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Ex-pat author Michael Luick-Thrams
IOWA-BORN, AND NOW Dresden-based author and activist Michael Luick-Thrams, who is rapidly becoming one of Central Europe's most visible American ex-pats, in part for his role in his adopted city's struggle against the racist Pegida movement, is back in the news this week as he publishes a new book - first in an electronic edition, to be followed by a print edition this spring - describing his own Midwest family's personal but all-too typical experience with the American dream - and with its dark flipside. Roots of Darkness is the first of five volumes, chronicling virtually the complete range of American history, from the earliest settlement of New York up to 9/11 and beyond. I caught up with him via email to interview him about this ambitious, richly illustrated and, in many respects, alarming project.
- Mr. Luick-Thrams, when I interviewed you in the summer of 2012, you had just left the United States behind you to go into self-imposed exile - crossing the Atlantic by ship, no less, just like your German forebears, although in the opposite direction - keen on a better life here in Europe. That interview (it can be accessed HERE) hit a nerve and quickly went viral. Now, far from home in the Saxon capital of Dresden, you have just published Roots of Darkness: Our Family’s Dreams and Nightmares in America (order at https://www.epubli.co.uk/shop/buch/44093). I understand it’s the first in a five-volume series about the American Heartland called Oceans of Darkness, Oceans of Light. Recalling our original interview, I’ve got the feeling you’ve gone full circle – straight back to the US. Could it be that you can take the man out of America, but you can't take America out of the man?
Of course—but isn’t that a good thing? If you love someone or something, it becomes part of you, even as you carry parts of it in you into each new day, regardless of where you are and what you do. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel disappointed, even angry in response to some characteristics, to certain behaviors of the other person or—in this case—persons, perhaps the majority of my compatriots.
If I didn’t care, if I had simply slipped away and pretended to forget what was happening to our country, then I’d be a callous cad—part of the problem itself, not a viable antidote to it.
Besides, after four centuries, my family has a vested interest in the whole project not going up in flames, but rather pulling back from continued decay and, at the current rate, likely demise.
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- Your book is a family history. How did you come to write it?
This pentalogy has both personal as well as political motivations. Like I outline in the prologue, as a child I experienced not one but two recurring dreams, nightmares about my paternal grandparents’ farmhouse in the middle of the Iowa prairies. One of the nightmares, specifically, had to do with the canyon-like, crooked stairwell tucked away in the heart of that rambling frame house. And, my few but unsettling memories of Grampa Luick literally sent chills down my little spine. The lingering imprint he left in me has always felt visceral, some indelible influence both primal yet vague.
For years, I thought I was projecting some inner malformation in me onto him—he died when I was only three and a half—but last year I discovered that my cousin, Peggy, also had recurring dreams about that same ol’ house. At that moment, I knew I wasn’t the only grandkid picking up on something both frightening yet deeply hidden. During interviews with other relatives for this project, I discovered that not only I, but none of us could remember our grandfather’s voice, or even his having spoken, although we know for a fact that the man physically was able to speak. At that point, I knew that something very wrong was afoot in my father’s family’s house.
I wanted, no, I needed to find out what that was, as half a century later it still would not let go of me—nor I of it. Figuring it all out, then writing it all down became a much-needed, long-overdue catharsis that not only I, but apparently other descendants of a dysfunctional nuclear family needed so desperately, for decades, yet had never achieved—until now.
On a political level, as we watch our country slowly implode—sort of like the image of those two collapsing towers that so aptly embody our nation’s otherwise often intangible spiritual decline—it seems to me there are myriad unspoken, shadowy dynamics at play that are causing the United States to fray, if not unravel irreparably. We’re talking about a pervasive, insidious yet low-level social crisis that everyone sees or at least senses the symptoms of, but few people dare name its actual causes. Many folks seem too close to it all, they have too much invested in keeping even a diseased system on life support—although doing so is killing them or the ones they love, and steadily devouring everything dear to all of us.
