In 1969, as a small German boy, I watched together with millions of others as Americans set foot on the moon. For me this was an incredible demonstration of the power of science and technology and of US leadership in those fields. It seemed that anything was possible.

I was too young to have heard about the threats of the cold war, about the treatment of the blacks in the US, and the resulting riots, about assassinations of presidents and Martin Luther King, about protests in 1968 in all the western world, and about the Vietnam war, although I must have seen some glimpses of that on my grandma's newly acquired TV. Instead I drew my knowledge about the US from the Big Book on America, which I got from our local library. This book was from the 50s and painted a very optimistic picture of the US, with all people nice, friendly, and rational. Happy (white) families in nice, clean houses in the suburbs, the men driving to offices in huge cars that resembled ships, dressed in white short-sleeved shirts and dark suits, heading to interesting jobs in huge air-conditioned buildings. Nice, functional, modern buildings, like the RAND building in Santa Monica.