Years ago, on a flight from Anchorage to Taipei, I was sitting next to a woman and engaged in small talk. I asked her about her nationality. “I have an American passport, but I am Taiwanese,” she responded. This left me silent for a minute as I had to ponder her response before we could move on in our conversation. Back then, I determined there could be no such thing as having a passport from one country, but loyalty and heart for another. I was sure I would never get to that stage of developing a sense of split nationality, claiming Germany to be only my passport country. While I lived overseas, I was German, but returning to live in German has made me realize what I had not expected.

A repatriate suffers some reverse culture shock at first. Since I’m intimately familiar with German culture and language, many German family members and friends automatically assumed I would be happy to be back in my Heimatland. But all together I had been absent from Germany for about 10 years and nothing really seemed familiar as rules, regulations, celebrities, building, places, the climate, faces, etc. had changed – including me. So it was just natural to reject some of the German things I had used to like and instead oriented my life as an expat, such as  enrolling our four-year-old in the international preschool when German four-year-olds do NOT go to school as they are meant to play only. For me it was OK to have my husband work seven days a week in his newly assigned job. Most German fathers are supposed to spend the weekend with the family. I longed for the friends I had left behind in Japan, when I was supposed to be happy to see my old German friends again who did not show much interest in the life I had enjoyed.

A repatriate can become Germanized again, but in this I mostly failed. My spoken German did not match my international attitude. My working hours are closer to a Tokyo shopping mall’s hours of operation and my philosophy has more of a positive Can do! sentiment, which I picked up in the United States. Only my directness is a sure sign of the German left in me.

An international family does not fit well into a German drawer. My husband is a school teacher – but no, he is not a German government employee. Yes, I got a driver’s license, but it is an American one. No, I do not have a Personalausweis, a very German sign for being a good German. The other day I had to pick up a parcel from the post office and the woman demanded to see my Perso. I had to ask her what is was, simply because I was not familiar with this colloquialism. She looked at me strangely and when I told her I had none, she proceeded to tell me: “Das geht nicht. Jeder Deutsche hat einen!” Again, I do not fit the German norm. In the end she used my American driver’s license for a picture ID. When Germans sit together for Kaffee and Kuchen on a Sunday afternoon, both of our children take lessons – one for Mandarin Chinese and the other one in horsebackriding. Both teachers are foreigners as there are not too many Germans willing to work on Sundays.

There have been quite a few times when I wish I could speak German with a foreign accent… I guess some Germans know how to make me feel less German. But then again, I am not blaming them as this would be another notorious German trait.

Nowadays, when my lifestyle does not meet German standards, I explain I am not German – only my passport is. This takes a minute to sink in and in the meantime I can slip away with a friendly Auf Wiedersehen!

We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.
–Talmudic Saying–