With 28 seasons and around 4,000 episodes, it was not only one of America’s most successful TV series but also an export hit that exposed the rest of the world to the other side of America in the crudest way. This is the story of the outcasts of American society, the vagrants and “crackers,” the rednecks and the “deplorables” who “have remained vilified, shunned, targeted and kept apart, both physically - in poorhouses and trailer parks, through eugenic science and discriminatory public policy - and in the nation’s cultural imagination, where they have inspired mockery, kitsch and unceasing grimaces.”įor anyone who has ever watched an episode of “The Jerry Springer Show” knows what I’m talking about. These are some of the reminiscences, images and thoughts that recently crossed my mind while reading parts of Nancy Isenberg’s “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.” Released in 2016, a few months before the presidential election, the book is as pertinent - if not more so - today as it was at the time it was published. I did, if only to avoid being bombarded with stones - the weapon, at the time, of the weaker sex - and, of course, out of fear of being associated with German trash.
My parents, of course, told me I better keep my distance. In my immediate neighborhood, there was a woman who had three “illegitimate” children, all of them girls, all of them with a reputation of being tomboys. They were German trash, and everybody knew it. In our little town, the Rs were the epitome of what across the Atlantic is referred to as “white trash.” At the time in Germany, there was hardly anyone who looked “different,” so “white trash” would have made no sense whatsoever. And avoid them we did, if only not to run the danger of getting beaten up. Those who lived there were dismissed as Grattler - uncouth, unsavory characters better avoided. In my hometown, this was an area located behind a horse and motorcycle race track, a place where respectable citizens wouldn’t want to be caught dead. They came from the “bad” side of town, the Glasscherbenviertel. The Rs were a couple of kids from the same family, one of whom happened to be in my class. Among the few things I do remember is the warning my parents gave me on my way to school to keep away from the Rs. Quite frankly, I don’t remember much about this time. I started formal education at the age of six at the local Volksschule - the people’s school. I grew up in southern Bavaria in the 1960s.
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