Eighty-seven years ago, my grandfather stopped being a German citizen. This February, I became one.
It was 1935, and he was living in France when the Reich Citizenship Law passed in Germany. It was part of the Nuremberg Laws under Hitler’s Nazi regime, and it specified that Jews were not of the German race—and therefore were no longer citizens. My grandfather, Kurt, was Jewish.
There must have been a moment when, one day without warning, my grandfather received the news that he was no longer a German citizen. Nearly a century later, one day without warning, the granddaughter he never met received the news that she was.
I opened my email one Monday in February to find a message from the consulate general of Germany. “Certificate arrived!” read the subject line. My application for naturalization had been approved, I was told. The necessary documents had arrived in Boston. I would officially become a German citizen once I picked them up.
So on Thursday morning, Feb. 16, I showered and dressed to make the journey to the consulate. Kurt died before I was born, but I am the grandchild who bears his name: Courtney. And I was the one who was going to get back what was stripped from him.
I put on heels and makeup. I packed my American passport and my appointment confirmation. I spritzed perfume on my wrists. But I wore all black.
I stopped as I was heading out the door. I doubled back into my apartment, into the bedroom, and opened the box of jewelry that I’d inherited from my grandmother. Though I had never known my grandfather, I’d been very close with my Nana Etty, his wife. She was the closest link I’d had to him. She was born in Czechoslovakia, and her family, except one brother, was exterminated in Hitler’s camps.
I rooted around in the jewelry box. I slid on two more of her rings, heavy ones, in addition to the one that I always wear. I put on a gold necklace charm in the shape of the tablets of Moses, inscribed in Hebrew, dated 1890.
I turned to go, but I stopped again. It still wasn’t enough. So I added her Star of David to the necklace and clasped both charms on the same chain around my neck. I needed something explicitly Jewish before I could walk out the door. I was feeling both grateful and defiant. The consulate is technically German jurisdiction, not American. I would bring my grandparents’ Jewish artifacts back to Germany.
I had been planning to drive to the consulate, but as I stepped out into the unusually warm February air, I decided to take the train. I wanted the journey to happen in public. I wanted to be seen wearing Nana’s jewelry on my way back to Germany, even if no one else would know what they were seeing.
As I took the Red Line into Boston, I reread the email. I was becoming a citizen under Article 116(2), a repatriation law for direct descendants of Germans who had lost their citizenship due to the Nuremberg Laws. (The law has seen many versions over the years, with a recent one passed in 2021; I had discovered it three years ago.) Applying had been an arduous process, especially during COVID. My father and aunt had sent me every document they could find. We had searched for proof that my grandfather had been Jewish, but we couldn’t find the word Juden in the old German script of my great-grandfather’s birth certificate from 1885. So we dug up alternate proof: old black-and-white photos and save-the-dates from my father’s bar mitzvah.
Finally, a distant British cousin told us that the proof had been on the birth certificate all along: We had been looking for Juden, but the word was Israelitisch.
So we got notarizations and apostilles and certified translations and fingerprints. And in May 2022, after two years of work, I finally mailed the documents.
I was never told that my application was nearing completion. I was told only that it had been completed.
As I switched from the Red Line to the Green in Boston, one step closer to the consulate and my new nationality, I kept waiting to feel relief. When I’d begun the application process, politics and the pandemic had combined to make me anxious about closing borders. Two passports would always be safer than one: This was a wisdom seemingly inscribed in my genes, present in all the stories of escape and survival that I grew up with.
But I was surprised to also feel the lump rise in my throat as I settled into the next subway car and reread the words. “You will officially become a German citizen once the papers are handed over to you.” I was close to tears. My grandfather had given me this gift. He became stateless, lost his citizenship—and that’s what allowed me to gain it.
I don’t know if he was a loving person, a warm man. I know that he was a refugee in France from the Nazi regime. He escaped to Switzerland as France, too, started rounding up its Jews. Once he came to America, he drove a yellow New York City taxicab and could recite the Greek words of The Odyssey by heart.
I know little else about him. But he gave me the most loving gift, anyway: the gift of protection. And I was on my way to give him a form of posthumous justice in return.
At the consulate, everyone wore masks. Yet I could see the smile in the eyes of the receptionist who welcomed me with congratulations. In the eyes of the official who told me that I am German for life as of now. That if I have children someday, they will be German, too.
Behind glass, he apologized for the lack of celebration. The German consulate is still upholding strict COVID measures. Before the pandemic, they would have gathered several newly naturalized citizens together for a celebratory ceremony, with pictures and champagne.
I joked that I would take my own selfie. He said he would take my picture, and instructed me come out to the hallway where the German seal looks best. Then, with a wink, he took a selfie with me. “Danke,” I kept saying. “Danke schoen.”
I held up my certificate in front of the square-shouldered eagle of Deutschland. There was one last miraculous piece to this strange moment: of all the times when Germany could have made me a citizen, it did so exactly two weeks before the publication of my first book, which is about granddaughters of the Holocaust still haunted today. The twin image of that eagle appears in the book splayed across the helmets of Nazi soldiers. In the back of the book, on the dedication page, I include a photo of Nana and her family.
The Jewish relationship to the concept of an afterlife is murky. There is no heaven and hell as in the Christian conception. Some believe in a more abstracted kind of “world to come.” But I wondered if somehow, behind the scenes, Nana or my grandfather was looking on. At the very least, I wondered what they would they think. Germany was the origin of my Nana’s family’s deaths. When I went to visit Berlin years ago, I didn’t tell her. There’s a dark irony here: I have this extra safety because it was stripped from my grandfather.
And yet. At the consulate, I walked out toward the elevators, grateful to my grandfather for the gift he had given me and to my new country for trying, generations later, to make things right. As I left, I pressed my Nana’s necklace to my heart.
