host sister of one of my best friends at the time. The very friend, in fact, whom I’d actually sat next to both on the bus to the airport and the plane back to Detroit (and that friend, unlike me, had been crying). What Helena asked me last week was how it was that I ever even decided to go to Germany in 2005.
When I signed up for the exchange program, I was a radical fundamentalist Christian. I spent all my free time studying Calvinist theology, and many of my nights were consumed by the agony of wondering whether God had predestined me to Heaven or to Hell. My friends made several attempts to get me to hang out with them, but I told them they were lukewarm Christians and I could not associate with them, lest their sins infect me and endanger my own soul. Germany, as I knew from my liberal German teacher, was a socialist hellscape, where the godlessness of a pseudo-communist ideology reigned supreme. I told her so myself. And yet somehow, I decided I wanted to spend a month there with a host family. I wrote in the questionnaire for my host sister that I was a devout Christian and that I wanted to go to church every Sunday while I was there, and in my pre-trip reflection for my teacher, I wrote that I would not allow the German socialists to influence me. And so looking back after the passage of a whole second lifetime since, I had to join Helena in wondering at the question she posed to me: why did I want to go to begin with?
By the time I actually went to Germany in 2005, I was no longer a fundamentalist Christian. I had given up the faith and rejoined my old lukewarm friends. The sorrow of my isolation had simply been too much to endure. Nevertheless, I still clung to stern moral values about alcohol, and I viewed drunkenness as among the worst crimes a person could commit against herself. To impair one’s mind in such a way seemed to me to be a sin against one’s own body. Spending a summer in Germany with this mindset, the debauchery I witnessed shocked and horrified me. Karl Marx was the least of my concerns in a nation ruled by the unbridled passions of Bacchus.
Me in Heidelberg, Summer 2005
At one particularly memorable party, I was sitting judgmentally on a couch, adamantly refusing to partake in the alcohol which was freely flowing. I would only drink Coke, and I expected my girlfriend to behave similarly. “Don’t ever drink a drop,” I told her. But she, no doubt yearning to escape from the solemn moralizing of her self-righteous boyfriend, vanished into the backyard to drink without my knowledge. I remained solemn and sober on the couch, sitting still and watching the frenzied people around me. A guy and a girl disappeared into a field in the backyard, returning with nettle scraped all over them, battle wounds from the oral sex they’d been having in the wilderness. A girl from that same party, who I saw wandering around without seeming to see any object around her, ended up getting her stomach pumped that night. Was how how the Corinthians lived before Paul’s epistles?
Certainly, it was precisely as I had feared. It was just what I had warned my 15-year-old girlfriend would happen to those who partook. A descent into animalism. The brutal destruction of one’s own body and brain. I saw a black-out-drunk American guy walking like a zombie down the hallway toward the living room. He seemed to hardly know where he was, and he felt around in front of him like a blind man without a cane. Incoherent sounds came from his mouth, and he fell against the wall every third step, hardly managing to rebalance himself for the next treacherous three feet he would traverse. After a long struggle, he reached the living room, where he leaned against a wall which was the only way he could avoid collapsing onto the ground. A girl, similarly unaware of the world around her, settled next to him, her back against the wall. I looked away for a moment. When I returned my disgusted gaze, his hand was shoved clear down her jeans, which were unbuttoned and unzipped, while the drunken revelry continued around them. I shuddered, scandalized by the immorality and wickedness playing out before my eyes. Neither of them appeared conscious of what their bodies were doing. I was still nominally a Christian, but it wasn’t religion which moved me to disgust. It was the evidence before my very senses of what alcohol could do to people. Beer could hurt them; liquor could leave them making “choices” they never really wanted. Wine and absinthe deprived them of all the rationality which separates human beings from the wild beasts.