I can only conclude that like in a family (a microcosm), secrets, lies and banal as well as overt evils leave an organism—our shared culture—sick and self-consuming. So, by dissecting what it was that was really at play in my paternal lineage, I hope to shed light on what is eating away at the heart of America—our collective “family” as a macrocosm.
- But don't you approach your family history from a highly unusual perspective? There are lots of skeletons in your ancestors' respective closets - anecdotes that most people would try to hush up. Why do you focus on these things?
I love the Midwest—including the archetypal sturdiness and decency typically ascribed to its inhabitants. As with individuals or groups, however, one’s greatest strengths are often concurrently one’s most debilitating weaknesses. The traditional stoic demeanor of my people—simple, unassuming yeoman farmers—meant that we typically avoided unpleasant topics, controversy or, gods forbid, confrontation. So, behaviors such as alcoholism, incest, child or spouse abuse—they went virtually unnamed for generations, really up until the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and early ‘70s bust the whole society open—yes, even at the ends of those long, gritty gravel roads.
As I was coming into young adulthood, it suddenly became possible, even conceivable to name such dynamics—and thus be able to confront them. By then, however, certain dynamics had become reflexive and so hard to root out. Still, naming needs to happen before such deep-seated behaviors can become conscious; only then can they be confronted and, with hard, sustained effort, transformed.
On top of the run-of-the-mill dysfunctions so common to the late-Victorian, Midwestern but also American mindset in place in my youth, which were the norm in most households at the time, my father’s family had the distinction of being a seedbed for even darker dynamics.
As I tried to uncover why my father’s father, Donald Luick, acted so mysteriously, so strangely, I unexpectedly stumbled across testimonies from Dad’s cousins that Donald’s father—my great-grandfather, George Michael Luick, who I knew and deeply loved—had been active in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
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And, that Donald’s wife—my half-orphaned grandmother, Charlotte (Juhl) Luick—had grown up in the same house with her seven-year-older aunt, Della, even though Gramma always maintained that she grew up alone in her maternal grandparents’ home. But, Federal and state census records, newspaper articles from the late ‘20s through early ‘40s, as well as photos from the 1950s, and now even reticent family confessions, document that Della had become a mass-murdering mother who later landed in prison—as of which point Gramma’s dead mother’s people mostly erased the burdened woman from its shared narrative about who the Mooreheads were.
And, there’s also the matter of Donald siring a baby with the hired girl brought in to help run the Luick household when Charlotte was laid up due to pregnancy complications—but you’ll have to buy and read the book to digest those juicy details.
So, for example, in the story of Great-Grampa George Luick, we have the drama of the Klan’s short-lived “revival” as distilled in one family’s enduring that toxic, recurring racist plague. While I don’t flippantly parade my ancestors or their families through a gawking public for shock value, there is a larger cause served by doing so—again, by naming a story that unfolded literally in millions of American households outside the South, all the way up into the Canadian Prairie Provinces and New England, on the heels of the game-changing First World War. How can we have rational, informed discussions about parallel dynamics today (think Ferguson, Missouri, or “I can’t breathe”), if we don’t know about comparable disasters in our shared past?
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- In what way do you think your family is representative of the United States as a whole?
Actually, my family is totally “normal,” not “special” at all, which makes it a prime candidate as an All-American Family ideally suited to represent the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant majority that ruled the country until the social revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s—a tectonic shift that also gets much air time in section one, Roots of Darkness. It’s my family’s genericness that makes it so accessible—we could be almost anyone’s kin who has ties to the Midwest or even to rural culture outside the Midwest. As over half of all Americans lived on farms until World War II, the vast majority of us alive today have some tie to the land—or at least to the Heartland.
- Do you believe that an American "golden age" existed? If so, when was it, and what happened to it?
For various reasons, on different levels, I feel particularly drawn to the era from about 1890 to 1940—not only to the Western cultural streams at play in the U.S. at that time, but also in Europe, Latin America, even in enclaves in Africa and Asia. Sure, there were great injustices taking place—there still are, aplenty—but in terms of physical culture such as architecture, dress, autos, and symbolic culture like theater and music, literature, visual art, hard and political sciences, a great deal of innovation and refinement was bringing aspects of Western living to a new level.
