I’m Having a Knippchen: An American View of Luxembourgish Culture

This book is a collection of humorous (I hope) essays about culture, from eating cheese to sitting in saunas. The project was to collect and rewrite pieces from a monthly column that I wrote for the Lëtzebuerger Land between 2018 and 2021. Black Fountain Press published the collection in 2021 and added a cryptic illustration of an empty box on the cover.

Nothing in this book is true. Not that anything in it is necessarily a lie, either. But while parts of it might feel truthy at times, none of it, strictly speaking, represents truth.

Do with this information what you will. I only mean to issue a disclaimer of titanic proportions and to urge you to disbelieve, at least in part, everything you are about to read. Any anecdotally constructed book about national cultures is in some senses a doomed project. So much is illusory and changeable about both “nation” and “culture,” each a many-limbed monster that shows only a shadowy fraction of itself at a time, that staring directly at either one is the surest way to miss what it’s all about. And all I do in this book is stare directly at them.

Feeling the inevitability of all this, I’ve decided to steer into the futility of the project: no real research was conducted for this book, none of its evidence is concrete, none of its statistics can be trusted, and by no means is it peer-reviewed. Any academic journal, even one with a very bad reputation, would kick it out onto the street for the birds to eat. You are about to read bird food.

[…]

The book-jacket blurb goes:

Why is Luxembourg so weird? Or the USA, for that matter?

Part academic analysis, part identity odyssey, part mental breakdown, I’m Having a Knippchen is powered by these underlying questions. Using observations and anecdotes and several shades of irony, Jeffrey Palms extrapolates big-picture cultural reasons for why Europeans are constantly naked, why Midwesterners are pathologically friendly, why Luxembourgers believe air conditioning is killing them, why Americans go berserk over their presidential candidates, and more–if you want to know, join this expedition down, down, down the rabbit hole of intercontinental weirdness…

Black Fountain Press, 2021
165 pages

Buy it from Black Fountain Press.
Buy it from Ernster.
Find it on Goodreads.