The day after that awful party, where I could hardly believe my schoolmates’ willingness to so thoroughly debase themselves with drink, my girlfriend wrote a letter to me. She promised me she would never behave like the others. I sent her a reply, scented with Old Spice, in which, despite my suspicions, I told her I was sure that she would never try any alcohol. My old Christian beliefs, which had rested upon the most sexist passages of the New Testament about the subordination of females to males, still had me viewing women as fragile creatures who could quickly lose control. A little while later, the hedonism so enraptured my girlfriend that she drunkenly made out with some random German guy, who wasn’t even in the program, right in front of nearly everybody. And then she dumped me in the hallway of a Berlin youth hostel. Despite the many witnesses, she denied to me she’d ever made out with anybody. She even called me to berate me for writing the contrary in my LiveJournal. I vowed that I would forgive her, seeing as she had only done the weak womanly thing. She merely needed a chance to strengthen her moral constitution. But she would not confess.
Würzburg, Autumn 2008
The most immediate outcome of my month in Germany was that I became even more adamantly opposed to alcohol, and with such a fervor that my prohibitionist devotions would contribute to the destruction of my next relationship. Germany symbolized all the horrors which flowed from imbibing that awful drug, and I often told people about the evils I had witnessed there. Never again, I vowed, would I return.
But over the longer term, it was the image of my friend blubbering on the bus that stuck with me, and far more than any of the shocking belligerence I had witnessed. Even at the moment, I felt the pain of not being able to cry with her. The sadness and humiliation I felt from having lost my girlfriend in such a public way had left me wanting nothing more than to go home. Meanwhile, my self-righteous, sexist, and lingering fundamentalism had so drastically tainted my experience that I had missed out on the personal connections and learning which had been the point. I became haunted by regret at the fact that I had not been able to cry. I knew there was something precious and critical which had passed over me. And it was my own fault. I also wished I had partied and drank at least moderately, and I despised the persistently prudish and reactionary values which so dominated my psyche. But the core New Testament teachings - which are so averse to drunkenness, women’s liberation, debauchery, and the sensual pleasures of “the flesh” - were so deeply implanted into my soul that no amount of logic seemed capable of freeing me.
Last week, as Helena and I enjoyed our beers at the Hofbräuhaus, she suggested to me that when people change, there was some part of them that was moving in that direction all along. There is something inside us, she said, pushing us toward that new version of us. I nodded in agreement, thinking back to my old psychology. I told her there must have been some part of me that wanted to break free of fundamentalist Christianity, that wanted to grow beyond it. Perhaps that is why, despite the extreme insularity of my worldview, I decided to go to Germany. At the time I signed up for the program in Germany, my fundamentalism was so extreme it had become unbearable, and I do think I was searching for some way to break free from it. I would never have admitted it to myself at the time, but I wanted Germany to corrupt me. After all, despite intensive online therapeutic intervention, I had never succeeded in overcoming my masturbation addiction. Even as I had been writing diatribes on the Internet denouncing women who wore bikinis, I had been secretly sneaking out to make out with an infidel. Worse, I had ultimately succumbed to the temptations of being unequally yoked to my old lukewarm friends. These were the pleasures I wanted all along, I suppose, regardless of how much I pretended I wanted Jesus. It was merely the fear of Hell which pushed me for so long to deny my true desires.
I wanted Germany to defile me, and maybe this expectation for Germany to turn me bad is what sent me there. But once there, months removed from fundamentalist Christianity, the old Evangelical values still saturated my attitudes. In Germany, my deeply rooted Pauline contempt for the flesh still so thoroughly contaminated my worldview that I was mortified by the very activities in which, beneath the affected veneer of a scandalized elder, I wished so badly to participate. I remember a drunk girl getting into the back of a car with me one night. She rubbed up right against me, giggling seductively, and then she whispered to me: “I know you hate this.” I gave her a face which confirmed her words. But in truth, I only wanted her to get closer to me.
