Peter Stephan Jungk 2003

Summary

A MAJOR THEME IN THE LIFE OF Peter Stephan Jungk is that of not belonging. Born to Austrian Jewish parents in Santa Monica, California and educated in Vienna, Berlin, and Salzburg, he is currently a resident of Paris, although not officially registered to live there. Jungk has, as he puts it, “always been looking in from the outside.” Not surprisingly, this experience has been most important in shaping him as a person and a writer.

Born in 1952, he spent his first five years in Austria, Munich, London, Paris, and Los Angeles, before his parents made a permanent move to Vienna, not wishing that their son would become “a football player who only spoke English to them.” There he first attended an American school with children of diplomats, then an Austrian high school where he and his family were viewed as too leftist — because his father, later to become a figurehead of the Green Party movement, was a supporter of détente between the Soviet Union and the West. In Berlin, however, where his family moved next, the opposite was true. At the school he attended there in the late sixties, run by Anthroposophists (a group that believes in reincarnation and a close relationship with nature as well as disliking right angles in buildings), he was considered almost too apolitical and not liberal enough. Eventually, the family moved to Salzburg, a provincial, conservative city still tainted by the Nazi era.

Jungk did not have a real sense of “belonging,” of “being part of a community,” until he lived in Israel for a time and studied Judaism. Though his parents did not deny their Jewishness during his childhood, they did not stress it either — the family celebrated Christmas and Easter rather than Jewish holidays. As a child he knew only vaguely about the Holocaust — he remembers mistaking the sign “Jugendverbot” (no young people allowed) at the movie theater for “Judenverbot” (no Jewish people allowed), but his parents did not speak openly about it. Thus even in Israel, where he came closest to belonging, he remained an outsider.

This sense of both “belonging” and “not belonging” carries over into his work. For example, when writing his biographical novel about Walt Disney, Der König von Amerika (The Perfect American), he felt a strong affinity to Walt Disney (hearing stories about Disney had been an important part of his childhood).