As a divorce lawyer, I never tire of singing the praises of single life and trumpeting the dangers of marriage.
Unfortunately, no one ever listens to me. Instead, people continue to walk down the aisle, towards doom and despair. Then, a few years later, they call me and humbly admit that I was – of course – right all along. I’m not one to hold a grudge, so I also help those who, through their own fault, naïveté, and conformity to petit-bourgeois conventions, have voluntarily entered into the misery of marriage. I am happy to support women, men, and, more recently, non-binary individuals in liberating themselves from pain and suffering, from oppression and misfortune.
But if you don’t want to heed my advice, I hope you at least listen to science.
Because science has now found that married people have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
The good news from this study is that even those who have made the fateful mistake can still salvage their health. Although lifelong singles have the lowest risk of Alzheimer’s, divorcees also have a lower risk of brain shrinkage than those who remain married for life.
And it does make sense. It is well known that dementia can best be prevented by keeping the brain active. Read a lot, travel to unfamiliar countries, return to university at an advanced age, learn languages, and constantly set yourself new challenges. Intellectually, academically, culturally, but also socially. I noticed this myself when, during my wandering years, I lived in ten different countries and traveled to many dozens more. A new environment, new rules, a new language, and above all, meeting new people again and again has kept me younger than all those fitness fads.
When you get married, life is over. Daily humdrum sets in. At some point, you don’t even need to talk to each other anymore, because you already know what the other person is going to say. And if you announce “Honey, I need a year off and I’m going to cycle along the Silk Road”, you will have a jealousy drama on your hands like in one of those telenovelas.
“I should have gone to university instead.” “Me too.”
Short relationships lasting no longer than six months are probably harmless in terms of dementia risk. The problem, as I know from my family law practice, is that many people cannot survive even a short relationship without pregnancy or paternity. And then their life is messed up twice over.
Now, you could argue that children keep you mentally fit. But thinking like that violates the second formulation of the categorical imperative. Besides, a membership with the local library will cost you much less.
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I don’t know if I was thinking about the dangers to the brain back then. But many years ago, I already argued that the concept of lifelong marriage is inhumane and unhealthy.
My hosts in Linz are exceptionally gracious hosts. On the morning of the farewell, they cook, bake, puree, flambé and prepare food as if I weren’t a humble little fellow, but a horde of a hundred hungry men.
Unfortunately, I don’t have much of an appetite. Because today, my journey will take me to Mauthausen.
The extremely caring hosts don’t mind driving me the 20 kilometers. Maybe they don’t trust hitchhiking, although it got me to Linz safely. We are cruising past blast furnaces, steel mills, smoking chimneys, sparking fires. Railroads are roaring and rushing from one part of the steelworks to another. There is hammering and smelting, productivity and perspiration. This is what the Rust Belt must have looked like before it got rusty.
These are the Hermann Göring Works. Construction began in 1938, a few months after Austria ceased to be an independent country. Built, expanded and operated with forced labor, with prisoners of war and with prisoners of the nearby concentration camps Gusen and Mauthausen. At the time, the Germans and Austrians could not show up to work themselves, because they were busy invading other countries to enslave their populations for the benefit of a German economic miracle. Capitalism needs growth, if necessary by force.
But you have to give credit to Voestalpine AG, the name under which the company is now trading, for maintaining a museum of contemporary history on the factory premises. Thousands of other companies keep as quiet as mice, even though almost everyone in the German Reich had forced laborers, down to small and medium-sized businesses and even small farms.
From the town of Mauthausen, and town is almost too big a word for it, a road winds its way through the forests and cornfields. Always uphill. Up to the fortress, which still yields a threatening and gloomy aura.
Thick walls. Barbed wire. Guard towers.
No trees, preferring a clear line of fire instead.
It is summer 2020 and there are fewer visitors than usual because of the corona virus. The lady at the reception takes a lot of time to explain everything.
Mauthausen was one of the last concentration camps to be liberated, on 5 May 1945. The fact that the first concentration camps had already been liberated ten months earlier did not stop the killing here. The fact that Hitler had killed himself a week earlier did not stop the killing. The fact that the Wehrmacht had already surrendered on many fronts at the beginning of May did not stop the killing. But thereafter, for the rest of their largely unprosecuted lives, the murderers blathered on about allegedly “not having had any choice”.
