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Europe and the United States share a common destiny, like Paul Auster’s novels and the Statue of Liberty writes Judith Kärn, one of the winners of the essay contest Fascination Europe – Fascination America. She reports here on an encounter with Miss Liberty in the middle of Europe.

There are countless images of her: America’s First Lady. She is a big woman, with piercing eyes always sternly looking straight ahead. Her gaze is also steely and cold. I have already had the great pleasure of meeting her in person. It was in Paris, yet, always with the feeling that she is not quite the same on the European continent. There, she in any case seemed more un-American than I had imaged her to be. Apparently, she went without fast food in recent years, to skirt any platitudinous clichés.

It was an encounter that made me feel euphoric, but also melancholic. If you walk along the roughly 900-metre long and only 20-metre wide Seine island of Île de Cygnes, you are bound to meet her: the Statue of Liberty. The allegory of freedom and number one symbol of the United States of America right in the centre of Europe. Liberty – who would want to do without it in this life? The lady on the Île de Cygnes gazes in the direction of the original, which the French people gave to the Americans for their centennial of independence. Miss Liberty always gazing ahead and yet, in her lee under the bridge on the île – all but in her lap – is a tent city of the homeless.

It is as if Paul Auster’s stories had raged in the centre of Paris. Paul Auster’s tales in which – no one knows exactly how – people become homeless and losers. They do so without fail, procedurally, in a sick world. Perhaps it is simpler to do without the abstract term of liberty, with which we simply fool ourselves, than without Auster’s stories of slow decay. It is not for nothing that the protagonist of Auster’s Leviathan wilfully blasts replicas of the Statue of Liberty in the air. It is not quite so simple with the Americans. The American Dream doesn’t need the Taliban to blow it up; it can just as well be blasted to bits by any (by all means philosophically minded) American citizen.

If we interpret the tent settlement on the Seine at the back of Miss Liberty as a seeming fulfilment of Auster’s apocalypses, we must ask whether the specifically American aspect of Auster’s narratives consists perhaps solely of his long-winded descriptions of American baseball, and nothing more.

Is there an American Dream in the lee of the Statue of Liberty for the homeless of Paris? I cannot say. Hence, Auster makes of the monument on the Seine isle a monument of reflection, also with regard to one’s own dreams and liberties. The First Lady certainly possesses a sense of mission; she cannot climb down so readily from her high pedestal (the same applies to the Miss Liberty in the States: “No – we can’t”). After all, both of the ladies are representatives of a world power.

And therefore, as Auster’s stories and the Statue of Liberty share a certain common destiny, the same seems to be true of Europe and the USA. It is this ambivalent state of being torn between the American Dream and Paul Auster’s worlds of terror that is so fascinating. How does America really tick? I have never been to New York and yet I know: it is calling me.

My American heroes are not called Brangelina nor do they adorn the covers of cheap tabloid newspapers, but ambivalently coquet as Misslibpaul. And that, as I said, has explosive force.