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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: I’ll always be considered a foreigner in Germany but will my German child?

Over five years since Shelley Pascual’s essay calling for an end to the dreaded ‘where are you from?’ question, she’s begrudgingly accepted that she’ll always be considered a foreigner in Germany. But will her German child have to accept this as well?

Published: 17 May 2023 08:14 CEST
Updated: 21 May 2023 08:32 CEST

Pictured is a newborn baby. Photo by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash

In just a few weeks, I am due to give birth to my first child. He will be a dual citizen, given that my husband is German and I am Canadian. As it starts to sink in for me that my son will obtain German nationality upon birth, various questions come to mind.

When he gets older, will he be asked ‘where are you from?’ as I have in the 11 years I’ve called Germany home? And will be he told he speaks very good German? Or, will people automatically assume he is German, despite how he looks and the colour of his skin?

I’ve come to believe there’s a good chance he, too, will be confronted with the dreaded ‘where are you from’ question. Worse still, that he’ll have to defend his Germanness. And this makes me very, very sad.

In my op-ed for The Local in 2018, I explained why being asked this question can be exasperating. Why not, as a possible alternative, ask someone to tell you about themself? That way, the person can answer in a way that’s most comfortable and authentic for them.

Born in Canada to Filipino parents, I describe myself as a Canadian who feels European. But when people press further (as they often do) and ask ‘where are you actually from?’ it can be downright offensive.

In Germany, asking someone where they’re from is based on the assumption that they aren’t German. No matter how well I speak German, and even if I get German citizenship one day, I’ll always be considered a foreigner here. But I won’t accept this for my son.

Aminata Toure speaking at the Greens’ Party Day in Schleswig-Holstein in March. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Frank Molter

Several Afro-Germans share their stories of being made to feel like foreigners in their own country in this recent documentary about racism in Germany. Their experiences are similar to those of other Afro-Germans whom I quoted in my article from 2018. It’s astonishing that nothing has changed in this regard in all this time.

A German-Kurdish friend recently told me that he’s also asked where he’s from. While Kahra isn’t as bothered by the question as I am, he points out that when he was studying in the USA, people simply accepted it when he said he was German.

This brings to mind my upbringing in Toronto. In the 22 years I lived there, I don’t recall ever having to defend my identity. Most of the kids at my elementary school were also people of colour whose parents were immigrants. Yet we all considered ourselves Canadians.

Looking to the future, I’d like for my son to have a similar experience. In an ideal world, he’d attend a school surrounded by many other kids of colour, and no one would ask him ‘where are you from?’ Disappointingly, however, Germany’s just not there yet.

For one of my Berlin-based Filipino friends, settling in Germany’s most multicultural city was a no-brainer. “I don’t want my children to feel like a minority even if they are,” Jenny said, explaining that the kids at her daughter’s kindergarten represent all corners of the globe.

Still, I doubt the chances of my son being accepted as German will be any higher in the Hauptstadt. Rapper and Berliner, Nura, is yet another German who’s been vocal about how frustrating it is to respond to ‘where are you actually from?’

Canadian and German flags flying next to each other. Photo: picture alliance / Gregor Fischer/dpa | Gregor Fischer

It’s not that I despise living in Germany. In fact, quite the opposite. Having spent the majority of my adult life here, I’m grateful for the high quality of life it offers. From becoming sportier to adopting its direct communication style, Deutschland has changed me for the better.

Overall, I do feel welcome in this country. I wouldn’t have stayed this long if I didn’t. The other day, I was caught off guard when I was mistaken for being German for the very first time. It made me think that maybe there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

It’s 2023. Isn’t it finally time for Germany to accept that people of all colours with diverse backgrounds can be Germans too? Maybe when there are more and more kids in Germany with mixed backgrounds, asking one another ‘where are you from?’ will naturally fall out of favour.

But since that could be decades from now, I simply cannot wait. If Germany gets to that point, I will have already moved somewhere else in the world, and my child – I hope – will have grown up in a place where he felt acceptance and belonging.