Because the killing went on in Mauthausen almost to the last breath of the Nazi regime, the camp was the destination of several transfer and death marches from other concentration camps. The number of prisoners swelled dramatically from 1944 on, and in the last four months before liberation, as many people died as in the previous four years. At least 90,000 people in total.
Mauthausen was liberated by the US Army. Looking at the banner with which the Spanish prisoners welcomed the liberators, it becomes evident that the term “Antifa” does not deserve any negative connotation. Quite the contrary.
But it is thanks to the Soviet Union that Mauthausen became a memorial site, the knowledgeable lady enlightens me. Like Germany, Austria was divided into four occupation zones, and north of the Danube was the Soviet zone. The Soviet occupying power returned the site only on the condition that it be maintained as a memorial.
“What do the people in Mauthausen make of the fact that their town is always associated with the concentration camp?” I want to know.
She turns to a young man who is doing an internship: “You’re a local, you can probably say more about that.”
“Yesterday I was handing out flyers for our film week,” he recounts. “Some people were interested. But when I walked into an ice cream parlor and said I was from the memorial site, the woman there turned around and didn’t talk to me anymore.”
He tells it like it’s not the first time this has happened.
And: “When we go abroad, we prefer to say we are from Linz.” I know this phenomenon from Dachau, where people prefer to say that they are from Munich.
Equipped with a map and other helpful hints, I begin exploring the grounds. Outside the fortress-like walls was the soccer field. Here, the SS played against local clubs. The local population could watch, and there was probably someone selling sausages or lemonade. There were also other joint celebrations and regular contact, even marriages between SS men and local women. The population of Mauthausen grew, the landlords rejoiced, the innkeepers were happy.
Next to the sports field were barracks for the prisoners who were so sick that they were no longer a flight risk. To die, they could be stacked outside the walls. Today, a woman is walking her dog in this field and picking flowers. For the breakfast table.
Where the SS barracks once stood, there is a memorial park. A mirror of the post-war situation, the Cold War and the changes that have occurred since then. The first monuments were large, heroic, male. Many groups of victims such as women, homosexuals or children were overlooked.
It was not until the 1970s that a memorial to the Jewish victims was erected. The Roma and Sinti had to wait even longer, until 1989.
And the commemoration was national. Each country wanted its own memorial. Germany is represented twice, not as perpetrator and victim, but as East and West. There are countries that no longer exist, the USSR, the GDR, Yugoslavia. And new countries like Ukraine and Slovenia.
Visitors from around the world put up plaques. There is gratitude to the U.S. liberators next to remembrance of the Soviet victims. The latter ones, at least if they were lieutenant generals, received the more flowery obituary. (“… Torture and mockery did not break the courage of the fiery fighter for the liberation of peoples from the fascist yoke. …“)
Memorial plaques for children. Plaques for Jewish paratroopers from Palestine who volunteered to fight the Nazis behind enemy lines. Plaques for homosexuals. For scouts. For Roma and Sinti. For Jehovah’s Witnesses. For Turkish victims. For Chinese victims. For Georgian victims. For Louis Häfliger. For deserters and conscientious objectors of the Wehrmacht. For communists and socialists. For Azerbaijani victims. For Kosovar victims. For Portuguese victims. For Montenegrin victims. For Cuban victims. And for Leopold Figl, who was elected Chancellor of the Republic of Austria after his imprisonment in Mauthausen.
One hundred and ninety thousand prisoners. One hundred and ninety thousand stories.
The lady from the memorial center had told me that in pandemic-free years, relatives of former prisoners come from all over the world. The historians then retrieve the respective files from the archives. And all relatives are given a personal tour.
“Sometimes,” she continues, “people hand us a bundle of papers they found after their father or grandfather died. Old IDs, documents, a diary or a handwritten memoir. Our work won’t be over for a long time.”
