You also taught in the United States. How did that come about? What did it change? And how were your methods received in the U.S.?

I was having a difficult time back then in Freiburg and besides you could still smoke in the early eighties in the U.S. First I was in Berkeley, then Stanford, and then Santa Barbara on invitations from the Germanists Ted Anderson and David Wellbery. The eight months in Stanford were the best. That had a major impact on me. I noticed that the whole Franco-Germanic way of thought couldn't quite maintain itself in California. You could explain Goethe, Valéry or Descartes, but no one really wanted to know so much about them. What the undergraduates at Stanford, for example, wanted were short formulas. Then I realized that they were right. They had to work with the Japanese and Chinese cultures as well as the European because Asia is actually closer to California than Europe. They couldn't hold every single European country under a magnifying glass. There were also some physicists among the undergraduates who simply wanted to learn about German history and literature. They asked me what I thought about the theory of relativity. Since I didn't know a thing about relativity, I went to the library and started reading. I noticed then that the technological transformation of what we know, in terms of literary science, is the only thing that can be transmitted and, in fact, comes across, indeed, justifiably comes across because literary science, in short, means translating and applying the structures of the Gutenberg age to those structures of the electronic age. We transport those things that are similar, and the other, which can't be carried over and communicated, that is, the poet's 'Geist' or spirit, the state of his 'soul,' we leave out.

The typewriter, for instance, changed the nature of writing. That was the beginning of the end of the word's monopoly as a medium. In Berkeley, they have the Mark Twain library with all of his books about the typewriter. Twain had purchased one for himself, and I worked that into my writing. Back then the story about the typewriter interested the Americans. In Germany, nobody wanted to hear about it. Edison, for example, is an important figure for American culture, like Goethe for German culture. But between Goethe and myself, there is Edison. Germans don't like to hear this, but naturally Americans do.

I still find it remarkable that in the libraries of American universities the books of the Engineering and Mathematics departments stand back-to-back with those of the Philologies. So you read a little Goethe for tomorrow's seminar and then you want to find out about Fourier transformation or entropy so you go over and read a well-written article in a natural science lexicon. If you had checked ten years ago in a German encyclopedia you would have found a small, miserable article about entropy and a long article on Goethe. The relationship seems to me to be much better balanced in America. When Thomas Pynchon was twenty-three and a literature student at Cornell, he could browse through the library and read up on entropy and Bolzmann. That's probably how he would have first encountered them — later he studied physics. The transdisciplinary, straight through the disciplines, in contrast to the interdisciplinary, was much easier in America.