Portraits: Joe

"You're not going to print my name, are you?"

I paused, my pen poised over my notebook, thinking, "That's exactly what I was planning to do." It wasn't a reaction I was expecting from an American, but then again, Joe may not really truly be an American.

He sat on a sideways crate, the only seat left by the time he arrived to the Thursday night gathering of ex-patriots at this week's bar of choice. A velvet curtain as a back drop, a red chandelier and red walls made the back room of the pub on Dresdener Strasse glow in a rouge hue.

We went through the normal negotiations when someone is hesitant to commit to an interview and eventually settled into questioning. Joe moved to Germany from New York City when he was 13 with his parents, he told me. He grew up in Cologne. He now works in the IT industry in Berlin.

His words didn't have the typical American accent, buttressed by blurry r's. But they didn't carry the strong consonants and the telling emphasis on the first syllable of words either. His pompous was more of the European kind. The way his hand motions guided his words, like a conductor of an orchestra, is a U.S. trademark.

Joe retains his American citizenship and uses the word "they" when he talks of Germans, as one speaks of foreigners. Yet he has lived in Germany for about 30 years. I paused, trying to figure him out. Who is he? One of his feet seems grounded on American soil, with the other stretching to reach the German border. Yet the span across the Atlantic is too great, leaving him caught in in the updrafts and waves crests of what is in between.

How much of his eccentricity is part of his character and how much is the result of a mixed cultural identity? I wondered.

"Do you feel more German or more American?" I asked him.

"Neither," he said, taking a sip of wine while everyone else drank beer.

He likes Berlin, where he moved to two years ago, he said. It feels safe. He likes the freedom. "It reminds me of New York City, but without all the problems."

Joe, if that really is his name, probably won't be part of the article I'm writing for the German newspaper about American ex-pats. He doesn't fit the rubric. He just doesn't fit.