The trip to the gun store, or rather the department store for weapons, hunting and camouflage supplies somewhere in the Iowa wastes, is perhaps the most predictable thing in this book. The Viennese author and cartoonist Stefanie Sargnagel spent two months in Iowa in spring 2022. She was invited to a Writer’s Residence at Grinnell College – and was even allowed to bring a companion with her: the German musician and author Christiane Rösinger.
Sargnagel uploaded impressions and videos from her transatlantic adventure to her Instagram account, but also revealed that she might turn it into a book: “After all, likes don’t get you a condo,” she wrote under a picture of herself the TV chair on which she is now enthroned on the book cover (drawn, mind you, a self-portrait). The book is called “Iowa – A Trip to America”. And as you would expect, it’s coffin nail-like, everything from funny to rude to downright bitter.
A cliché is a cliché for a reason
So back to the gun shop, this “epicenter of military ideals of masculinity,” whose full name is “Bass Pro Shop” and which is a “Disneyland for hunting enthusiasts.” In addition to the expected weapons of all kinds, there are meat grinders (“Forests and meadows want to be sausaged”), camouflage fashion for the whole family and lots of toys for the hunters of tomorrow: “There are mobiles with little deer for babies, that’s how they learn scouting for prey even in the crib.” A cliché is a cliché for a reason, and this trip confirms many things that Sargnagel thought from afar were exaggerated.
In addition to the expected, she also discovers a lot of new things. Because when she’s not teaching “Comic Writing”, she goes on all sorts of exploratory tours with Christiane Rösinger (and later with her mother, who comes to visit).
Between depression and a childlike thirst for adventure, she bravely throws herself into the adventure of America beyond the metropolises, which presents itself to her at the airport as a “psychedelic, bright color landscape, all the Simpsons episodes at once.” She treats herself to whatever experiences there are here, and at some point she even tries the “Cooked Turkey Gizzards”, the boiled turkey stomachs that float as “gray shreds of tissue” in a container full of cloudy liquid on the counter of the local bar. As sad as everything seems at first, the experiences in this civilized wasteland are just as bizarre.
Bunnies with knotted feet
Sargnagel will buy eggs in an Amish village (“Orthodox organic, organic extremism, unwashed eggs from unshaven cloacas of godly hens, fed by untreated peasant hands of unvaccinated girls”) and visit the esoteric Maharishi International University, where you can get a “bachelor’s degree in aromatherapy ” and “yogic flying” is practiced three times a day.
Sargnagel describes all of this so vividly that you can actually see them hopping around the room “like rabbits with knotted legs,” the followers of Transcendental Meditation. She tries Tinder, where all men present themselves with animals and it is the absolute exception if they are still alive. She misses the antis in college, the anarchists and depressed drunks with whom she could identify.
Cheers to red Vienna
But perhaps, she concludes, there is no place for them in a university culture in which a year of study costs $70,000? Cheers to red Vienna! She visits Riverside, the place where Captain Kirk (“Star Trek”) will be born in 2028 and which is already adorned with a monument engraved with “Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk”. These are just a few of the oddities this trip has to offer.
A caucus party in Iowa. © picture alliance/dpa/AP A caucus party in Iowa. “}”>
Sargnagel is not afraid to write about his own weaknesses and fears. She admits that she is addicted to so-called Mukbang videos on the Internet, in which young, mostly Asian people watch – and above all listen! – can see how they shovel, slurp, chew and swallow tons of food.
You can hardly get more Iowa than that
Also that she feels as comfortable and safe at the parish pie contest as she does in group therapy. Everything Sargnagel describes, she describes with her own personal perspective. Always feminist and combative, but always ready for inconsistency when life has different needs and desires than theory. She writes sentences that alone would make the whole book worth it if it weren’t already a joy. “I have no feelings for dogs, I always see them as humiliated wolves,” is one of them.
Racism, Trumpism, the gun lobby, homelessness – all of America’s problems are featured in this book. The way Sargnagel encounters them: embedded in the normality of everyday life. All the horror in its disturbing averageness.
Donald Trump recently won the first Republican primary in Iowa. Sargnagel was no longer in the country and her book had already been published. A pity. One would have liked to read her description of this event. Still, you can hardly get more Iowa in one book.
Stefanie Sargnagel presents “Iowa – A Trip to America” (Rowohlt, 304 pages, 22 euros) on May 11th at the Volkstheater
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