Although he’s only been here a short time, you might know Leif as the guy singing next to you in Wessingers, the guy helping you out in the Office of International Studies, or the guy talking about Glam rock or German philosophers. That is unless you’ve shared a classroom with him – then he might just be “that guy.”
Laura: I know you’re a transfer student, so why did you choose Wesleyan?
Leif: I decided to transfer because I wanted to be back on the East Coast. I chose Wesleyan because the other schools I got into, which will remain unnamed of course, were by all accounts preppy and generalist and no one was passionate.
Justin: So we have passion?
Leif: I mean, the image I was given of Wesleyan is that it’s a school where people are really pursuing their passions, and I think that’s correct.
L: You went abroad to Germany, right?
Leif: Yes, 11 months in Hamburg. Germany’s really a great place to be.
J: Do you plan to go back?
Leif: I’ll probably spend some time abroad during graduate school and then I would like to spend part of that time abroad in Germany.
L: Could you tell us about the German punk scene?
Leif: Well I didn’t have a lot of direct connections…I would say it tends to be a lot more anti-Nazi than the American punk scene, for obvious reasons, although you can find anti-Nazism along with anti-flag in some American punk bands as well. It also tends to be a lot more humorous. There’s this band called The Doctors, and the lead singer of their band is called “Farin Urlaub.” It’s a stage name, and it means in German, “go on vacation.” On the album he sings this great song called, “How I Lost the Marilyn Manson Look-Alike Contest.”
L: Now, I know you’re in Wessingers, do you have any other musical background?
Lief: I was taught to play recorder from a very young age, then when I was in third grade I started playing the violin. I played the violin until the second year of college, and I haven’t picked it up in a long time. I also did four years of choir in high school.
L: So you dropped the recorder?
Lief: Yeah, I didn’t take it up as a serious discipline…although I had a friend at Oberlin in the Conservatory to learn to play professional recorder.
L: So tell us about your thesis.
Leif: My thesis is about Nietzsche. Officially the topic is Nietzsche and his language or Nietzsche and rhetoric.
J: What inspired you? What got you interested?
Leif: Originally I was interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche which is one of the lesser-known literary influences certainly in the German-American world. Then I started reading Nietzsche whom I had actually never read before, and it was kind of too deep a trail, and I got kind of involved.
L: Do you have a thesis carrel?
Leif: Yes I do, 2A, two and a half. I actually got really lucky. I have a window, it’s nice.
L: How did you manage that?
Leif: I just got lucky in the lottery. The window looks at the other part of the library, so it’s not like, “ah, Olin field.” It’s more like, “there’s a seminar room.”
L: What are you interested in doing after you graduate?
Leif: I’m going to be pursuing a PhD in literature in the fall. I haven’t chosen what school I’ll be going to yet, but my fields are post-Nietzschean literary theory, German enlightenment, and French and Latin medieval.
L: So nothing lofty.
J: Very down to earth.
Leif: No, it’s all about humility, the humility of 12th century scholastics.
L: You work in the Study Abroad office. How did you start that?
Leif: Well they only hire people who have already been abroad, so when I got back from studying abroad, they said at the meeting for returnees, whoever wants to work just send us an e-mail, and I did. It didn’t work out last semester, but it worked out this semester.
L: Do you have an official job or is it just handing out forms and adjusting things?
Leif: There’s a lot of office work, but I get to do the initial consultation, so if a sophomore comes in and says, “I want to go abroad, but I have no idea where,” then I get to give them the first papers and say okay, let’s talk about the process, and then as soon as they ask me a question I don’t know the answer to, it goes to the next level up in the hierarchy.
L: So you get to see them when they’re excited and not yet bitter and bogged down in paperwork.
Leif: Yeah, you’ve got to do a little work to get where you want to go.
L: So why do you think that we chose you to be a WesCeleb?
Lief: I really don’t know. This is my fourth semester on campus. I’m pretty outspoken in class, so I know some people have taken likings and dislikings to me because of classes.
J: So do you think you’re “that guy” in classes?
Leif: Yeah. I have to be honest about that, I think I’m “that guy.”
J: But it doesn’t seem to upset you.
L: You’ve never gotten beaten up in alleyways?
Leif: People make comments sometimes, but I learned to debate in the German classroom last year. In America, if you don’t like someone else’s idea, you say, “you know I like your idea, but I’d like to take it in this other direction.” But in Germany, if you don’t like someone else’s idea, you say, “that’s crap, it’s really nonsense and I totally disagree with you.” So the classroom is not a place for any sort of personal reserve in Germany. People who are reserved remain quiet.
J: Well our final question: what would be your superpower, if you could choose any one?
Leif: I would be the Green Lantern, who can shoot amorphous forms which he can then cause to take form out of his ring, which become a sort of green smoke that comes out of his ring and can overpower his enemies. Of course he has his weakness: the color yellow.
L: Isn’t yellow part of green?
Leif: Yes I think his weakness should be orange, but apparently whoever made it up wasn’t looking at a color wheel.
J: So what would be the first thing you would fight, if you could, in today’s world?
L: And don’t pick poverty, that’s the obvious one.
Leif: Um, I would defend myself from the people that try to beat me up in alleyways because I’m “that guy.” Them and the social scientists, I would fend them back, get more funding for the humanities.
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