At the same time, of course, something in that mystifying puzzle of human behavior—especially human group behavior—seems to regurgitate “too much of a good thing,” to reject as “too long” an era of sustained peace or prosperity. By the end of the Belle Époque, there seems to have been a hunger for destruction and a social leveling, for the bloody carnage and thereby the devastation of the prevailing order that erupted with the outbreak of the First World War and then, after a rocky break, continued in the Second. I document in detail how my own, how one “ordinary” family “back home, down on the farm,” experienced both global conflagrations—and how massive mobilization affected even the “little people” of history.
Much of the diversity, the intricacy and the sophistication the West as a whole had reached by the zenith of the Belle Époque went lost after two world wars. That fratricidal slaughter on a massive scale set humanity back in some ways, even while catapulting us forward in others—like in terms of the gender, racial and even sexual equality that arose around of the postwar chaos, between 1920 and, say, 1980. As I not only write about but show in section one’s postscript (there are over a thousand photos and other images in the book, after all), a steady uglification of the planet that began during the heyday of industrialization also unfolded in the most rural reaches of the house-proud Midwest. So, once again, we see the macro in the micro—in how my parents said they “remodeled” but in truth “standardized” the Arts-and-Crafts gem built about seventy-five years earlier by Grandpa and Great-Grandpa Thrams, in 1925.
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- At certain points in your book, you seem to be saying that the US is "standing at the brink" of some sort of collapse. Why do you believe this? And, are all of us perched at the same “brink” or can you make distinctions in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and social/financial status?
I reject part of the worldview, and parts of the resultant agenda, behind the “political-correctness police” who want to micro-dissect, to atomize individuals even more into “queer,” “multi-gender,” “metrosexual” and the like. Of course, differentiation is key to nuanced recognition and response, but exaggerating some alleged, tenuous “distinctness” only further separates us various cogs in an already fractured wheel. Fact is, regardless of skin color, sexual-orientation, ethnic or religious or any other of a zillion alleged “backgrounds,” we are all on one-and-the-same stressed planet, in a taxed, “modern” world looking for a better way forward. Ironically, for my part, I think offering a critical look backwards is actually essential to eventually seeing a better future, more clearly.
- If the Midwest has fallen into a terminal crisis, does your book represent a mere post-mortem, or do you see a way of putting the genie back into the bottle?
Some speak of there having been three main waves in American agrarian history. The first fueled the settling of a continent inhabited by non-industrialized peoples and the natural abundance with which they lived in total balance. The second—the industrialization of agriculture that intensified during World War I, then steam-rolled over all reason after that—helped decide the war against Nazism, then propelled the American economy to one with global reach. Rural sociologists, whole-food or slow-food advocates, and others now speak of a Third Wave in American agrarian culture, of “boutique farms” focused on sustainable soil health, food nutrition and viable rural culture—one in balance with a more humane urban counterpart.
I’d take this construct a step further and propose that the entire country needs to be “resettled” from top to bottom, from coast to coast—both on a material plane but also in terms of our jointly-held moral landscape. In the process, we need to throw out the cynical cliques that have shouldered 99% of the U.S. population out of Washington, D.C., or other isolated dens of power across the country, and, in essence, start from scratch to recalibrate the American Dream—one we have to make accessible to all, not just partisan thieves with deep pockets and their corporate whores with deep throats.
We need to rethink what it means to be an “American,” what abstractions like “freedom,” “democracy” or the “pursuit of happiness” really are and, in practice, actually entail. If the country’s to not just survive but thrive going forward, I’m convinced that will only be possible by peering back to check who we were when we arrived on this great continent’s shores—as well as acknowledge who we’ve become in the process of evolving from a discordant babble of immigrants to a more-or-less unified whatever-we-still-are-today collection of people sharing a vast geographic space and a rich cultural legacy.
- From what you've told me ahead of this interview, you're an extremely busy man these days. How does the book project fit in with your other work as a social activist?