Whether I wanted to admit it or not, there were aspects of Germany which attracted me even after I declared my hatred for that relatively godless nation. As my parents drove me home from the airport, and I was declaring my intention never to return to Europe, I was immediately stunned by the grotesque scope of the strip malls sprawling out around us. It had been a month since I’d seen so many parking lots, department stores, and fast food joints, which piled up on top of one another for what seemed like a hundred miles. A month is short to an adult, but for me, as a teenager, it was the longest I’d ever been away from home, and I couldn’t help but remember how different the whole environment had been in Germany. Even in Bad Neustadt, where driving was much more essential, there had been better public transportation, and there had been vast green rolling hills and trees between villages, rather than the endless hideous slabs of concrete which I encountered between the airport and my home. In the years to come, I could not help but to remember Germany’s broad pedestrian boulevards, comfortable regional trains, delicious döner kebabs, wildly high-quality bakeries, and walkable cities. I admired the infrastructure, cityscapes, and food. The low cost of higher education and the universal access to health insurance. Even through the limited teenage inclinations with which I had experienced it, I sensed vaguely that there was somehow a higher quality of life there.
There were positive experiences to build upon. I had in fact loved our tours through Berlin, Heidelberg, and Munich. In the many photographs of me with her and them, I can see how much I wanted to have a connection with Kathi and her family. I can even see myself in several photographs having a wonderful time with my friends. No matter how melodramatically I spoke upon my return, part of me grasped constantly at those connections, tempting me to use those memories to vocalize a happier vision of the past. Despite promising that I would abandon the language forever as soon as I graduated high school, I continued learning German in college.
In the back of my mind, I was haunted by this sense that I needed to redeem myself to my host sister, Kathi, and her friends. I might have been the lamest possible American that anyone could have gotten. When I was with them in Munich this past week, Kathi and Helena told me a story I had perhaps willfully forgotten. We had all just arrived at the swimming pool, and they had just finished laying out their towels for a whole afternoon there. At just that moment, I walked up to them and said in a thick American accent: “Kathi, ich möchte ein Döner essen” (Kathi, I would like to eat a doener). Seventeen years removed while we drank together at a restaurant in Munich, they were laughing heartily at the memory now, describing to me precisely how I had stood there with my hands on my backpack straps. But it nevertheless seared me to dwell upon it. The image came back to me, of Kathi’s startled expression, and all the towels laid out behind her. I cringed at the recollection of the person I had been.
I felt a surge of gratitude that I was friends with them now. At every party, I had been the lame one, sitting in the corner refusing to have any fun. Every night we went out to a bar or club, I was the one standing still off to the side drinking Coca-Cola and declining even just to dance. At the field parties where everyone gathered to drink in the grass, I would walk off to the side with a few American friends, so averse to the alcoholic shenanigans that I would hardly even socialize with the Germans at all, let alone the drunkest Americans. And when the Germans came to visit us, and the school organized a field trip for all the Germans and their Americans to go to Toronto, I was the only American who did not go. I refused to attend any of the parties the entire time the Germans were in town, and I was so reclusive and antisocial that at some point my host sister decided to spend her remaining nights at someone else’s house. And yet somehow, these people, 17 years later, are my friends.
It was the summer I spent in England in 2007, between freshman and sophomore year of college, that brought to the surface the way I had always wanted to feel about Germany. The very regret I felt regarding Germany is what spurred me to go there, to try and make up for the experiences I felt I had missed out on, to try and achieve the changes I had wanted all along. Through my corrupting coursework about the history of British foreign policy and British social welfare state, I became man of the left for the first time in my life. My new disposition was a cosmopolitan, internationalist one, precipitated by the quick friendships I built with students from Sweden, Germany, Turkey, the Netherlands, and France. My best friend there was a Belgian, and he shared my passion for literature, while pushing me gently away from Christianity and toward his own confident atheism. Cambridge - in which I was only studying thanks to the course Bad Neustadt had set me upon - thus killed off whatever was left of my religion. In that way, it even helped to destroy a romantic relationship of two years. Yet despite the disruptive and painful implications, I found myself relishing the ways in which these students, professors, and experiences abroad were influencing me.