Visiting a former concentration camp, one expects to be most shocked by the gas chamber. Or by the furnaces in which the corpses were burned. Or by the photos of piles of corpses. But here, the memorial has a different concept: in the basement, where the crematoria are located, relatives are allowed to place plaques, memories and photos of the victims.
The rooms are full of faces, full of names, full of lives cut short.
One hundred and ninety thousand prisoners. One hundred and ninety thousand stories.
I want to tell one of them. The story of Francisco Boix.
You may have wondered, when you saw the image of the liberation, why the poster was written in Spanish. Well, there were about 7,000 Spanish (many of them Catalan) prisoners in Mauthausen.
How did that come about? Spain was never conquered by the Nazis, was it?
It was a consequence of the Spanish Civil War. After Franco prevailed in 1939, many Spanish leftists and republicans fled across the Pyrenees to France. Some of them became German prisoners when Germany invaded France. Others fought with the French Foreign Legion against Germany and thus ended up in German captivity. The Third Reich did not want to put them in concentration camps at first, but treated them as prisoners of war. Germany even offered Franco to send them to Spain, which after all was not at war with Germany. But the Spanish dictator replied: “No thank you. These people have conspired against me, they are no longer Spaniards. Do with them whatever you want.”
That was their death sentence.
Francisco Boix was one of those Spaniards who fought against Franco and against Hitler. He was caught and sent to Mauthausen in 1941. He was also a photographer.
That saved his life.
He had to work as a photo lab assistant for the SS identification service in the camp. Propaganda photos, photos of all new prisoners, photos of deaths in the quarry, photos of executions, photos of the cruel living conditions in the camp were passing through his hands. Photos of everything.
Boix secretly made an additional print of many of these photos. Other Spanish prisoners working in the quarries outside the camp smuggled the photos outside. On the footpath through the town of Mauthausen, they noticed a woman who seemed friendlier than the other locals, who nodded at them, greeted them. The prisoners slipped the photos to this woman. Again and again. Each time at the risk of the lives of everyone involved. This woman, Anna Pointner, kept the photos hidden until 1945.
It was almost unbelievable, but Francisco Boix survived the four years in the concentration camp. Without him or his helpers ever being exposed. His photos and his testimony at the first Nuremberg Trial as well as at the Mauthausen Trial not only proved the cruel conditions of imprisonment, but also the personal knowledge about it of Albert Speer, who was photographed during his visit to the Mauthausen concentration camp.
And then, Boix and the other Spanish prisoners were not able to return to their homeland after liberation. Spain made no effort to restore their revoked citizenship. They remained stateless.
I am learning so much in the exhibition that I cannot reproduce here without going beyond the scope of the article.
About Martin Roth, who was responsible for the operation of the gas chamber and the crematorium at Mauthausen. Since 1945, he was wanted for murder. But apparently not wanted very much, because he was able to live unmolested in Germany and Austria until 1968. Only then was he sentenced to seven years in prison. From 1977 until his death in 2003, he went on summer vacation to Mauthausen every year. He liked to sit in the garden of a pub there, with a view of the former concentration camp.
About the SS, which, in the spirit of capitalism, founded its own limited company to exploit the quarries in Mauthausen. With brochures that advertised the quality of the granite from Mauthausen, Gross-Rosen and Flossenbürg. From the latter quarry, people with a terrible taste in gardening still like to get their granite today.
About the camp brothel to which women from Ravensbrück concentration camp were brought. Only a few privileged prisoners were allowed to visit the brothel. Jews were excluded. The subsequent release which had been promised to the women never happened, of course.
About the efforts of the SS to destroy all evidence in the last months. Most of the documents were burned. The killing facilities were dismantled. Good thing that Francisco Boix had hidden the photos. And good thing that Jack Taylor, an OSS secret agent, survived his imprisonment in Mauthausen concentration camp and was able to help with the US Army’s meticulous investigation.
As is so often the case when confronting National Socialism, it is above all the bureaucracy, the obsession with regulations, the orderliness of the bookkeeping – the German virtues – that are so frightening.
I have to catch some air, step outside, walk through the grass, which is now greener than it ever was in the days of the concentration camp. But everywhere I step, there is a cemetery.
