an essay by Liv Hambrett

It’s a warm afternoon in late September and I’m sitting in a quiet room with sixteen other adults. We’re all perched at small wooden desks that creak each time someone re-crosses their legs or shifts in their seat. The room we’re in is in the beautiful old Volkshochschule building, once a school, on Kiel’s Muhliusstraße, which is just off Bergstraße, a street that only really has meaning to students who frequent its sticky-floored bars, or fly down it at extraordinary speeds on bicycles. One block back from the Volkshochschule is a retirement home, which we used to visit when my husband’s Oma was still alive and not too much farther over is the Universitätsklinikum Schleswig-Holstein where both my children were born. About the same distance away, but in the other direction, is the Standesamt, where we married ten years ago this year, and just one street over is the restaurant we celebrated in. The room I am seated in on this amber afternoon in September sits almost precisely in the middle of a decade’s worth of memories and milestones made in a city I have come to know better than the one in which I was born. 

The sixteen of us, feet tucked under our small desks, pens lined up, phones turned off, are waiting for our names to be called. There’s a kind-faced woman up the front of the classroom, who has spoken in crisp, clear German from the moment she walked in, most probably because she has spent her life, like me, teaching her language. As she calls our names, all of them foreign on her tongue, none of them suited to German phonology, we go to the front desk, show our passports and receipts, proving our 25€ fee has been paid, and receive a large brown envelope. In the large brown envelope is a test and we need the test because what we’re all doing that afternoon is taking another step in the process of becoming citizens of Germany.

My adult life has largely been spent in places I am not from and, because of that, my adult life has been marked by a preoccupation with ideas borne of that disconnection. I obsess over the notion of belonging, how it is shaped, its fragility and its power. Defined by my very unbelonging and marked indelibly by my efforts to redraw my person – and my understanding of her – outside of where I come from, I spend much of my time thinking about how that works and what it looks like.

Most of the answers to the questions I busy myself with are found, quite delightfully, in the ordinariness of the everyday. In the recipes resurrected from my childhood, in the words and expressions my kids use, in the music we play, books we read, in the songs I sang to them on the long nights their baby eyes wouldn’t close. I can see, a decade into parenting, there’s a pattern in the behaviour I instinctively do and don’t encourage, attitudes I do and don’t value, and that pattern comes from a place so intrinsic, I can only have inherited it, absorbed it as I grew. Likewise, when I go back to Australia, I see the Germanness to how we live and raise the children, the things we do and don’t have, do and don’t need, do and don’t prioritise. I have absorbed that, too, as I have grown here. This grey area of the in-between has always been the clearest, hardest and most interesting part of the entire thing to me. I have become comfortable in its unending tension, a scholar of it.

But lately, and perhaps it is age, perhaps it is also the strange, strange world we currently inhabit, perhaps because of the global scale of human movement over the past decade, I have come to think often about the ongoing exchange that occurs between a person and the place they move to. People and places extract a number of things from one another: ideas, words, money, knowledge, skills. Taxes. Healthcare. Worry, peace, pain, discomfort. Happiness. Safety. And I have come to see that as a person comes to know a place, an almost complete rewiring of the brain occurs at the same time as slowly, incrementally, a systemic, structural reshaping of the place does. And while, in essence, that cannot possibly be a bad thing, the fear of precisely that change seems to be driving entire societies and political movements. This, despite the fact we have been moving and rewiring, for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years. 

A year after I settled in Schleswig-Holstein, with its oil-painting coasts and windy flats, a place I recognised a home in, a place I had, by then, given birth to my daughter in, the world seemed to tilt on its axis. Millions of people were on the move, fleeing on foot, on trains, in the back of freezing trucks, in inflatable boats the ocean claimed relentlessly. Angela Merkel’s government dissolved Germany’s borders and ultimately admitted just over a million people who, for the most part, were seeking refuge from war, political instability, and persecution. Of that total number, half of the applications happened in a three-month period. 

