Yeah, you read that right.
More specifically, I’m a dual citizen, so I’m American and German.
What a journey it has been. I wrote my first entry on this blog in September of 2010 — more than 15 years ago. Back then, I was young and I had a dream, and I had very little idea of how to realize it. But I did what I’ve always done when I’ve wanted something, which was doing whatever I could to get there, which required a lot of hard work and a lot of rolling with the punches. And there were a lot of those, that’s for sure.
I’ve had permanent residency since 2016 ish, and for awhile, that was the closest I could get to being German, thanks to laws in place that required non-EU passport holders to give up their other citizenship to gain German citizenship. There were, of course, various loopholes, but I didn’t qualify for any of them, so I sort of gave up on that dream. But then a new government briefly came to power and changed that law, which came into effect summer 2024.
I had most of the documents I already needed to apply, with the exception of a few (a letter from the Finanzamt being one, but that was easy and inexpensive to obtain). I submitted my application on July 12, and then I waited.
And waited. And waited. The frustration of this process is you submit your application and then you receive an email that it was received, but there’s no account or portal or email contact where you can follow up on the status of it. For some people, they hear back in weeks. For others, years.
Once I hit the five-month mark or so and started seeing people who applied after me receive their invitations, I decided to be the annoying American and send constant emails with updated documents they didn’t ask for, like more invoices, more tax returns, etc. etc.
At the end of January, I received my first email asking for a few more specific documents. I provided them that day. Then I got an email saying my application was complete and processed, and the only thing I had to wait on was the security check — again, something that could take days, or weeks, or months, depending upon whose desk it landed on.
Luckily for me, it took days, and then I got the email I’d been waiting for, inviting me to become German.
So on February 12, exactly seven months after applying, I became a German. My son and husband came with me, and afterward we went out for pizza and boba to celebrate. I had an appointment the next day to get my ID and passport, the latter of which I expedited so that I could vote for the very first time later that month.
Earlier in the year, my husband had asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I’d half-jokingly replied, “To be German.” Well friends, it happened.
Now that I’ve beat the boss level of German, you’d think I feel like a real German. And I do and I don’t. This place is “home” to me, but California is also home, and even though this is where I want to continue living, because it’s where my life is, I’m not sure that I’ll ever feel fully German. Ask me in another 15 years, I guess.
On a closing note, a friend of mine (also someone who became a citizen of a different country than the one he was born in) told me that if I ever feel imposter syndrome or like I’m not a real German, to remind myself that I’m more German than people who were born with the citizenship, because I had to earn it.