Only at the fence, once electrically charged and another killing instrument, does my walk, lost in thoughts, come to a stop.
Only once did prisoners manage to break through this fence. In February 1945, Soviet prisoners of war attacked the guard towers and short-circuited the electric fence with wet blankets. 419 of them were able to leave the camp.
However, only for a short time. Many collapsed from exhaustion or died in the hail of bullets from the machine guns. The SS organized a veritable hunt for the rest. For three weeks, all surrounding forests and villages were combed to find and kill every escaped Soviet soldier. Under the cynical name “Mühlviertel Hare Hunt” the police, the fire department, the Wehrmacht, the Hitler Youth, the Volkssturm as well as the civilian population participated in the manhunt. Mass murder as a public spectacle. Those were the people who after 1945 claimed that they hadn’t known about anything.
Only eleven of the escaped Soviet soldiers survived because they were hidden by farmers or by forced laborers. These were the ones whom the majority resented after 1945, because they had shown that resistance was possible.
I walk down to the Danube, through the town. It is four kilometers to the train station, which the prisoners had to walk the other way, always uphill for them. Past pretty villas, petit-bourgeois houses, well-tended gardens.
I do the math. Those who were 20 years old back then would now be 95. There won’t be many of them left. The 60- or 70-year-olds sitting in the garden now are the ones who never asked. For fear of what might come to light. Including about their own parents.
It probably takes two or three generations for people to start asking. And sometimes even longer. On the website of the municipality of Mauthausen, the concentration camp memorial is not listed among the local sights. Neither is the memorial to Anna Pointner. But there is a proud reference to the war memorial for the Nazi soldiers who rounded up the victims for Mauthausen all over the world.
In winter, the memorial is closed on Mondays, otherwise it’s open every day. I recommend that you schedule at least 3-4 hours for the visit.
Entrance is free of charge. The app which guides you around and provides background information is also free of charge. If, like me, you don’t have a smartphone, you can rent an audio guide for 3 €.
There is a graphic novel about Francisco Boix. It has an extensive and illustrated appendix, introducing the history and system of the Mauthausen concentration camp. I found this a very helpful preparation for the visit.
The disturbingly fascinating story of Enric Marco is also set against the backdrop of the Spanish connection with Mauthausen.
Every now and then, people ask if I can recommend a long-distance hiking path. I don’t know why they would ask me, of all people, because I am really more of a couch potato myself.
But one thing I know: Eastern Europe is very much underrated. And Romania is particularly wonderful.
Via Transilvanica is a relatively new long-distance path, completed just a few years ago. It traverses all of Romania from north to south (and probably the other way, too), stretching over 1,400 km. I haven’t walked this route yet, but I will dare to pass on this recommendation, because I have had nothing but the best experience anywhere else in Romania.
In 70 daily stages, each covering around a manageable 20 km, the route passes through a wide variety of landscapes, without crossing steep mountains or any other challenging terrain. It is more suited for leisurely hikers who want to get to know the country and its people. For that reason, accommodation with locals is available in almost every village along the entire trail. So if you don’t want to, you don’t have to bivouac or camp a single night.
I found three videos that provide a good overview of this long-distance hiking trail, the different regions and landscapes, and the hospitality. But above all, they show that the Via Transilvanica was and is a project of thousands of volunteers who take care of the trails, maintain the signposts, publish hiking guides and accommodation directories, and involve the local community.
The following second part covers the regions where I was usually stumbling through the forests and across the gentle hills: Szeklerland and Transylvania. From minute 18:40, it enters Mureș County, where I lived in 2014 and 2015.
The hiking trail does not lead through the charming city of Târgu Mureș, but that’s the way it is with trails that mainly want to incorporate nature and village life. But as you will see, there is plenty of culture and impressive architecture even in the smallest villages. I don’t even know if there is another hiking trail that passes through that many UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
The third part delves deep into Romanian and Roman history. As you may have noticed from the language, there is a connection. (Last year, I had a Romanian Couchsurfing guest staying with me who made the bold claim that Latin was derived from Romanian rather than the other way around, and that the Vatican only exists to suppress this linguistic truth. Otherwise, a Romanian would become Pope and then Romania could finally get back the gold that was stolen by the Soviet Union. Which would make Romania the richest country in the world. Were it not for the Vatican! I gave him a second beer, so he would fall asleep soon. But he was a nice guy.)