It was an extraordinary time to be in the country, perhaps particularly so as a foreigner. I watched as the country I was in the early stages of forming a relationship with, became a poster child of acceptance and global altruism at the same time as it completely transformed itself. Merkel’s catchphrase ‘wir schaffen das’ was everywhere, at first said in earnest and later, when the tide turned, ironically, bitterly. But first, before the bitterness and the wariness came, Willkommenskultur was the word of the year. Posters saying ‘refugees welcome’ hung in windows. After Hungary closed its outbound railways, stranding thousands of people, Germans went to train stations to physically welcome those refugees at their journey’s end. Container villages popped up, the Ausländerbehörde, a sluggish beast at the best of times, worked around the clock at a pace it didn’t know it was capable of, completely overwhelmed but with a specifically Germanic approach to crisis. The country slowly realised the need for Deutsch als Fremdsprache in schools (despite the fact Germany has been an immigrant country for decades, but immerhin) and began instating programs and training teachers to teach German as a second or other language. Merkel, who grew up in the former German Democratic Republic, itself a product of a war that displaced people in the tens of millions, sending them across oceans to change the fabric of far-flung places, was adamant. Wir sollten uns dabei an unsere Grundwerte erinnern, uns von Artikel 1 unseres Grundgesetzes leiten lassen: Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar. 

Meanwhile, the media busied itself trying to figure out what to call these people on the move: asylum seekers, refugees, migrants? Not everyone was fleeing war, many were in search of something better and joined the surge. What were they, then? Economic refugees? Fakes? Were they even allowed to take advantage of this mass migration? How many were already radicalised, using the cloak of asylum-seeking to plan and wreak their wicked havoc? How many might become radicalised? Politicians, particularly those for whom division and fear was a game plan, watched on, collecting the numbers and soundbites they needed, planting the necessary seeds. They would mobilise later, reaping precisely what they had sowed. Amidst the hubbub, the headlines, the hysteria, a Syrian family moved into the church downstairs, beneath our apartment, their dead daughter’s picture hanging on the wall. A two-year-old boy washed up on the beach. Nearly four thousand people died trying to run. A country, cautious of change and impulse, not designed to move quickly on anything, a culture built on waiting and watching and discussing, moved like the wind while the world watched. 

In the years that followed, and in the wake of an almost type of euphoria that had seen Germans show the world a different face, seen them come good on a historical responsibility that pulses, permanently, just below the surface of its skin, something else set in. Reality, perhaps, as the complex, ill-defined process of integration began. Fatigue, wariness, distrust. It was too much, too soon, we don’t have the money, the capacity, these people are too different, we don’t share the same values. The optics were easy to weaponise, they always are, as is the general knowledge of the public about systems that don’t affect them. ‘Look at all these people, draining and straining the system’ was the wildfire whisper, when, really, many of these people were waiting. Waiting to work, waiting for a stamp, a piece of paper, waiting to be trusted to join the economy. Not many people know the process of immigration, the maze it presents and this lack of knowledge engenders mistrust, and mistrust is always a fertile breeding ground for the more malleable emotions. The general consensus seemed to be how impossible it is to get so many people to integrate – but the truth is more that no one can really agree on what integration looks like and the steps involved. Most people are clear on the ‘in’ part of it – you come in, you do the work, but I fear that ‘in’ is something of a misnomer. 

The word integrate, you see, comes from the Latin word integrare, meaning to ‘make whole’ and I think that’s what we should be thinking about, not the ‘in’ part. Integrate doesn’t mean there is an onus on a person to fit in. It means, the moment a person enters a place with the intention of remaining there, there exists an opportunity and an impetus to render that relationship between person and place whole. Integration means we, together, make each other whole. That is not an individualistic act. That is a communal act, it requires the work of more than one person. It requires the bending and benevolence of systems. It is precisely that fundamental ideal I am always sighing and reminding my children of: give and take. 
Three years after the crisis, Merkel, her government’s popularity at an all-time low, announced her last term. Three years after that, a new government came to power, a year into a pandemic that brought the world to a standstill. Russia invaded Ukraine and, once more, millions of people were on the run. The country, in fact, the entire continent and the union that knits much of it together, began to reveal, election by election, they had been creeping to the right. At the top of every poll asking people what they were most concerned with, what they were most worried about: immigration. This made the news at the beginning of this year all the more startling: the beleaguered coalition that followed Merkel’s government delivered on their promise to reform Germany’s complicated, hurdle-filled path to citizenship. Overnight, it became possible for me to become a citizen of the country I live in (work in, pay taxes in, am raising my children in, own a house in) without having to renounce my citizenship of the country in which I was born – my homeland. Overnight, it meant that, once all was said and done, I would be able to vote. I would finally be, officially, a mündiger Bürger, a term I first encountered in the Kindergarten Whatsapp group when a father refused to pay for a bamboo toothbrush for his child. (A more German encounter, by the way, you cannot have.) And not just me – millions of people who had been living in Germany for years would be allowed to become citizens and engage politically with the society they had long been members of. At a time when voting has never felt more vital, and at a point in Germany’s history in which the country is one of the most popular in the world for immigrants, it was a move of massive proportions and potential. 

