After a year in Berlin, it is easy to notice cultural differences between here and there.

Returning to Lewiston after a year in Berlin has been a pleasant, but not an easy, transition. Some people have asked me if I experienced culture shock. I did, and those moments since I have been back when I felt shock show most clearly the cultural differences.

Berlin is a city of 4 million people, more than 100 times the size of Lewiston, so one big change was my re-entry into small-town life. Small-town America is a wonderfully friendly place. Instead of circulating anonymously in crowds of strangers, I returned to familiar faces all around town, in my neighborhood, on the street, in stores, at work. We gave up the boundless variety of cosmopolitan life for the coziness and familiarity of our small city.

In Berlin, within a couple of blocks of our apartment, we could eat Indian, Thai, Turkish, vegetarian, Italian, Brazilian, Cuban, Nepalese and probably a few others. But over the course of a year, we became known in only one caf, where I often wrote my column for the Sun Journal with a cup of coffee and piece of cake.

Here at home, the Pizza Hut staff knows that we are the people who order anchovies and hot peppers, and the family that runs Dubois Caf asked about our year away.

Some shock did come from the transition from Germany to America.

Walking into Hannaford stunned me. Germans shop mainly in small specialty stores, buy fresh food for that day, and buy only as much as they can carry. Getting lost in the myriad aisles of a food department store, buying huge containers and piling a dozen bags into the car represent a particularly American way to purchase food.

The grocery store is one way in which American life is bigger. Not just the big box stores themselves, but the industrial boxes of detergent and the giant bags of chips represent American super-sizing. Our cars are also far bigger, as are our roads. The whole land is bigger and more spread out, which is most clearly expressed in the strips of stores along main streets. There are no European equivalents of Center Street in Auburn or outer Lisbon Street. Large commercial establishments, each surrounded by parking lots, sprawling along heavily traveled roads where a pedestrian is a rarity, are a uniquely American development.

Urban sprawl was created around the automobile, which is a much more important part of daily life here than in Germany. While most people have cars in Berlin, travel almost always offers a choice between driving and other forms of movement: subways and buses, trains, bicycles and walking. This is one reason why shopping is done differently: If you do not use a car, buying smaller amounts in local shops makes sense.

In some ways, these two big differences that I have experienced on my return work against each other. I prefer the friendliness of the small town to big-city anonymity. It’s a great feeling to run into friends at any time of day. But our car culture makes that harder. We cut ourselves off from the outside world in our cars, drive alone from point to point, shop in big stores where nobody remembers us.

It is not easy to question one’s own culture from the inside. As in the above examples, so many aspects of American life that seem natural to those of us born and raised here, then appear peculiar when viewed from the outside, from the standpoint of a different culture. Now that I am back from Germany, the Sun Journal has agreed to publish my comments on American life once a month. I will call these essays “A Different View”.

My views are different from what is often presented in mainstream American media, but not just because I have lived in Europe. I don’t fit into the usual categories of left and right, liberal or conservative that dominate newspaper commentary. While I have been clear that I don’t support the policies of our current administration, I also know that my children complained that we were the strictest parents they knew. I join the libertarians’ concern about freedom from government intrusion with a powerful sense of fiscal conservatism and a radical desire to reduce social and economic inequality. These seem to me to be traditional Maine values, which have gone out of fashion in a world increasingly dominated by glitz and empty talking heads. I hope that my different view will spark some reflection on American possibilities.

Steve Hochstadt teaches history at Bates College. He can be reached by e-mail at: [email protected].