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On the face of it, Werner Bohleber's biography and mine couldn't appear to be more different. How then did the two of us become such close friends and cherished colleagues? Werner, a German who was born in Strasbourg in 1942, experienced the trauma of the Second World War directly. With his father serving in the German army, the young boy and his mother were left to face the war years on their own. As the American troops were advancing on that Alsatian city in the late fall of 1944, the two of them moved to Stuttgart. And it was not until 1946—that is, not until Werner was four years old—that he saw his father when he returned from an allied prisoner-of-war camp. It is no wonder, then, that Werner was drawn to trauma, nationalism, prejudice, destructiveness, identity, historical memory, and the legacy of the Nazi era as the central topoi of his theoretical project.
I, on the other hand, am an American Jew who was born in 1947 and grew up in Los Angeles. The city was not only located as far as one could get from Europe while remaining within the boundaries of North Atlantic Civilization. With the influx of returning GIs after the War, it also became the staging ground for the attempt to create a new form of suburban life ex nihilo that would leave history behind once and for all.