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Kramer’s questions—Who has the right to represent a community? What happens when one citizen’s
notion of celebration is another’s notion of denigration?—are at the core of the debates over political
correctness and multiculturalism. Kramer avoids the easy answers, scrutinizing Ahearn’s motives as
closely as his ideological opponents’. It is in the space between what each says and means that she
finds her richest material. “[Ahearn] talks about making people in the South Bronx ‘happy.’ He does
not easily admit that he needs to make them happy, or why he needs to make them happy, but anyone
who really looks at the work he does in the South Bronx knows that his community—the people he
loves and casts—is a wellspring for him, the source of a remarkable vision. He needs the Bronx
because his art is important,” she writes.
In The Politics of Memory (1996), Kramer collects six pieces, each of which asks a different
question about the emergence of the “new Germany.” Her piece about Peter Schmidt—an East
German teenager whose lack of self-knowledge mirrors his country’s anomie—is a good example of
how illuminative the theme of marginality can be in Kramer’s hands. “Peter says that maybe the
problem of being East German, the pity of being East German, is that you are always at your best, and
your clearest, standing at a wall or a border or a prison door, reflecting on the other side,” she writes.
Kramer became interested in right-wing militias at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, when
she was, once again, returning from a long stay in Europe. “I had been covering the extreme right,
among other things, in Europe for a long, long time. I had covered wars, I had covered fighting, I’d
written about Le Pen, about neo-Nazis, and the most ghoulish and insane and hateful characters. And I
was relatively untouched by that experience. But when it happened in my own home I was
heartbroken, and it made me realize just how American I was, how tragic for me that collapse of
promise was when it pertained to this country,” she says. Kramer conceives of Lone Patriot (2002)
as taking up where The Last Cowboy left off. “How did we go from someone like my father, an
immigrant who believed he could be whoever he wanted to be, to a West where the myths of
entitlement are established, the sorrow deepens, and the possibility of reinvention diminishes? What
do you do when you get to the end of the line, you’ve reached the other end of the continent and there
is nowhere else to go?”
What kinds of subjects are you drawn to?
I’m interested in cultural clashes and implosions. We live in a moment in which the world is
suddenly as culturally complicated as the Roman empire. Vast migrations of labor have scooped up
people from all over the earth and flung them together in the big cities of the West. Here, of course,
we’re all from somewhere else, we’re all mixed up in parentage—each of us is a multiethnic world
of conflicted and conflicting realities. That, for me, is the postmodern story. The really interesting
story. And I like teasing one thread out of that vast story.
How do you find your stories?
I’m attracted to puzzling characters, to people I can look at and say, “If I understand this one
person, I will understand something about this country or this moment in history or this experience.”