The Wounded Land [antikvár]

The Last Chapter In the evening friends in Los Angeles had driven us to the station. Now we were rolling eastward again, toward Chicago and New York. On November 30 we were to sail for Europe in the Leonardo Da Vinci. It had been a reunion with America after an absence of many years. There I had spent the years of exile, there I had served in the United States Army, I had become an American citizen. Between 1946 and 1953 I had shuttled to and fro between America and Europe, my feelings much like those of the Germán poet Adalbert von Chamisso, who once said to Madame de Staél that he was "a Frenchman in Germany and a Germán in Francé, a Catholic among the Protestants, a Protestant among the Catholics, to the aristocrats a Jacobin, and a nobleman to the democrats. Je ne suis nulle part de mise." Now I had returned to America as a European, but differing from other Europeans in that I regarded all Europe as my homeland. I was not a member of the Germán or the French or of the Italian nation but, although still an American citizen. I looked upon the whole of Europe as my country. I was equally at my ease on the beaches of Normandy, in Naples' Via Roma, at the Iron Gates and in the