This is what I had wanted all along, it seemed, from the moment I signed up as a fundamentalist Christian to spend a summer in Germany. I always wanted to change, even if a fear of both everlasting and worldly consequences kept me back from embracing this. Being abroad, I had somehow always known, was the path forward, because what I really needed was a complete removal from the culture around me and an immersion into a different one. Even if I was too afraid to fully embrace that desire the first time around, it was the reason I had gone to Germany to begin with. What England really left me with, then, was a more conscious desire of how badly I wanted new ideas, foreign people, and different cultures to obliterate the values of my childhood, and to push me into becoming a different kind of person entirely. Conservative religion and conservative American politics had brainwashed me, but a part of me was screaming for liberation from the old regime, as if my mind were in the midst of a civil war, waiting for the conscious part of me to switch sides to the rebel forces. When I finally opted for revolution, I did not really know where the journey would end. I had no concrete vision of the result. Yet it was the only path forward, and the unknown future, which contrasted so sharply with my former dreams of becoming a right-wing evangelical pastor, itself became a part of what I craved.
In England, I thought back to the summer two years before in Germany. I wished so badly that I had gone there eager to connect with the Germans in my program. I felt such intense regret for the way I had behaved, for how withdrawn I had been from them, and I was desperate for a way to go back in time and fix it. How had I reduced my whole experience to a condemnation of the excessive drinking of the Americans? How had I characterized all of Germany according to the debauched behavior of my classmates? Thoughts ran through my mind of a different past, one where I’d become great friends with Kathi and Helena, and with all the other Germans who probably thought I was a fucking freak. If only I could do it over! With my new mindset, which was finally willing to actually admit how much I stood to gain abroad, even if I had pretended not to know it in the past. I had squandered my opportunities in Germany the first time I went. I had suspected it even then, when I could not produce the tears which were streaming down my friends’ faces on that bus. I felt the pain of regret more acutely than ever in England.
Now I cried out for something that would irredeemably internationalize me. My whole being ached for an experience that would irreparably damage the religious, conservative, and nationalistic world views which had dominated my childhood and controlled my mind for so much of my adolescence, and which lingered within me against my will even once I’d declared myself an atheist. The people I met in England had seen so much more of the world than me, especially so much more of Europe, and I yearned for that kind of exposure. I left England with only one thought in my mind. I must spend a full year in Germany, improving my German, meeting new people, and seeing Europe. And as soon as I could, I signed up to complete my junior year in Freiburg. This time, I would not suppress what I really wanted. I would act upon it, and I would forever leave behind the reactionary attitudes which had imprisoned me for so long.
Early in that year in Freiburg, in the autumn of 2008, I visited Kathi and Helena in Würzburg, the beautiful Bavartian city where they were attending university. I have always looked back on that weekend with such happiness, as it seemed to make up to some degree for who I had been in those first weeks I had spent with them. I was nervous as I journeyed to them on the train. I was like a man who had been awkward, quiet, and withdrawn throughout an evening, and is then so consumed by thinking about how weird he is that, as much as he wants to snap out of it and just start acting “normal,” he finds an inertia holding him back, a fear that his behavior has been so off-putting that he almost does not deserve to simply start acting normal, and against his will he continues being anti-social. Yet I forced myself to overcome this, and to act like my best self while I was with them. I was different now, I reminded myself. I spoke much better German. I was embracing my coursework at a German university. I was a partier and a drinker now. I was a fun and interesting person who had developed a profoundly different mindset than the one I had just three years before in Bad Neustadt. I stayed with them in their apartment, and I was overwhelmed by the kind eagerness with which they welcomed me, despite all the unworthiness I felt as a result of my past behavior. Within moments everything was wonderful. We wandered around Würzburg taking hilarious pictures, often posing on steps and benches as if we were a musical group doing a photo op. They took me through the palace gardens and we went to the movies. And we had a fantastic night out drinking with their friends. I was sad to leave, wanting immediately to see them again, but feeling so fortunate to have been given another chance, and to have confirmed to myself that I was different now.