In addition, this last episode once again highlights the hospitality, warmth and helpfulness that once led me to feel completely accepted, integrated and at home in Romania.
One thing has probably become evident from the videos: If you want to lose weight or give up alcohol, hiking through Romania won’t help. However, if your mind and soul are more important to you than cholesterol and liver levels, then Romania is the place for you!
A potential client is trying to convince me to take on her case, listing the reasons why she should have child custody.
“I have a house, I have a car, my ex doesn’t have anything,” she says, among other equally unconvincing reasons. “We even have a swimming pool.”
“Well, you are not going to have that house and that car for much longer,” I inform her.
She is visibly shocked: “Why not?”
“Because you will have to sell them to pay my fees.”
Maybe it’s my working-class background. Maybe it’s my disdain for most matters material and for showoffs. Or for non-sequitur arguments. In any case, I have a problem with parents who think they are entitled to child custody because they are wealthier than the other parent.
Luckily, they never hire me. Because in the end, their wealth is more important to them than their child.
By the way, I have neither a car, nor a house, and I am perfectly happy. But then, I don’t have any children either. – Which happens to be the best advice I can pass on. For free.
As I reach those echelons of advanced age, where, just a few short centuries ago I would have been regarded as a wise man, I sometimes feel the impact of age discrimination already. For example when they randomly change well-functioning processes just to confuse people. Or when they fire people to make things “digital”, which just means that you can’t understand nothing no more, when in the good old times you simply walked down to the Post Office to ask. Or when they take away software that we had just gotten used to. Like Microsoft is now threatening to do to Skype.
The end of Skype will mean two things:
People like me, who are slow to adapt to ever-changing technological gadgets, are being shut out from electronic communication. Henceforth, no more fancy video chats for me. (Anyhow, I always found it strange that people from the southern hemisphere weren’t shown upside down.) Luckily, I still have a proper phone (the number is in the phone book) and an address, where you can send letters, postcards and books.
Second, I have been using Skype to communicate with my international clients for decades. This shows that even one’s own business, if it’s based on some computer tool, can be reduced to rubble at the whim of a madman.
Either way, I shall have more time to read books, to stroll across flower-strewn hills, and to be happily unavailable to the big wide world.
In every country in South America, there is one specific topic with which you can interrupt the logorrhea of even the most verbose person. In Brazil, mentioning the numbers 7-1 is enough to make people cry. In Bolivia, you praise the beauty of the country, the diversity of nature from the Andes to the Amazon, before adding innocently: “Just sad that you don’t have the sea anymore.” Depending on his character, the Bolivian will break out in tears, in deep pondering or in torrents of hatred against Chile.
Even young Bolivians, who can’t possibly have any personal memory of losing the sea, talk about the War of the Pacific as if access to the Pacific had been wrested from their own hands. In that war, Chile fought against Bolivia and Peru. Chile won the war and gobbled up some nice pieces of land from both losers. Peru became smaller and Bolivia lost its Pacific coast.
Oh by the way, all of this happened already between 1879 and 1884.
With Lake Titicaca, Bolivia actually has far more beautiful waters than the broth that washes up dead fish and plastic waste on the shores of the continent’s other countries. But for the purposes of ex- and importing, a common sea with China would be more important. Bolivia does indeed suffer from its position as a landlocked country, the only one on both American continents (Paraguay can access the Atlantic via the Paraná River). Every export of minerals requires that treaties be negotiated with the neighbors, who use their position to suppress prices, divert part of the profits and make everything more complicated. Switzerland and Austria can be lucky that they don’t need to export anything, but that tourists and black money flock to them naturally.
The distance from the world’s seas weighs especially hard on Bolivia because the country lives from selling gas, ores and precious minerals to China. These goods are hard to transport by plane. The cocaine producers would prefer a coast with ports for submarines, too, which would be more comfortable than carrying the precious substance through zika- and malaria-infested jungles.