Have you had a similar experience to Shelley in Germany? Share your own stories and views in the comments section below.

Member comments

Anonymous - 17 May 2023 at 18:47 CEST

I came to Germany 26 years ago from Scotland, becoming a citizen in 2015. People pick up from my German that I am foreign, but ask if I am Irish or Dutch. When I say Scottish, they are charmed, which makes me proud to be Scottish and German. I can laugh at the cliches, e.g. do I play the bagpipes or wear a kilt? So it is almost always a positive experience being asked.

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OPINION: How bureaucracy is slowly killing Germany

In the summer of 2022, I attended a Q&A session that Olaf Scholz held with members of the public in the city of Magdeburg. Coming only a few months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, most of the questions centred on sanctions, energy costs and Berlin’s response to the war.

But the response I found most revealing was on the dull topic of tax reform.

An audience member asked Scholz why the VAT rate on dog food is seven percent but on baby food it is 19 percent. Parts of the system “don’t seem very coherent to me,” the man said with obvious understatement.

“I don’t think you’ll find anyone who understands the list of VAT exceptions,” Scholz replied with a grin, adding that “at any rate I don’t understand it.”

“But I can tell you that all attempts to change it have ended in a massive disaster,” he continued. “If we were to lay an empty table today, we would definitely do differently. But the system is there now and I think we will have to live with it for a while yet.”

It was a fascinating answer. Essentially, Scholz admitted that there are some regulations that are so complex that no one really understands them anymore. But trying to simplify them just isn’t worth the effort.

It reminded me of a story I once heard about Cairo’s famously dysfunctional traffic system.

Legend has it that Egypt invited a group of Japanese planners to come up with a way to fix it. But the Japanese were so befuddled by what they found that they advised the Egyptians to leave things exactly as they were. The system was so confusing that any attempt to tamper with it might only make things worse.

A similar thing could be said of Germany’s regulatory system. It can be contradictory and infuriatingly slow, but open the can of worms of trying to simplify it and you will probably live to regret it.

private pension plans spain

VAT is just one more confusing piece of German bureaucracy. Photo: Mathieu Stern/Unsplash

Summer snow and other oddities of German red tape

VAT serves as a notorious example. But, wherever you look in German life, you will find egregious cases of sprawling and overlapping regulations.

A few amusing examples:

In August 2022, the town of Esslingen in Baden-Württemberg wanted to organise a summer fête to help local restaurants get back on their feet after Covid. The idea was to build temporary food huts that restaurants could rent cheaply. But planning authorities insisted the huts be built to take the weight of heavy snowfall – during a month with average temperatures of 19C. The fête went ahead, but the eventual costs were “exorbitant,” city officials said.

Last winter, the town of Tübingen acted on an appeal from the federal government to cut gas usage. They decided to switch off street lights between 1 am and 5 am, something that would cut energy costs by 10 percent. Shortly afterwards though, they had to backtrack. The measure contravened a regulation on providing light for pedestrians. In the event of an accident they could have been sued.

A landlord in Hanover recently recounted her efforts to turn an empty attic into student housing. Her planning application was first rejected by fire authorities who said that the branches of a tree were blocking an escape route. Their proposal to cut the tree back was then turned down by the city authority for green spaces, which argued that trees form “a vital part of the city scenery” and “must be protected at all costs.”

Flood of new rules

It is not as if politicians aren’t aware that over-regulation is having a stifling effect on society’s ability to function and adapt.

In its coalition agreement, Scholz’ ‘traffic light’ government committed itself to cutting bureaucracy 63 times. There is an entire section in the agreement on how they planned to cut down official paperwork.

But changing such a deep-seated German mentality is a different matter.

In a withering report published in November, the government’s own bureaucracy watchdog, the Normenkontrollrat, concluded that under the current government the costs of bureaucracy “have reached a level that we’ve never seen before.”

Far from cutting back paperwork, the traffic light coalition has loaded companies, administrators and citizens with a whole raft of new rules, the watchdog said. “Ever more regulations have to be observed and implemented in less and less time,” it concluded.

