America in the park

Washington stayed with us not as one story, but more as a sequence of images.

Rainbow flags in front gardens. A homeless veteran outside the White House. Yellow school buses around the National Mall. A Texan who loves Egon Schiele and carries a pistol back home. Thousands of American flags representing headaches. And, in the evening, an almost deserted park where only the monuments remain.

The city around the Mall is a kind of collage. Park, museum, stage, centre of power and national narrative all at once. Here, America explains itself. And not always in the same version.

Pride

Our walk from the Airbnb to the White House takes us through residential streets of brick houses and basement flats. It is Pride Month.

Rainbow flags hang from many houses, some small and almost incidental, others large and emphatic. In one front garden stands an inflatable unicorn with a rainbow horn.

We will see this image many more times on our journey: at Rockefeller Center in New York, in Boston, and in Provincetown, of course.

None of it seems hidden. Nothing looks like a brave gesture in hostile surroundings. Naturally, as travellers we see only the surface. Social changes unfold gradually, political decisions do not always affect everyday life immediately, and a few colourful streets are no proof of an entire country’s freedom.

Even so, the impression remains: perhaps, even in politically charged times, America is more diverse and freer than our European perspective sometimes allows. Perhaps we focus so intently on the loud conflicts that we overlook how much difference continues to be lived as a matter of course.

A little later, we are standing outside the White House.

The veteran

Directly opposite the fence, at the edge of the little park, a homeless veteran has made a camp of cardboard boxes, blankets and accumulated rubbish. Political messages are scrawled on cardboard signs.

Across the street lies the White House’s immaculately tended lawn. White colonnades, a lamp, a building everyone knows. Barely ten metres between the cardboard boxes and the fence.

In Munich, the police would probably have moved the veteran elsewhere long ago. Politely. Discreetly. But firmly. In Washington, the contradiction remains: political power on one side of the street, and on the other a man who once served this country and now lives out of cardboard boxes in front of his president.

Yellow buses

Yellow school buses stand everywhere around the National Mall. They arrive in long lines, doors open, children get out: elementary-school children, teenagers, entire classes in colourful T-shirts, with packed lunches and teachers trying to keep their groups together. There are foreign visitors too, but above all Americans.

Washington is not a typical American city, at least not around the Mall. There, it feels like an enormous public park in which the country tells its history — from monument to monument, museum to museum. Even admission is usually free.

Here, the great national stories are not behind glass. You can walk through them. Children sit on steps eating sandwiches. Joggers pass memorials. School groups hear explanations of what America was, what it is and what it should be.

And right alongside, political decisions are made that affect far more than this country alone.

From above

We are early. As we almost always are.

So we get up the Washington Monument right at the beginning of our visit. The lift carries us up, and from above the order becomes visible that you experience only in fragments below. The Mall is not simply a collection of important buildings. It is a composition of axes and deliberate juxtapositions.

Most impressive is the great east–west line: the Capitol in the east, Ulysses S. Grant before it, then the long lawn, the Washington Monument, the World War II Memorial, the Reflecting Pool and, at the western end, Lincoln, seated, solemn, almost removed from the world in his temple-like setting. Together, a sequence of statements about the nation’s history:

Washington founds. Lincoln preserves. Grant fights. The Capitol carries on.

The Capitol dominates. The White House looks surprisingly small. It is close to the Mall, yet somehow off to one side: not far enough away to form a world of its own, and not close enough to be fully part of the great composition.

Perhaps the spatial arrangement still speaks of the founders’ intention: at the centre stands not the president, but Congress. Not an individual, but the legislature. Political reality today often looks different. Perhaps reality has overtaken the architecture.

The war we barely know

One of the memorials that stays with us most strongly is not the Washington Monument, not Lincoln, not even Vietnam.

It is the Korean War Veterans Memorial. In our European perception, the Korean War disappears behind Vietnam. Perhaps we know the broad historical context, perhaps the 38th parallel, North and South Korea, the armistice without a peace treaty. But hardly any images, names or personal stories.