A few months later, my friends and I took regional trains from Freiburg to Berlin, where we would be spending Christmas in a hostel for a week. At one point, we passed through the station at Bad Neustadt, and I looked at the sign marking it outside the window. A wave of emotions overtook me then, but the regret I had once felt was replaced by something different. “That’s where I spent the summer,” I told the person next to me, without a hint of sadness in my voice. I felt instead a kind of nostalgia, stemming from a satisfactory realization that I wouldn’t have been there in that train toward Berlin if it hadn’t been for Bad Neustadt. I probably wouldn’t have even gone to England; I never would have lived a year in Freiburg. The next summer, I saw Kathi again when I visited Bad Neustadt during the final couple months of my year in Germany. I was fearful of what impression her parents might retain of me. But as her dad drove me to the train station when it was time to leave, he told me I would always have a place to sleep there with them, and all my regret gave way to happiness.
I was a radically different person after my year in Europe. I had studied at a German university, visited two dozen countries, and dramatically expanded my conception of varied ways of life and of different approaches to government, religion, and morality. My American Evangelical religious beliefs were utterly destroyed, never to be revived again. Even if a Calvinist sense of Total Depravity still haunted me, I never again allowed it to shape my judgment of other people, or to hold me back from the delicious sins in which I had always yearned to participate. And if my old conservative politics would sometimes struggle to stay alive, they could not endure for long.
In the years to come, I would see Kathi numerous times in New York, Frankfurt, Bad Neustadt, and Tel Aviv. Yet I would not see Helena again until just this last week, fourteen years after Würzburg, when the three of us were together in Munich. It reminded me a bit of our time in Würzburg. We had good food and wandered around in the vast English Gardens. We watched the surfers on the river and I thought about how I had stood once on that very bridge with all those other Americans from the exchange program. It felt in some ways as if hardly any time had passed since I was last with them both. I knew that despite all my absurdities seventeen years before, I had gained these unique transatlantic friendships to last a lifetime, and the summer I had spent back then truly had, in the end, liberated me from what I had been. In Munich, I told them how much Würzburg had meant to me. I told them I couldn’t even believe they had still wanted to be friends with me after all the ways in which I had acted. But they told me that they knew somehow I was a cool person inside. They even told me how me and my friend had gotten them into Death Cab For Cutie, and I smiled at the memory of my old favorite band. Always, even then, the seed of who I am today was there, and the first growing pains were simply the worst of them.
My summer in Germany way back in 2005, I realized, had not been a waste after all. Despite all my self-avowed desire to not allow the “socialists” and “hedonists” in Germany to influence me, I had succumbed, and to something completely different than all my preconceived notions about the threat then before me. It was just as I had really wanted to begin with, somewhere deep beneath my reactionary veneer. The exchange program with Bad Neustadt had set me on the course which led me to where I am today. It was the root of the person I am now. Being in Munich last week visiting my friends, I wandered around contemplating all the memories I had in that city, none of which I would ever have predicted in the days of an Evangelical Dark Age: the awkward 17-year-old I had been there in 2005, the debauchery I had enjoyed at Oktoberfest in 2008, the Death Cab concert I attended there the same year, the weekend with my parents in 2009, a weekend there alone in 2010. Being with my friends there in 2022 was an occasion to leave behind regrets and simply revel in the relief I felt for who I had become, and the happiness about the people and experiences I have gained in my life thanks to Bad Neustadt. I thought back to all the despair I felt in England about my squandered days in Germany. If only I could have foreseen that, fifteen years later, I would be welcome in Munich to spend those wonderful days with Kathi and Helena, then I would have known I had nothing to regret after all.