ALAN SABROSKY Prelude The first week of June, I watched all thirteen episodes of a mini-series called Amerika (1987) I had briefly seen in part thirty-odd years before. Yes, I know it is a Hollywood production. Yes, I know it is fiction, just as I know that (e.g.) 1984 is fiction. Yes, I know many of the details re wrong for our time, most notably that the USSR is gone. Nonetheless, it shook me profoundly, and I could not understand why. Being a methodological Germanic scholar (perhaps a triple tautology?), I set out to understand…