The memorial breaks through that distance.

Nineteen soldiers seem to be moving through rough terrain. They wear ponchos; their faces are tense. Some look to the side, others ahead. The group appears not heroic but cautious, exhausted, uncertain. In the polished granite wall, the figures are reflected and visually doubled. Nineteen become thirty-eight — an allusion to the 38th parallel.

But you do not have to know that meaning to feel the effect.

A Texan outside the library

We are waiting outside the Library of Congress for our booked time slot. An American sits at the next table. Late fifties, very well groomed. We get talking. He is from southern Texas and is spending a few days as a tourist in the capital. Naturally, he has relatives in Germany. He is interested in German and Austrian Expressionism.

Egon Schiele.

We talk about art, then the stock market. Apparently, he makes money from investments.

At some point, we mention something that keeps unsettling us in Washington. At museum entrances, signs say you may not enter the buildings with a gun. What is unsettling is not that guns are prohibited in museums. It is that the signs apparently assume some visitors may well be carrying a pistol up to that point.

The Texan finds little surprising about this. He carries a gun himself in Texas, he says. It is sensible.

We feel our way further: immigration, prices, affordability, politics. Gradually, it becomes clear that he is a committed supporter of Donald Trump’s political agenda.

And there he sits, the gun-carrying Trump supporter from Texas, talking to us about Egon Schiele.

As our time slot approaches, we say a warm goodbye. What remains is the feeling that one of our carefully maintained MAGA stereotypes has just burst.

Not completely. But audibly.

A warning about history

On the Mall, America tells its history not only through monuments but also through museums. And a year after our visit, it is arguing about which history may be told there.

Imagine this: outside the entrance to a publicly funded history museum stands a sign explaining, in essence, that the curators inside do not love their country enough, and their exhibition should therefore be treated with caution.

Comedy? An art installation? Perhaps soon a reality on the National Mall.

The administration accuses the Smithsonian of presenting American history too critically, too “woke” and not patriotically enough. The National Museum of American History in particular has become a focus of the dispute. Plans include notices outside the museum alerting visitors to allegedly problematic or ideologically distorted accounts inside.

A history museum on the National Mall, with its own government warning visitors outside about the museum’s interpretation of history.

Even for Washington, that is a remarkable image.

What struck us during our visit, though, was something else. It was not the content that seemed exceptionally progressive, critical or “woke”. The presentation felt conventional. While arguments about “woke” historical narratives rage outside and across Washington, inside the picture is rather different: varied in content, but not necessarily cutting edge in design.

Flags for headaches

Outside the Capitol, a large lawn is covered with thousands of little flags.

We immediately think of soldiers, veterans, the fallen, perhaps a political campaign. It is a natural assumption. In Washington, flags rarely serve a purely decorative purpose. We move closer.

It is about headaches. Migraines and chronic forms of pain.

The different flags represent different groups of people affected. For veterans, there is even an American flag.

We need a moment.

Americans’ relationship with their flag is clearly different from what we expect from Germany. It can stand for war, protest, pride, grief or an election campaign. And apparently for migraines too.

After dark

On our third evening, I want to return to the Mall. To take photographs. Blue hour.

We take the car.

The contrast with daytime is dramatic. The yellow buses have disappeared. No school groups, hardly any tourist groups, few people strolling. No pavement cafés, although it is a mild summer evening.

The great lawns lie almost empty. The monuments remain illuminated in the landscape, but the audience has gone home.

America. As soon as it gets dark, people go indoors. The emptiness is not entirely peaceful. It feels slightly unsettling instead. You begin to gauge the distance to the car and pay closer attention to individual people. The public space that felt so generous and natural by day loses something of its sense of safety with the light.

I quickly take a few photographs. Very beautiful photographs.

Then we too drive back to the apartment.