Mounk, whose parents emigrated to Germany from Communist Poland, describes a country still far from at ease with its horrific past — and thus stuck in its ways of dealing with the present.

The country’s much-vaunted attempts at coming to terms with its Nazi past, in particular since the student revolts in 1968, he argues, have done only so much to put Germans at ease with their history, let alone to give them an appropriate — that is, non-revisionist — sense of closure.

Germans are still ambivalent about Jews. This sentiment is all the more peculiar since the Jewish population in Germany today is, mainly thanks to immigration from Russia and the other former Soviet lands, the third largest in Europe.

However, instead of launching a full-on attack on a whole country, Mounk, a softly-spoken, witty young man, pointed out two things over coffee near Harvard Yard: that he wasn’t after an accusatory rant, but rather intended simply to take stock. And, he added, almost in passing, he truly came to peace with his identity living on America’s East Coast, simply because of the variety of identities and personal histories in the US.

In the country of his birth, Mounk remained somewhat alien — no matter that he spoke German as his native language, he felt that he was never regarded as truly German. That elusive sense of a homeland, Heimat, he found only when he was free not  to feel Jewish, in other words to have his experiences defined and framed by  others.

How much comfort can an outsider take in his or her own status? It would be downright wrong to compare my sense of not-quite-belonging to Mounk’s: mine is by choice; his, as far as one can tell, is not.

Still, I can’t help noticing that his journey made me aware of why I’m caught out whenever I have to answer the simple question about where I am from.

I’m no longer sure whether I still yearn for the state of being an outsider wherever I live or, conversely, whether I now long to put down roots in a place that is not my country and perhaps will never be.

At this point, I only know that I have one word for both states of mind: home.