I wish I could say America was what I had seen on TV in my childhood and teenage years, but I can't. I don't know the reason for it, but I remember that when I came to the US for the first time, it felt like a total surprise. It was a high school trip to LA, in 2008, I think. We stayed with a Mexican host family, living in Whittier, on the outskirts of LA. The house was supposed to be worth a million dollars—a surprise to me and my fellow students when they told us. The cat was fat, and the youngest child felt most comfortable lying in the trunk of the car with a blanket and a pillow instead of being buckled down in a regular seat. The milk cans could have been gasoline reserve tanks, and the oldest son used to drink out of the 5-gallon milk jug every morning and ate cold pizza. The host family was great—very kind—buying us 6-packs of imported European beer that we drank without any change in appearance. That was the family’s surprise.
*Back to what I wanted to write about.*
What was America when I put my feet on the ground for the first time? Nothing I knew. It seemed like I had no expectations. It might have been the result of brain damage after hitting my forehead when we had a contest in my hometown, Lieboch.
I regularly met with friends in the Billa parking lot. Johannes and Stefan were my age, and the rest were older. On this particular day, we battled against each other to see who could jump higher with the stunt skates. We had built our own ramp, and I think I was not bad that day. If I remember correctly, the \Absperrband* was mounted between two wooden poles at about 2.5 meters high. Jakob, who had fabricated the ramp, lent me his helmet because of the height. I had a bad feeling, but I appreciated his gesture. The problem was, the helmet was too big, and as I jumped, it moved and blinded my eyes. I couldn’t see anything anymore, lost balance, and literally köpfelte into the asphalt. Everyone ran toward me. Jakob’s sister Anna was bending down, holding some fingers in front of me, asking me to count. I lay down on the bench of the nearby restaurant, cooling the biggest Beule ever seen.
There’s a good chance that this is one of the reasons why my brain didn’t work that well anymore. It still doesn’t work that great.
What was America after that trip? A place I didn’t want to visit anymore. I had never seen more poverty and Elend in any city before. Our host family drove us through Skid Row. I remember miles of cardboard along the sidewalk, tents—some of them functioning, some halfway, some fully collapsed. I remember an old man—I guess a war veteran—who had lost both legs and was pushing his wheelchair on the road, naked on top, wearing a gold chain.
I was not thinking about coming back, but years later—2017—my then-girlfriend and I got an invitation from her friends to stay with them for a couple of weeks in Sunnyvale, where he was working for an Austrian automotive company; she was babysitting. We flew, and my American experience was very much the opposite of my first trip. The Silicon Valley at that time was extremely boring, but what seems to come out to the Western world from these boring, reflective, battery-like buildings will change the world. I was not so much into Silicon Valley, but the landscape, the Pacific, San Francisco as a cultural hub though. I remember wandering through the city with tears in my eyes because it felt like home—a place where I could envision raising my children. At that time, it was just a mind game, as I didn’t even allow myself to dream about living here.
Wolfgang Welsch, a German philosopher I read, said that he had some kind of enlightenment when he was standing at the coastline looking at the vastness of the Pacific. I remember many magical moments when I spent time here.
I came again to stay with my then-girlfriend’s friends—this time for nearly two months—to take a photography and plein air painting class during the summer at the Continuing Studies program at Stanford University.
I loved Stanford. It was a magical but intimidating place. I was told the chairs cost 2K. I was even intimidated by the chair. It was also the place where I was complimented for something very strange. I didn’t know then, but I would get used to this and might start giving strange compliments myself. I got a compliment for my glasses. I was surprised and had to give back a compliment—about her T-shirt or so. The teacher was nice and different. Yvette was their name, and they would have a huge impact on my life. They brought us to different places: the coastline covered in fog, a woodshed that was a bar in the middle of the forest, the cactus garden that I loved.
They showed me the colors on the surface of the water of the Pacific that I hadn’t seen before, and they were the ones who asked me about my plans after I finished studying in Austria. They also introduced me to the college where I would end up studying: Mills College—an institution I’d never heard of—that later on became very important to me. The college today doesn’t exist anymore.
In general, I feel as if many of my experiences, places, institutions, and bars have had their existence halfway in history. Many of them have already faded out. I constantly see them going. They are now fast food chains, or empty, or something else.
— Markus Kager
San Francisco, April 4, 2025