Visually, Bolivia does not suffer from the absence of the sea because the shore around Lake Titicaca is one of the most beautiful sceneries in South America. That it’s not attractive to stoned surfers isn’t necessarily negative. I even dare to establish the theory that Bolivia is more intellectual than most of the neighboring countries exactly because it doesn’t have the coast anymore. Without sandy beaches, Bolivians don’t constantly need to think about their appearance in swimsuits, leaving more time for literature and the arts. Brazil has boobs and bikinis, Bolivia has brains and books.
Nonetheless, every 23rd of March all of Bolivia finds itself in collective lamenting. On the Day of the Sea (Dia del Mar) the national flag is replaced by a maritime version. Replicas of sunk ships are being carried though the streets like an ostensorium.
Military marching bands play sad songs like ”Vaya, vaya, aqui no hay playa. Vamos a La Haya!“(“Oh no, oh no, we don’t have a beach. Let’s go to The Hague!”). All day long, films related to the sea are being shown on TV (The Perfect Storm, Titanic, Pirates of the Caribbean, Vicky the Viking).
Irredentism has constitutional status in Bolivia. Article 267 elevates full sovereignty over the Pacific coast as a national objective – without any geographical limitations. When President Morales receives or visits foreign heads of state, he gives them a book that explains Bolivia’s claim to access to the Pacific. The present then probably ends up where the brochures of the similarly insisting Jehovah’s Witnesses are discarded.
To underline its claims, Bolivia maintains a navy. Not just any navy, but the largest naval forces of any landlocked country in the world. Because there is no sea, the 60 boats need to chug in circles on Lake Titicaca, from where nobody knows how they would reach the Pacific if there was ever a war again. Maybe they can be dismantled, transported by train and then put together again?
This arsenal may seem exaggerated, but it’s the reaction to a strategic mistake during the War of the Pacific: back then, Bolivia had no navy at all.
With having a big-ass navy come martial threats. This mural by Lake Titicaca depicts a Bolivian soldier ramming his bayonet into the neck of a Chilean soldier. The inscription says “What was once ours will be ours again”.
I wonder how Chilean tourists react to this.
But I don’t think there will be a war. So far, President Morales is content with delivering speeches along the line of “The whole world hears the legitimate cry of the Bolivian people against the injustice perpetrated by the imperialists”, and so on, because in Mr Morales’ worldview, anyone who doesn’t agree with him or do what he wants is imperialistic.
My Bolivian lawyer friends are quite happy that Bolivia wages judicial instead of naval battles. First, Bolivia filed a case with the League of Nations, and now with the International Court of Justice (the real one, not the one re-enacted by cute children). The obsession with the Pacific coast means that in Bolivia as a landlocked country, there are more master and doctoral theses about maritime law than in all other countries of South America combined.
To me, all of this looks as if the Bolivian government is trying to distract from real issues and wants to blame “imperialist Chileans” from the 19th century for the current lack of drinking water, infrastructure, housing and schooling. (My Hungarian readers know this concept from the tirades against Trianon, and the older German readers will remember when the Treaty of Versailles was blamed for any and all problems.) But the wish for access to the sea has indeed been ingrained in many Bolivians.
Books about the War of the Pacific are bestsellers. Particularly popular is the theory that the peace treaty was “unfair” and that the country was betrayed by Bolivian politicians; something like the Bolivian Dolchstoßlegende.
When Bolivians go on holiday in Chile, they take flags with them and walk through the sea which was once “theirs”. This ritual is the Bolivian equivalent to the pilgrimage to Mecca. Once in a lifetime, you need to do it.
If I have given you the impression that all of Bolivia is in an irredentist rage, that would be wrong. As I have been trying to convey many times already, Bolivia is a highly likable and personable country with a sense of humor. When you talk about this subject a bit longer, most Bolivians will concede that it would be impractical to rescind all wars. “Otherwise, the Spanish could come and claim that South America used to be theirs.”
And don’t you just have to love a country where naval officers are being paraded around in a ship made of painted bed sheets?
