No Such Country: Essays Toward Home

When a German born writer spends almost a third of his life in the U.S., where he writes award-winning essays in English and learns of his homeland's reunification, it is understandable that home will be a recurring topic of his writings. In No Such Country: Essays toward Home, Elmar Leuth offers a series of autobiographical essays in which the idea of home is constantly shifting, both geographically and psychologically.

The early essays position Lueth between Germany and America, exploring his family's century-old beer distributorship in Hamburg and recounting his first extended stay in the U.S. as a 19-year old farmhand with a first glimpse of the adult choices that await him. Later essays add a third cultural dimension to the mix: the former East Germany. On Christmas day 1989, Lueth and his father take a ten-minute ferry ride across the former border to a place neither of them ever expected to enter. Lueth also chronicles his 17 months as a U.S. government employee in eastern Berlin and his tour of the former State Security Police headquarters there.

The closing essay introduces one more layer of the narrator's cross-cultural journey; his marriage to an American woman, an act that embraces and perpetuates his position between cultures.