No Such Thing As One America

Special to TMN

– Lia Blanchard

Saskia Hertlein looks like any other college kid you might see traversing the Fort Hays State University campus. Her backpack is slung over one shoulder, and her long dark ponytail swings as she walks across the quad to Rarick Hall. She’s quick with a smile and a “Hello!” when she passes, and in the stairwell she takes the steps two by two.
But this “student” is actually a professor—she speaks seven languages fluently (and a few others not-so-fluently) and has traveled to more countries than most Americans can find on a map. And she’s only 33 years old.
Dr. Hertlein is a visiting faculty member from Universität Duisburg-Essen (the University of Duisburg-Essen), located in Essen, Germany. FHSU and Duisburg-Essen have been exchanging English faculty for years, with a German professor coming to Hays each summer to teach a class in the English Department’s Summer M.A. program. Previous visiting professors from Essen have taught summer classes in linguistics, British literature and applied linguistics.

Dr. Hertlein has just completed her dissertation in American Studies, with an emphasis in literary and cultural studies. Her summer class at FHSU is appropriately titled “Fictions of Diversity: Reading America from the Inside and the Outside.”

Before she left for Hays, her colleagues at Duisburg-Essen prepared her for the diligence of the graduate students in the FHSU English Summer M.A. program, but she says she was still a little surprised. “These students put in a lot of work,” she says. “Classes like ours show how in-depth the conversations can be. For a long time, upper-level academia targeted a certain homogenous group of people—those who could afford to pay tuition while not working—but isn’t it important to include everyone?”

“Hays almost feels big”

Someone as well-traveled as Dr. Hertlein might be expected to feel a little stifled in a western Kansas town several hours’ drive from the nearest metropolis, but she feels right at home. “Essen is big, but my hometown is really just a village,” she says. “Hays almost feels big compared to Triefenstein.”

Her colleagues at the German university also warned her that the FHSU campus is very quiet during the summer months. “They told me, ‘You’ll get lots of work done,’” she says with a laugh, “so I brought along some academic work to do.” As it turns out, she has discovered plenty to do in Hays. “I haven’t gotten nearly as much work done as I thought,” she says, “but my boss is happy that I am getting out and about.”

She’s attended a couple of barbecues, her first Fourth of July parade and fireworks, and has taken in the historical sights downtown and at the Ellis County Historical Museum. She even ran in the Wild West Fest 5K, although she says, “It wasn’t the ‘Fastest 5K in the West’ for me. It was a little more humid than I am used to.” Dr. Hertlein accompanied some of her graduate students to a musical in Kansas City one weekend, and to Lindsborg on another, taking in the Swedish flair of that town during its Front Porch Friday event.

The plurality of being German—or American

She finds it interesting that although she has heard a lot about the Volga-German heritage of the town, she sees quite a variety of German regions represented here, especially in the culinary offerings of the local restaurants and grocery stores. “There are very distinct regions in Germany,” Dr. Hertlein says. “It made me smile to see a lot of those places represented in one section of the grocery aisle.”
In fact, when asked how she would represent Germany if she were in charge of an international festival, she says, “I would do something that shows the plurality of being German. It isn’t just lederhosen [from Bavaria], or the Volga traditions. There are many different things.”

She gave the same answer when asked how she might represent the United States at an international festival elsewhere: “Same idea. People tend to have an idea of what the USA is like based on what they see on TV, or the news. It’s changing a little bit with the Internet now, but a lot of people still think of the USA as being full of fast food, large cars that use a lot of gas, and lots of technology. But I know that that is not always true. Depending on where you go in the USA, you will have a completely different experience. There’s no such thing as one America.”

Although she holds a Ph.D. in American Studies, Dr. Hertlein speaks from experience as well as academics. Her first visit to the United States was as a high school exchange student in Washington State, and she has been back to the Pacific Northwest several times to visit her host family. She’s also attended a conference in Missouri, and was an intern at a Model United Nations conference in New York City in 2001. Woven among the visits to the USA were trips to Mexico, India, Cuba, England, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and many of the countries of continental Europe.

Fluency in seven languages is impressive to most Americans, but there’s no doubt that Dr. Hertlein’s expertise in literature and culture comes from a deeply felt passion. “A language is far more than codified signs on a piece of paper. All the different kinds of languages are like all the different kinds of art. The way that some art is best expressed in a certain form—music, or theatre, or sculpture—some things are better said in a certain language.”