The FAQ on German Citizenship are the most popular post on my blog. But some aspects are so complicated, they warrant their own list of FAQ, like those on reclaiming German citizenship or German citizenship by restitution.
Before asking a new question, please read through the many comments which may already answer your question. And if you find these FAQ useful, or if you ask a new question, it would be very nice of you to support this blog. Thank you!
1. Why would someone lose German citizenship in the first place?
The main ways to lose German citizenship were applying for and receiving citizenship of another country without prior permission from Germany (§ 25 StAG until June 2024), voluntarily serving in the armed forces of another country (§ 28 StAG) and renunciation (§ 26 StAG).
But it becomes endlessly more complex because different laws were in place at different times. Until 1949 or 1953, depending on the specific circumstances, German women who married a foreign man automatically lost German citizenship. Until 1913, German citizenship could be lost by living abroad for more than 10 years and not registering with a German consulate. And then, between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis stripped many people of German citizenship as an act of punishment or out of anti-Semitic ideology.
2. I am a history geek. Tell me more about that Nazi policy.
In November 1941, the Third Reich passed a law that deprived all Jewish Germans who were living abroad at the time (or moved abroad later) of their German citizenship.
In addition to that, since July 1933 there had been a law that allowed the individual revocation of German citizenship, which was mostly applied to opposition activists and intellectuals. If your ancestors were among the 39,006 victims of that policy, they were in the good company of people like Albert Einstein, Willy Brandt, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht and others.
3. I am a descendant of someone in one of these two groups of people. Does this mean I can now apply for a German passport?
Generally yes.
Art. 116 II of the German Constitution states that all people who were deprived of their German citizenship on “political, racial or religious grounds” between 1933 and 1945 can reclaim Germany citizenship. What is of more interest to you is that Art. 116 II GG extends this to descendants.
Since 2021, there is a new § 15 StAG, widening the number of people who are eligible to reclaim German citizenship. So even if you were previously told (by me or by someone else) that you are not eligible, it may well be worth to look into your case again.
4. That sounds interesting. What are the changes?
First, the new § 15 no. 1 StAG extends the eligible group of people to all those who lost or gave up their German citizenship – for the reasons outlined in Art. 116 II GG – before 1955. Previously, the loss of German citizenship had to have occurred before 1945. The purpose of the new § 15 StAG in this respect is to cover German citizens who fled from the Nazis, but only lost their German citizenship after the end of the Nazi regime, for example through naturalization in another country after 1945.
Second, § 15 no. 2 StAG now explicitly covers people who were excluded from mass-naturalizations of ethnic Germans based on racial grounds. For example, when the Nazis occupied the city of Gdansk/Danzig, the population automatically became German. Jews were however excluded from this.
Third, § 15 no. 3 StAG now covers people who did apply or could have applied for German citizenship between 1933 and 1945, but did not receive German citizenship due to racial or political discrimination. This concerns Jews, but for example also communists.
Fourth, § 15 no. 4 StAG extends the possibility to obtain German citizenship to people who were deported or forced to emigrate from the German Reich by the Nazis. In this case, the applicants (or their parents, grand-parents, etc.) need not have been German citizens! It covers any of your ancestors, of whatever nationality, who lived in Nazi Germany and were forced to leave.
5. And if I qualify, this also extends to my children?
Yes. Even to grandchildren.
6. What about the non-Nazi related cases, for example when I lost German citizenship because I applied for US/Jamaican/Australian citizenship without prior permission from Germany, but now I want to move back to Germany?
First of all, you don’t need German citizenship in order to move to Germany (§ 38 II AufenthG).
§ 13 StAG allows for the discretionary re-naturalization of former German citizens (and their minor children). You need to present a compelling case, though. In my experience, only very few applicants make the cut, because you need to show that it would be in the national interest of Germany to re-naturalize you. Unless you are some great sportsperson or scientist, that’s not easy.
But luckily, in recent years the European Court of Justice has come to the rescue of many ex-Germans who want their citizenship back.
