Closing the Circle

Bear with me, this is quite a long story (or at least it goes back quite a long way in time) but it feels important to write about the righting of an historical wrong and, as I titled it, the closing of the circle.

My mother was born in Berlin in 1922 into a long established, wealthy, German Jewish family. She spent a happy childhood both in Berlin and in the family’s home in Wannsee until, of course, 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor.

Her father (my grandfather) was prescient and quickly realised that things were not going to end well. He decided the time had come for the family to leave Germany. Fortunately, they were wealthy enough to be able to leave and so, the family packed up and left to travel across Europe finally ending up in British Mandate Palestine. Not all of the family wanted to move. For example, my mother’s favourite uncle refused to leave Germany and, eventually, perished in Auschwitz.

During the course of the 1930’s the Nazi’s started stripping German Jews of their citizenship. After the imposition of the Nuremburg Laws in 1935 this was done by publishing lists in the Reich Law Gazette of German Jews and others (mainly communists and social democrats but also conscientious objectors, Quakers and Jehovah’s witnesses) who were being deprived of their German citizenship. Finally, in November 1941, the Nazis stripped German Citizenship from all Jewish Germans living outside of the Reich thus making them, effectively, stateless.  

By this time, my mother was working as a Nurse at UCH in London having come to Britain to finish her education. She probably thought little of the decree stripping her of her German citizenship (if she even knew about it at that point in the war) and certainly as news of the Holocaust trickled through to her and others in the UK at the end of the war she would have had strong feelings about any association with the nation that had murdered so many of her relatives.

In 1947 she applied for naturalisation as a British citizen and was promptly accepted. For her, that was the end of the matter. She saw herself as a British citizen and, for the rest of her life, was proud to be a citizen of the country that had given her shelter.

For Germany however, this was not entirely the end of the matter. Prior to 1949, any German citizen who became a citizen of another country before November 25, 1941 lost their German citizenship as, according to the relevant German Act, they had relinquished their citizenship and claimed a different one. However, after the adoption of the German Basic Law in 1949, if they had emigrated or were expelled because of Nazi policies and / or had their citizenship stripped from them by the Nazis then, even if they had acquired a new citizenship they were still eligible to re-obtain the citizenship that had been taken from them. This law (Article 116) also applied to the descendants of deceased refugees.

My mother never bothered to apply for restitution of her German citizenship. As I said she was proud to see herself as British and, indeed, I am not even sure to what extent she knew about the details of Article 116 and the rights it gave her.

As for me, I was only dimly aware of Article 116 until after the outcome of the Brexit referendum in 2016. At that point, the UK newspapers were suddenly full of articles about UK citizens applying for dual nationality with EU nations. In passing, an article mentioned Article 116 and the provisions it set out for those who had been deprived of citizenship by the Nazi regime. It took only a brief email exchange with Juliane Busch (the diplomat at the German Embassy in London with responsibility for Article 116 applications) to discover that, potentially, I was one of those who could reclaim the German nationality taken from my mother.

I have to admit that when I discovered this I had very mixed feelings. Here was I in my late 50’s, someone who had always felt themselves to be entirely British now discovering that I also had the right to be a German citizen. I hesitated, was this something that I wanted. It would certainly be reclaiming my “birth right” and would also be something that I in turn could pass on to my son but even so. . . . It was the increasing rise of rise of two things that convinced me that this was something I should do:

1.   The gathering anti-European attitude that was becoming apparent in the UK. Despite the supposedly “friendly negotiations” around Brexit it was clear that there was a swathe of anti-Europe sentiment that was coming to the fore and gathering pace. I felt strongly British but, unsurprisingly considering my background, also felt strongly that there was a wider European context to my identity

2.   The rising and obvious level of casual and also not so casual antisemitism in the Labour Party who in 2017 had come much closer to gaining power. One side of my family had already had to flee a country because of antisemitism – would I have to consider doing the same?

 It took me 10 months to gather all of the documents needed to prove my case and it was far from easy. For example, I had to engage a specialist archival research company in Germany to find my grandparents’ birth and marriage certificates only to discover that the relevant archive in Berlin had lost the marriage certificate. Fortunately, the archive were able to provide me with their divorce certificate thus proving that they must have been married in the first place! In September 2017 I presented my application to the German Embassy in London.

Now, 2 years later, I have in the last few weeks been to the Embassy to collect my certificate of naturalisation as a German citizen. It feels right. It feels, strangely, part of me and Juliane Busch could not have been more welcoming or more sensitive to the significance of what I was doing.

The title of this article comes from a comment made to me by a German work colleague of mine. When I told her that I was going to the German Embassy to collect my certificate of naturalisation her first question to me was “but how do you qualify for German citizenship?” when I gave her a brief overview of the history of my mother her immediate response was “Ahh, so the circle closes”. If that is the reaction of the modern Germany I am proud to be both British and German.