After I moved to Los Angeles, I sold a little biweekly tongue-in-cheek column called “Living in America” to the major German news & entertainment website stern.de. To everyone’s surprise, it got a stunning number of page views and quickly spawned copycats. In the middle of a great run, it was taken off the main page to help launch their new blogging section where it was surrounded by a number of clones and, buried in the depths of their gargantuan website, got less than 10% of its original page views. Momentum lost, the blog folded a year later, and the whole blogging section followed soon after.
At the same time, other German print and TV media started to explore the emigration experience and produced countless features through the late 2000s. Here are the first nine of the original articles that unexpectedly heralded years of saturation coverage. Some of the later blog entries survived on the Internet Wayback Machine and might be added later. Please contact me directly if you have any questions or requests. (All articles are only available in German.)
Der unsichtbare Fußgängerüberweg