You Are German Now
I’d waited an eternity, but I’m finally holding my brand-new Deutsch Reisepass. It’s stiff and unyielding, unlike my mother’s and grandparents’, which are worn, faded, and pliable. If I handle those old passports too roughly, the prominent swastika and red J on the cover may turn to dust in my hands. From dust to dust. My crisp new Reisepass has neither of these reminders of my family’s German passports from 1939.
Two years ago we began gathering documents to apply for German citizenship under Article 116(2). My siblings and our children were all entitled to this claim because my mother, their grandmother, was “deprived of German citizenship on political, racial, or religious grounds between 1933 and 1945.”
Generations of my maternal family had lived in Germany as far back as we can trace our ancestry. My grandparents’ identity was, first and foremost, German. They believed that, as prominent German citizens and baptized Christians, they were safe from Nazi persecution despite having Jewish grandparents. So they stayed in Berlin even as others who were perhaps more prescient and less optimistic escaped. Eventually, the Nazis stole my grandfather Otto’s business and most of the family wealth. The German government prevented my mother from attending her local school. Storm troopers marched in the streets. Even once my grandparents recognized that it was no longer safe in their country, they were reluctant to leave. Securing four visas took four years and financial help from a wealthy Swiss uncle. My mother and family left Berlin only months before the beginning of the war.
I thought of the way my grandparents and mother lost their citizenship as I considered this application. Perhaps this offer of restored citizenship for descendants was just more German guilt, another kind of reparation. You can come back, even if we took your home, your country, and most of your family.
It might have been German guilt, but it was our right. The question became, why would I want to become a German citizen, after what the Germans did to my family? And what did it even mean for an American citizen to become German? People have asked, and it’s a reasonable question. “It’s complicated,” I answer, which might seem evasive but truthful.
My friend Annie, an observant Jew, couldn’t hide her disgust. “Why would you ever even want to visit Germany, much less become a German citizen?” She refused to support the Germans by purchasing a German car, and wouldn’t visit Germany or even fly through Munich or Frankfurt. This was a common theme among a number of my more religious Jewish friends, and even some non-Jews who held Germany responsible for the deaths of their relatives or friends, for a collective horrific history. I was well aware of what the Nazis had done to my family. My grandparents had everything taken from them, including their dignity. My great-grandmother was murdered at Treblinka. Could I find a way to forgive Germany, and also reclaim my mother’s lost citizenship?
Because there is something about Germany. It resides in my DNA. I am German too.
Before filing the application, my mother dragged out papers stored in a locked metal box somewhere deep in the attic crawl space. Inside were the passports, birth and naturalization certificates, a few photos, even one of my mother’s school reports. The German consulate had outlined an extensive list of necessary documents to accompany each application for reclamation of citizenship. “How German,” my mother remarked with a grimace. But we had every single paper they requested.
I picked up my grandfather Otto’s worn, yellowed passport, dated June 1939, with the J, identifying him as Jewish, stamped in the left-hand corner, as well as the addition of a second middle name, Israel. I studied Otto’s face, smooth and innocent. I examined my mother’s passport too, which included the middle name Sara, bestowed by the German government as part of the Nuremberg Laws, although her given middle name, Diane, like mine, has been a family name for generations. I scrutinized the documents with awe, having never seen a single one of them. And now these papers were the gateway for my mother’s three children and seven grandchildren to become German citizens.
My mother was typically negative about Germany and Germans, as if she and our family had nothing whatsoever to do with the country. Like a pall over our ancestors and each of us, a part she still liked to push away or hide. Having all of us apply for citizenship and talk of visiting Germany irritated her.
“I don’t know why you want to do this,” she scoffed. “I doubt this whole citizenship thing is real. It’s probably just another German promise. I don’t really believe it will ever happen.”
"Why didn’t you ever go back to Berlin, Mom?” I asked. “I’d think you’d be curious to see what it was like there now.” My mother had never once returned to the city where she’d lived for the first seven years of her life. I couldn’t understand her lack of interest as I was eagerly planning a trip to her homeland. I wanted to visit all the places she had never again seen, including the home in the West Berlin village of Dahlem where she had been born.
