Accepting German Citizenship
Jan studied German in High School and college. A few months before we first met at a poetry seminar at the Free University of Palo Alto in 1966, she returned from a year-long residence at the Stanford-in-Germany campus near Stuttgart which entailed several months of work as a nurse’s aide at Krankenhaus Bethanien, a nursing home founded by Martin Luther’s wife and located directly on the Berlin Wall. She told me later that when she first saw me, dressed in a white shirt, wine colored v-neck sweater and beret, she thought she was back in Swabia. My being a first generation child of German refugees was one of the factors that drew us together more than those that separated us–a New York Jew and a Presbyterian Mayflower descendant from L.A.
She’d been a leader of the Stanford-in-Germany alumni group that met regularly ever since and had organized their three-day gathering a few years ago in San Luis Obispo. She’d also been active in the organization managing yearlong home exchanges since the fifties between San Luis students and those attending a high school also in Stuttgart, the city where both my parents grew up.
Driven by her general interest in genealogy as well as the post World War 2 effort to understand the horrors of the Holocaust, Jan continually collected stories and documents about my family which I generally preferred to ignore or turn away from. Learning of the German government’s policy to offer reinstatement of German citizenship to those from whom the Nazis had revoked it, as well as to their children and grandchildren, she took on the challenge of assembling the formidable archive of proof required to qualify for this benefit.
After two years of persistent research and correspondance with the German Consulate in L.A. she secured an appointment on October 16 2024 for the four of us to be sworn in and receive our papers. By then, given the travel and work opportunities throughout Europe they provided along with a possible escape from the shadow of fascism deepening in this country, we all were excited to meet for the event and celebrate at a nearby German restaurant afterward.
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