The frustration is being felt most acutely by local administrators, who say that they just don’t have enough staff to cope anymore.

An open letter sent to Scholz by town councils in Baden-Württemberg pleaded that “things can’t go on like this. Ever more laws and regulations, all too often containing mistakes …are simply resulting in an unmanageable flood of tasks.”

Meanwhile, Germany’s revered Mittelstand, or small and medium sized family businesses, has warned that over-regulation is the single biggest threat to their future viability. A survey among middle-sized companies last year showed that they were far more concerned about regulation than energy prices. Other surveys have shown that a majority of companies don’t understand the regulations they are expected to follow, while two thirds say they make no sense.

“Enormous bureaucratic burdens are combining with labour shortages, lengthy administrative procedures, permanently high energy prices and high taxes in a blow to the future of our business location,” warns Marie-Christine Ostermann, head of the association of family business.

Stuck in the analogue era

For some though, the problem isn’t the regulation itself, it is the fact that there are not enough bureaucrats to deal with it all. After all, they argue, the rules are there to ensure that everyone’s concerns are accounted for.

“An unbureaucratic administration would be a nightmare,” protested economist Georg Cremer in a recent article for Die Zeit. “Sure, there can be too much of a good thing… (but) a prosperous social life is absolutely dependent on the government and administration being bound by law.”

Germany’s welfare system, Cremer points out, requires an army of bureaucrats who assess each claimant’s case based on things like the age of their children and their specific rental needs. “Undoubtedly, the welfare system is over-regulated”, he admits, but we also shouldn’t forget that any attempt to simplify it would make it less fair.

The Deutsche Institut für Wirtschaft, a left-wing economic think tank, has therefore argued that the answer to Germany’s woes is not to strip back regulation, but to employ more staff and push on with the digitisation of key services.

That sounds good in principle. But, when it comes to modernising Germany’s ossified public institutions, it is easier said than done.

A law passed in 2017 obliged local administrations to offer close to 600 of their services online by the end of 2022. A year past that deadline, just 81 of the services have been made available across the country.

The reason for the delays? Local governments are using software that is incompatible with the services developed by the federal government. Meanwhile bureaucrats often display a “grievous” lack of knowledge of how to use a computer, a recent analysis by consumer website Verivox found.

Bürgeramt

A man walks to the Bürgeramt, one of the many centres of German bureaucracy. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Martin Schutt

A German Javier Milei?

In September of last year, Scholz appeared to have finally recognised that things have gone too far.

Doing a good impression of an anarcho-capitalist then running to be president of Argentina, the chancellor gave a rousing speech to the Bundestag in which he called on the country to unite against the scourge of excessive regulation.

“Only together can we shake off the blight of bureaucracy, risk aversion and despondency that has settled over our country for years and decades,” he said. “It is paralyzing our economy and causing frustration among our people who simply want Germany to function properly.”

Two months later, Scholz announced he had reached a “historic” agreement with the federal states to speed up planning processes and to make life “palpably” easier for German citizens.

The agreement, since praised by the Normenkontrollrat as “having a lot of potential,” will mainly muzzle environmental agencies, thus allowing LNG terminals, wind turbines and motorways to be built through sensitive natural environments.

The jury is still out on whether it will simplify your everyday life.

At the start of this year more new laws came into force, including the government’s now notorious gas heating ban.

One that passed with less attention was a decision to abolish child passports. Under the old system you could take your child to your local Bürgeramt and they would give you a Kinderpass on the spot for €13.

Now, all children are required to have proper documents that are valid for six years. The hitch? The passport (which costs €40 and takes six weeks to arrive) is only valid as long as your child’s face remains recognisable.

“The new system makes absolutely no sense for children under six,” the lady at the Bürgeramt told me when I applied for my newborn baby’s first passport this week. “A baby’s face changes so much that you’ll have to get a new one after a year anyway.”

This article originally appeared in The German Review, a twice weekly newsletter full of analysis and opinion on German politics and society. You can sign up to read it here.

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