No Such Country: Essays toward Home (Sightline Books Book 1)

No Such Country explores the idea of home—but a home without clear boundaries, a home in motion. A German who spent ten years in the U.S. and also witnessed the complexities of German reunification firsthand, Elmar Lueth writes about his idea of home, its shape and texture, which has shifted in unexpected and often startling ways. The autobiographical essays here focus on these shifts, tracing the geographical and psychological borders Lueth has crossed between the U.S., western Germany, and eastern Germany. He writes about his family's business in Germany and examines his ties to this tradition even as he lives an ocean apart, studying and teaching the intricacies of a foreign language in the U.S. Another essay revisits a ferry ride across the Elbe, which formerly marked the border between East and West Germany and now becomes the site of a psychological journey that the author embarks on with his father, into a space neither of them expected to enter. Other essays explore this space and attempt to map its many dimensions, taking readers into the streets of the new Berlin or tracing the difficult legacy of the Holocaust. These are beautifully written and quietly compelling personal essays about family, language and communication, work, love and marriage, home, history, memory, and belonging. Lueth's journeys will interest anyone who lives or works at the intersection of different spaces, languages, or cultures. When a German born writer spends almost a third of his life in the U.S., where he writes award-winning essays in English and learns of his homeland's reunification, it is understandable that home will be a recurring topic of his writings. In No Such Country: Essays toward Home, Elmar Leuth offers a series of autobiographical essays in which the idea of home is constantly shifting, both geographically and psychologically.

The early essays position Lueth between Germany and America, exploring his family's century-old beer distributorship in Hamburg and recounting his first extended stay in the U.S. as a 19-year old farmhand with a first glimpse of the adult choices that await him. Later essays add a third cultural dimension to the mix: the former East Germany. On Christmas day 1989, Lueth and his father take a ten-minute ferry ride across the former border to a place neither of them ever expected to enter. Lueth also chronicles his 17 months as a U.S. government employee in eastern Berlin and his tour of the former State Security Police headquarters there.

The closing essay introduces one more layer of the narrator's cross-cultural journey; his marriage to an American woman, an act that embraces and perpetuates his position between cultures.

__No Such Country__The autobiographical essays here focus on these shifts, tracing the geographical and psychological borders Lueth has crossed between the U.S., western Germany, and eastern Germany. He writes about his family's business in Germany and examines his ties to this tradition even as he lives an ocean apart, studying and teaching the intricacies of a foreign language in the U.S. Another essay revisits a ferry ride across the Elbe, which formerly marked the border between East and West Germany and now becomes the site of a psychological journey that the author embarks on with his father, into a space neither of them expected to enter. Other essays explore this space and attempt to map its many dimensions, taking readers into the streets of the new Berlin or tracing the difficult legacy of the Holocaust. These are beautifully written and quietly compelling personal essays about family, language and communication, work, love and marriage, home, history, memory, and belonging. Lueth's journeys will interest anyone who lives or works at the intersection of different spaces, languages, or cultures.

Matthew Mark Trumbull was a Londoner who immigrated at the age of twenty. Within ten years of his arrival in America, he had become a lawyer in Butler County, Iowa; two years later a member of the state legislature; and two years after that a captain in the Union Army. By the end of the Civil War, he was a brevet brigadier general, and in his later years he was an author and lecturer. Kenneth Lyftogt's biography details the amazing life of this remarkable man, also shedding light on the histories of the Third Iowa Volunteer Infantry and the Ninth Iowa Volunteer Cavalry.

A series of autobiographical essays explores the complexities of German reunification and the new German state, grappling with modern issues as well the troubled legacy of the Holocaust. Original.