Academia is fun here :)What made you decide to pursue a long-ass academic career in Germany?
Hard to explain. Discussing texts, historical currents, writing styles--really picking them apart, and working together to produce a better understanding--with people who also really care: that's fun for me. Spending two hours picking apart Heiner Müllers Hamletmaschine, a text of about 10 pages, then going home to write about it is super exciting. Doing the thing because it's interesting, not because it's classically "productive" :)
Academia in the US is dying-- especially the humanities. Not to mention, as a language professor in the US, you have to spend about 40% of your time teaching beginning language classes to people who are only there to fulfil a requirement. Here, those classes are in Gymnasium (high school, sort of). That means professors teach the actual intellectual parts. Also America is generally suffocating :P