Your story “Autobahn” is set on the highway between Frankfurt and Munich, in the nineteen-seventies. A young man, hitchhiking, is accosted by a police officer, who perhaps suspects him of being a member of the Baader-Meinhof group—a left-wing terrorist organization that targeted police and other state, military, and business figures. How did this scenario come to you?
The event on the Autobahn is real. It happened frequently in the nineteen-seventies that an innocent person was mistaken for a terrorist. The terror of being questioned at gunpoint has been felt, no doubt, by many people all over the world who have been perceived as strangers because of their appearance or ethnic origins. In my story, the character’s entire identity falls apart when the cop refuses to believe him. He turns into an “elsewhere man,” with no foothold in the world, struggling not only with the cop but with the more fundamental threat of his own father in memory.
The narrator of the story shares some of your biography: like him, you grew up in Dublin, with an Irish father and a German mother. How did you decide how much of the story to fictionalize, and how much of yourself to include?
My memoir “The Speckled People,” tells the story of my strange German-Irish childhood in Dublin. My mother was the reporter from elsewhere, recording everything in her diary. The way she told the stories, those funny and tragic, often incomprehensible events—as I was growing up speaking German at home, then migrating each day onto the street, where English was spoken—took on a legendary, almost mythological quality. My view of the world contains that exaggerated sense of confusion. The narrator of this story is defined by a profound loss of identity. The outsider experience of being held at gunpoint in his mother’s country sets off a deeper questioning of his feathery existence.
There are two themes in the story: a fear of violent men, as exemplified by the father and the cop; and a sense of statelessness, of not quite belonging to either Ireland or Germany. Do those two undercurrents flow together for you?
I often ask myself why every man I meet turns into a version of my father. A basic father-and-son issue that I attempt to deal with in writing. Rather than judging my father for his raging ideology, I have always tried to understand where he was coming from. People talk about a sense of closure, but I feel that writing has the opposite effect: it becomes a great opening. A live engagement with memory. The cop on the Autobahn forces the narrator into a posthumous conversation with his father that leads to some reconciliation.
The story is set half a century ago. Do you think that the cultural differences between the two countries—Germany and Ireland—have lessened over that time?
German people and Irish people always seemed to live at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. My German mother, for example, found it hard to understand why Irish people made such inventive detours when answering a question. Everything in Ireland was converted into a story. By contrast, I was brought up to engage in a form of extreme honesty that was perhaps not the best strategy for survival in Ireland. Things have changed over the last fifty years. Prosperity in Ireland has allowed us to look into the past with more clarity. The Germans, on the other hand, may have evolved to take on some of the Irish eccentricities they’ve always craved.
The narrator of the story had a father he couldn’t communicate with, who was sometimes violent. He has just become a father himself. How do you think his relationship with his father will affect his relationship with his daughter?
When the cop on the Autobahn goes through the narrator’s bag, he finds a Teddy bear. The narrator bought it for his daughter, who is six weeks old. This gift allows him, in that moment of terror, to remember something good about his father, a time when his father gave him a mouth organ for his birthday. In many ways, the narrator is learning how to repair the broken relationship with his father by showing kindness toward his own daughter. He is ready to recreate his role as a father by arriving home with a Teddy bear and a song at bedtime.
The story underwent several drafts—you approached the scene on the Autobahn from different angles, before settling on this one. Can you talk about that process of revising and what kept you coming back to the story?
The experience of being held at gunpoint forced me to question who I was as a person. I did not tell anyone about it, and could really explore it only in writing. In earlier drafts, it was a frightening event that pointed to a deeper terror in the narrator’s life without revealing it in detail. I imagined the narrator’s loss of his identity pulling up a more fundamental insecurity, but it was only when I brought in the father as a parallel to the cop that the story succeeded in addressing the character’s true fears. ♦