7. What does the European Union have to do with German citizenship law?
It’s a bit complicated and counterintuitive, because citizenship law is one of the bastions of national law within the European Union. But lawyers can be creative:
With each national citizenship of an EU member country, you automatically have/receive the citizenship of the European Union, pursuant to Art. 20 TFEU. If you have a passport from any EU country on hand, just look at it, and you will see that it is also a passport of the European Union. For a long time, this EU citizenship was pretty much disregarded, because you cannot obtain, keep or lose it independently. It is tied to the national citizenship of a member state.
But then came the European Court of Justice (ECJ, the highest court of the European Union, not to be confused with the European Court of Human Rights, which is not an EU court) in 2019 and ruled that the loss of EU citizenship in the context of losing the national citizenship of an EU member state (for example the loss of German citizenship when you got naturalized in another country before 2024) needs to pass a proportionality test under European law.
In several subsequent decisions, the ECJ required that the proportionality test takes into account the specific situation of the EU citizen at the time. And this gives you an opening if (a) at the time of your loss of German citizenship no proportionality test was carried out at all, or (b) if Germany at the time did not consider the effects on your EU citizenship.
Option (a) is less relevant for people who held German citizenship and lost it upon naturalization in another country, because they could have applied for a Beibehaltungsgenehmigung pursuant to § 25 II StAG a.F. If you didn’t and thus didn’t even give Germany a chance to make a decision about your citizenship, then that’s your fault. However, option (b) can be very relevant, because until a few years ago, Germany never considered the implications on your EU freedom of movement rights, should they withdraw your German citizenship. This is a huge opportunity for people who had been using their German citizenship to live in other EU countries, who have relatives in other EU countries, or other connections to other EU countries.
All of this has meanwhile been incorporated in the German Citizenship Act in § 30 I 4 StAG.
As you may have noticed, this is very complicated, so you shouldn’t try this yourself. For some of the other options, you don’t necessarily need a lawyer. Here, you need a real hot-shot citizenship lawyer.
8. I am the child of a German mother, but I was born before 1975 and therefore did not receive German citizenship. Isn’t that unfair?
Very unfair indeed. Finally, this has been recognized and there is a new § 5 StAG, which is supposed to bestow German citizenship on all those who previously missed out on it due to gender discrimination in older versions of the Citizenship Act. This concerns the following groups of people:
Children of at least one German parent, who did not receive German citizenship at birth (§ 5 I no. 1 StAG). The main cases here are children of German mothers born before 1975 and children of German fathers born out of wedlock before 1993.
Children of a German mother who had lost her German citizenship due to marrying a foreigner (§ 5 I no. 2 StAG). This is only relevant if your mother or grandmother married a non-German before April 1953.
Children who lost their German citizenship because their German mother married their non-German father (§ 5 I no. 3 StAG).
Like with the other restitution cases, this also applies to descendants of the aforementioned cases.
If you fall under any of these categories, you have the opportunity to obtain German citizenship by a simple declaration. But you need to make this declaration by August 2031, that’s the cut-off date.
9. Will I have to give up my existing citizenship?
No, you do not need to renounce your existing citizenship.
10. I lost German citizenship when I was a child because my family moved to another country and my parents filed for British/Brazilian/US citizenship for me. I was never asked. This is unfair!
We cannot undo everything that your parents did on your behalf when you were a child. Or do you want to return all these bicycles and Commodore computers?
But it is worth looking into the exact circumstances. I’ve had cases where only one of the parents signed the petition for a new citizenship although the parents had joint custody. In this case, German law treats you as if you never lost German citizenship in the first place and you can simply apply for a new passport without having to go through re-naturalization.
When I photographed this mural in Kutaisi in Georgia (the real Georgia) in 2017, it seemed to symbolize the Georgian aspirations and hopes to join NATO. After all, somebody has to bring the wine for all the military exercises.
Nowadays, it makes you wonder if time is running out for NATO. And for Georgia.
“Winston, you have to stop with this warmongering, do you hear me? The Nazis just want your little island. And all of Europe. And to enslave millions. And to murder, rape and loot. And you come here, make a fuss about that inconvenience, and smoke your stinking cigars in my garden. How dare you??”
The Happy Hermit 