“Why would I want to go there?” Mom snapped. “I have no interest in going to Germany. Why would I want to do that? I don’t even like Germany. Or Germans. Why would I want to go back when they took so much from us? Never had the desire. Never had the interest.”
But even if my mother had no interest, I desperately wanted the promised citizenship and felt a visceral need to return to our ancestral homeland. Germany had always called to me, but she has been a specter of shame, an unknown, an amalgam of our family secrets. I wanted to see the ancient church where my grandparents were married and the gravesites of my great-grandparents, to visit Dahlem, and to explain Germany’s role in my family’s history and trauma. I needed to better understand my secretive mother and stoic grandparents. There was a mystery to Germany and our family I needed to witness myself. I had to make peace with this ghost, with both the crematoriums and the castles.
When I told my local German friend, Heidi the story of my great-grandmother, Gisela, she cried. Gisela had been left behind on the airport tarmac in Berlin because Otto had been unable to afford a visa for his mother. She had been killed at Treblinka. Although Heidi wasn’t even born when the war ended, she explained how many Germans feel deep survivor’s guilt. After all, her country was responsible for unspeakable atrocities, one of history’s worst genocides.
Yet I had never seen my mother cry about Germany or her abandoned dead grandmother, or anything else for that matter. Our family did not cry openly. But I still weep when I think about Gisela or look at her photo. I’ve thought about those German soldiers responsible for her death.
***
Two years after filing the citizenship documents, I was handed my certificate of naturalization at the German Consulate of Boston, stamped and embossed with my name, and welcomed enthusiastically. “Congratulations, Ms. Forman! You are now a German citizen!”
I gasped, somewhat surprised at the tears which immediately filled my eyes, and my buckling knees, forcing me to steady myself against the counter. A circle had finally closed. I now held the citizenship to the country from which my mother and her family had been exiled over eighty years ago.
I’m reminded that the immigrant story often highlights what people are running towards. Although my grandparents arrived in the United States with dreams and promises of a new life, they were emigrants first, and left a country they loved against their will. While they came to America with hope, I can’t forget or overlook the reasons my grandparents fled, the shadows in pursuit, and the memories that continued to haunt them the rest of their lives. Always ashamed, hiding the true reasons they left their homeland, including any hint of Jewish heritage, my grandparents faced isolation and loneliness in America. My grandmother told me late in her life that while they had lived in the United States for over fifty years, she never felt accepted or at home in this country. I can’t imagine that burden. Generations of my ancestors had called Germany home. Granny said it would always be the place where she belonged. I can still hear the longing in her voice.
My mother wonders how her parents would feel about their grandchildren and great-grandchildren becoming German citizens. She doesn’t think they’d be happy about it. I’m not so sure, as I imagine they too would appreciate the significance of the closed circle. There is satisfaction when things fit together.
Like my grandparents, like my mother, I am an American citizen with an American passport. But now I am also a German citizen with a German passport. Every move, every trip I’ve ever taken, has forced me to think about place. I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about Germany as a place, a place in my family history, a place in my identity. People tell me I should be angry because of war, mass graves, and concentration camps, because of our family losses. But I remind them that Germany is more than that. She is also the living green heart of the Black Forest, the winding rivers of the Danube and the Rhine, of Berlin, of plains and meadows. Germany was home to my favorite composers, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, as well as my beloved ancestors. I claim it all.
Germany is no longer a ghost holding flowers as brick red as my new Reisepass. She is no longer a ghost holding my grandparents’ shame, which once seemed bottomless. Unreachable.
-Diane Forman
After a long career as writing tutor and educational consultant, Diane Forman is currently working on a series of essays and a memoir. She has had pieces published in Intima: a Journal of Narrative Medicine, and the Intima blog, The Muse, The Toho Journal, and a San Fedele Press anthology, “Art in the Time of COVID-19.” A graduate of Northwestern University and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Diane lives on the north shore of Boston, where she leads AWA (Amherst Writers and Artists) writing groups and retreats.