The Price of Freedom, Criminalization and the Management of Outsiders in Germany and the United States

Author

Soyer; Michaela

Year

2024

Publisher

University of California Press

Language

English

Pages

ISBN

978-0-52039-426-1

Link

Last Update

04-Sep-2024

Keywords

Criminology & Criminal Justice ; Law ; Sociology

Description

Around Christmas 2021, I had the first conversation in more than two decades with my aunt. My father’s younger sister had left southern Germany with her GI husband to move to Texas sixty years ago. At seventy-seven she was suffering from the early stages of dementia. As she was beginning to lose her shortterm memory, she sought to reconnect with her German roots. When I spoke to her on the phone, she told me that she wished she could go back to Germany: “When I was young,” she said, “I didn’t know that America was that far away.”

I cannot...