Once more, the Volkshochschulen were overrun. People scrambled to get their official language certificates and sit their Einbürgerungstests, an adorable word for a profound undertaking. Appointments for the latter need to be made in person, which is how I found myself, on a June morning, sweating slightly in the office of the woman seemingly solely responsible for test registrations. A slew of new Einbürgerungstest appointments for September had been released and I was securing one of them. There’s one more spot, if you know of anyone who wants to take the test. The lady was calm and kind and typed slowly with two fingers as the heat of her office thickened. I texted my friend, a US American and she drove into the city that afternoon, registered, and took the last spot. We would take the test together.

The bank of citizenship questions is online. Of the three hundred possible questions, you are asked thirty-three. Three of those questions are about the state you reside in. (I can tell you about the state I reside in. My God, I can tell you they eat Grünkohl with sugar up here and the Fischbrötchen is holy. I can tell you where Schleswig ended and Holstein began and when the whole thing became one. I can tell you all about the process of renting a Ferienhaus in Denmark, which is, possibly, the most important thing you need to know up here. I can read rudimentary Plattdeutsch, I only drink East Frisian tea, and I have an Ostsee/Nordsee preference (Ost). I can tell you about the Kiel mutiny, the Hanseatic League. I know which beer goes plop, I know where the Vikings lived, where the Slavs built a wall. I know real northerners only say moin once. I hate Oktoberfest and Karneval, I say ‘jo’ in the most perfect way.) The other thirty questions are about Germany and its history – largely from 1933 onwards – its governmental make-up, and the values it deems fundamental to a functioning, healthy society.

Going through the questions, I came to see that, if you want to know how a country sees itself, look at what it asks people who want to become a citizen of it. The three-hundred questions show a country that sees itself tethered to its past, not allowed to outrun that shadow. A country that holds democracy close in the way a place can only when it has lost it once before. Is a dictatorship possible, can a political party remove the freedom of the press? What does freedom of religion mean and what does it look like? What does freedom of speech afford you and when is it curbed? What are the cornerstones of democracy, who votes for whom in the seemingly endless layers of the Bundestag? It is very clear what Germany demands of its future citizens – that we understand and uphold freedom of speech and opinion and religion; that we are aware of the country’s history and how that history manifests in the present. It is also very clear that, simultaneously, a political party whose fundamental positions are the antithesis of those values, whose rhetoric is reminiscent of that same period of history, is growing in might. 

The test was over quickly and my friend and I gave our brown envelopes to the teacher at the front and left the room, walking out into the afternoon sun. We had kids to get home to, errands to run. But first, we had an hour or so to get sushi, in a restaurant underneath the first apartment I ever knew in Kiel, next to the shoe shop where we bought the tiny little shoes our kids first walked in, across the road from the playground I chased toddlers around. It seemed like, that afternoon, the universe wanted to remind me of all the ways in which I am tied to this place, all the ways in which I have made it my own. It wanted to show me how long I have been picking at the edges of all of this, trying to peel back the layers and understand what we are doing when we move somewhere. We are, ultimately, asking a place to have us (and I am reminded of the way we teach children to thank people for having them, and how there is no German counterpart to that). To shelter us, feed us, let us grow in its soil, use its water, its food. In turn, we offer to share what we know, what we have learnt on our travels, inherited from our place of birth. These things are our Mitbringsel and, if accepted, they can bring a place great joy and unexpected growth. If they are received warmly, openly, with interest, they can spark an almost neural connection on a societal level. We push ourselves to learn a new way of thinking and speaking, to make a constant, concerted effort to communicate, to keep reaching out. And we break off pieces of our own languages and offer them, because it will help people understand us and if they understand us, we will remember that kindness and pay it back somewhere, to someone. And it is in this process of give and take, we become a little of where we are; and where we are becomes us. A whole is made.