You know, during the Reagan years I helped load political muskets behind the barricades of the disenfranchised—I went on marches, canvassed, demonstrated, ladled soup in dank public kitchens, wrote endless articles, organized a palette of social and political events to coax my fellow Americans to think a bit deeper, then a second time, over issues of justice, peace and freedom. Countless gains have been won in the days of the assorted civil-rights movements of my youth, but perhaps we’ve tapped out—at least for now—what umpf such actions once were able to muster.
In all that time, doing the self-work that sound, sustainable activism really requires, I kept coming back to my family, to my rural roots in the heart of a great country. And, I realized time and again that any lasting changes must include those folks the pundits on both the right and the left, on both coasts, like to poke fun of and deride. We—the farmers and carpenters, the road-graders and truckers, railroad workers and shop clerks, the janitors and cafeteria crews—who literally built this nation’s physical plant, then kept it and its people running, must march along with any attempts to modernize, to humanize the culture as a whole. Without such people, no real change can happen.
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My current work is as a “public historian,” as the director of two non-profit education organizations—one in Germany, the other in the Midwest. They bring narrative and, if you will, “social” history to people in various, accessible forms, with the goal of helping them immerse themselves in it and, ideally, be transformed by that encounter with our shared past.
Dresden—the German city where I live most of the year at present—is struggling with its own, post-dictatorship self-image and how non-Saxons fit in with the rest of the populace in this isolated corner of the erstwhile “German Democratic Republic.” Our project at Spuren e.V. (see www.roots.TRACES.org) is all about massaging loose people’s stories, their narratives about who they and their families have been, so that they might revisit their images of who they think they are now. We do all that self-work, together, with an eye to how that “me” we all carry around with us might fit in with the non-“me”—in this case, the non-Germans—in our midst.
I have often felt like an outsider living in my native country, so the feel of being an Ausländer, a “foreigner” in booming, contemporary Germany feels familiar. My work organizing other foreigners into a speakers bureau that goes into schools, churches or other venues to speak about our lives here among the Germans, is inseparable to my own, on-going “self”-work in the United States—that of researching, recording and broadcasting stories about John and Jane Doe.
Roots of Darkness: Our Family’s Dreams and Nightmares in America embodies my continuing interaction with the land of my birth. For me, being not only a bilingual but bicultural gay, Midwest Quaker farmboy living in the mostly aspiritual, urban former East Germany, there is a symbiotic relationship between the roles I play in each country. All of the proceeds from Roots of Darkness for the next two years, for example, will go to Spuren e.V. to fund educational efforts here. In turn, an exhibit and speaking tour based on Roots is planned for the Midwest for next fall. I can’t wait to roam the open prairie and speak at small-town libraries and town halls again: That’s me in my natural setting, through and through!
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- How has your emigration to Germany worked out for you? Would you recommend taking such a step to other disgruntled Americans?
On one hand, by voting with our feet, we dejected Americans abroad give a host of signals, including the most tangible, unmistakable message that we’ve had enough, that the current state of affairs in the United States is no longer conscionable, or even tolerable on a direct, daily basis. For myself, I had to leave as I could not find peace with the recognition that every time I paid a dollar in one or another form of taxes, I was helping to feed the beast, to pay for torturing, even killing people who had never done anything to me and the people I love, nor were so inclined.
Not just in terms of America’s foreign policy, but in-country I no longer felt personally safe. Any person who’s even half-awake has to ask her or himself, “Ok, am I gonna be the one today sittin' in a café or walkin’ down a city sidewalk who’s gonna land in the crossfire of some frustrated, berserk gunman?” For those of us who are dark-skinned or homeless or living in disadvantaged parts of town, the additional question becomes: “Am I going to be shot by some scared cop today?”
What I try in my own small, flawed way in my family history series is to ask—based on my own tribe’s 400-year sojourn in North America—where have we been as a nation, how did we land where are we now, and where, using current trajectories, are we likely to head?
Ultimately, while I try to raise some of the “right questions,” my search raises few pat answers, but rather places the onus back in the laps of my cousins, our neighbors, colleagues, bosses… on all of us: Who are we—and who do we still want to become?
- Mr. Luick-Thrams, thank you for this discussion.
