Journey Through America

<p> <em>Amerikafahrt </em>by Wolfgang Koeppen is a masterpiece of observation analysis and writing based on his 1958 trip to the United States. A major twentieth-century German writer Koeppen presents a vivid and fascinating portrait of the US in the late 1950s: its major cities its literary culture its troubled race relations its multi-culturalism and its vast loneliness a motif drawn in part from Kafka's <em>Amerika</em>. A modernist travelogue the text employs symbol myth and image as if Koeppen sought to answer de Tocqueville's questions in the manner of Joyce and Kafka. <em>Journey through America </em>is also a meditation on America intended for a German audience and mindful of the destiny of postwar Europe under many Americanizing influences.</p>