The Exchange Year in the United States

The Exchange Year in the United States is both a deliberate departure from the narrator’s life in Schleswig and an interval reshaped by a death he cannot yet grieve. He leaves hoping for distance after a mental breakdown; in Wyoming, new routines and friendships let him live as though nothing has happened, even after his second-oldest brother is killed. His return to the United States is therefore not a simple continuation of the adventure but a choice to postpone mourning.

Departure from Schleswig

The exchange follows a period of acute distress. After being allowed to leave the hospital, the narrator spends a week at home before returning to school. His mother tries not to cry, and his second-oldest brother embraces him for a long time and treats him kindly. Yet the wish to go somewhere far away grows stronger. He wants to leave Schleswig and, ideally, go to the United States. The exchange is not presented as a carefully mapped plan so much as a way to create distance from a familiar life that has become difficult to inhabit.

That life had been formed around the psychiatric institution where the family lived. Christmas, for instance, meant accompanying his father through the hospital wards: each visit lasted only twenty minutes, and patients waited for the hospital director and his son before the gift-giving could begin. At the psychiatric service’s Christmas gathering, the patients’ nativity play might veer into disorder, yet the performances remained part of the annual celebration. At home, the children also held funerals in a pet cemetery. The narrator carried the dead animals while his eldest brother made crosses and his second-oldest brother delivered eulogies. On the blackbird’s burial day, the brothers’ plan to cremate it was overruled by their mother because it was their father’s fortieth birthday. These childhood rituals do not explain the exchange, but they establish the world the narrator is leaving: one where illness, death, and ceremony are part of ordinary family experience.

Laramie and the life he makes there

The narrator had imagined California or a large city such as New York or Chicago. Instead, he arrives in Laramie, Wyoming, a place he comes to like for its wolves’ nighttime howling. The sound recalls the patients’ cries in Schleswig, linking the unfamiliar landscape to the institution he left behind. Wyoming’s sparse population and immense area intensify the sense of distance: the narrator observes that about half a million people live across a territory as large as Germany. His high school even has its own airstrip because some students fly in each morning.

His host family lives outside the city, in what he describes as being beyond the outskirts: a green pocket within dry prairie, with remote-controlled sprinklers moving through the garden from morning to night. He had pictured a host family with a daughter; instead, it has three sons and a dog, much like his own family at home. He likes his host parents, Stan and Hazel, who are patient and friendly. Don, the youngest son and the narrator’s age, is less welcoming. He corrects the narrator’s English and, when his parents are absent, calls him “The German Robot.” The insult is one part of a new life in which he must negotiate difference without the shelter of home.

At school, the narrator chooses subjects that interest him. Rock climbing takes him to the Rocky Mountains: a bus collects him at six in the morning, and the students eat breakfast while waiting for the rocks to dry in the sun. In German class, he becomes top of the class for the first time in his life. In woodworking, the class builds enormous rustic birdhouses. These details mark the exchange as a period of practical adaptation and competence, not merely geographical escape. He also learns basketball and how to throw a football, carves a giant turkey, shovels large quantities of snow, meets a girl at a hot-tub party, rides for hours across the prairie, visits a prison and finds a pen pal there, and travels with his host parents.

Bereavement and the return to Wyoming

The year changes abruptly when the narrator’s father calls to say that his second-oldest brother has died in a car crash. When Janet asks what has happened, the narrator cannot find the English words. He reaches for a dictionary and assembles the news word by word, finding the phrases for his brother’s death and the car accident. The failure of speech makes the distance between the two countries suddenly concrete: the news arrives in English-speaking surroundings, but his first means of understanding and expressing it is German.

The family is about to leave for Yellowstone National Park. Because the narrator’s complicated return flight is still four days away, the trip goes ahead. He looks out at herds of bison and geysers during long drives, but the grandeur of the landscape does not console him; it seems more desolate than any landscape he has known. He flies back to Schleswig for the funeral after a thirty-four-hour journey with four transfers. At the airport in Frankfurt, he remembers that his brother had brought him there before the exchange. In Hamburg, he sees his parents and his remaining brother sitting motionless behind a large pane of glass while other travelers run to greet their families. They embrace when they see him, but the homecoming he once imagined—as a confident basketball star with fluent English—has been overtaken by loss.

Even knowing how hard his absence is for his parents, the narrator decides to return to Wyoming. His father asks him, in tears, whether he might rather stay, but the narrator is determined to go back. Fourteen days after the death, he is again with his host family in Laramie. At school, no one knows about the accident; outside his host family, no one offers him sympathy. The ordinary anonymity helps him continue the life he had before the call. He thinks of his brother rarely, mostly after Sunday phone conversations with his parents, and refuses to mourn. The activities of the exchange continue around that refusal: basketball, winter chores, riding, travel, and the small demands of school.

The year’s ending and its aftermath

When the narrator leaves the United States and returns to Schleswig, he weighs ninety-five kilograms, can do one hundred push-ups, and speaks fluent English. The measurable changes make the year’s outward success unmistakable. They do not, however, mean that the bereavement has been worked through. His brother’s death also took the life of the brother’s girlfriend, who was riding in the back seat. Their car slid beneath a truck stopped beyond a rise in the road; the truck driver had switched off his lights while letting two hitchhikers out. The car’s driver, the brother’s best friend, survived unhurt. The circumstances that emerge after the narrator’s return give the loss a fuller and more terrible shape than the news he first managed to translate in Laramie.

Back in Schleswig, his parents have changed. They return to work, eat together, sit in front of the television, and take walks, but to the narrator these routines resemble a simulation of their former life. Their shared actions seem like a framework into which ordinary life might slowly grow again. With his eldest brother studying in Munich, the narrator is the only child left at home with them, inside the psychiatric institution that had once been the setting of his childhood. The contrast gives the exchange its lasting significance: in Wyoming he gains physical confidence, fluency, and a life sustained by new routines, while the family he returns to is trying to rebuild its own routines around an absence. The year provides distance and change, but it does not resolve the grief he has chosen to defer.