In 2005 Adrian Piper secretly emigrated from the United States. Several months passed before anyone realized she had disappeared. She resurfaced in Berlin and has lived there ever since.
Piper has consistently and firmly refused to return to the U.S. or explain why she left. Many assume it was because she discovered her name on the U.S. Department of Transportation Security’s Suspicious Travelers Watch List. Others point to Wellesley College’s forcible termination of her tenured Full Professorship. Yet others speculate that George W. Bush’s presidency, or American racism, or the invasion of Iraq compelled her to leave.
All of these conjectures are groundless. Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir is a gripping autobiographical narrative that provides a full account of the facts.

“When she arrived at Wellesley College — which, in this memoir, is simply called The College — she was the only tenured African-American woman on a faculty of 200. And so it’s surely unsurprising that her situation was full of conflicts. That said, only a true philosopher, I suspect, would explain such difficulties as she does by reference to “the mistake Nietzsche warned against, of demonizing others by projecting onto them one’s own repressed aggression.” When she speaks of her love of the students she taught at Wellesley for 15 years, any reader will sense that she was a magically charismatic professor.
Piper describes her elaborate, ongoing conflicts with her college administration: She wanted to pursue her career as artist, she had serious health difficulties, and she had to take care of her mother, who was extremely ill. And, by her own account, she was singularly unsuccessful at gaining support from her colleagues, or the professional associations of philosophers. After 9/11, following prolonged legal battles, she discovered that she was on the “Suspicious Travelers Watch List”; in response, she refused to return to the United States, and her tenured position was terminated. Now she resides permanently in Berlin. In the saddest statement in her book, she reflects on this dismaying history:
I owe everything I am to my birth, upbringing, and education in the United States. So I would have preferred my achievements to be a source of pride to my country of origin. Unfortunately, it is not set up to tolerate achievements like mine from someone like me, because people like me are not supposed to exist.
In Germany, she adds, everyone over the age of 30 has been damaged by their life histories. “My story does not even figure on the same scale of comparison as any of theirs.”
You really should read this book because it is brilliantly lucid, entirely engaging, and (I deeply regret to say) all too revealing about the limitations of American academic life. Reading it made me extremely sad. Even granting, as Piper herself repeatedly allows, that she was not easy to get along with, why was not more allowance made, and more support offered, for an artist and philosopher who is so obviously, uniquely gifted? What a great loss her self-exile makes for our country.”
- David Carrier

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Adrian Piper (1948) is an American conceptual artist and analytic philosopher. She received an AA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in 1969, a BA in Philosophy with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology from the City College of New York in 1974 and a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1981.
She currently lives and works in Berlin, where she runs the Adrian Piper Research Archive.