As a follow-up to my comment # 37 on this thread (see http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/20590833/#Comment_20590833), I received the following good news yesterday from the German Consulate in New York City:
My son and I submitted our applications for restored German citizenship (and EU citizenship) together, 17 months ago, and he received the same news yesterday as well.
I’m very pleased, especially for my son, since he will now have the ability to travel, study, work, and/or live anywhere he wants to in the EU, without restriction. Even for me, though, it’s good to know that if things ever become completely impossible for me here, I have a place to go. And to know that even if I never find another job, I won’t ever have to worry that I’ll be in the position of being unable to afford medical care. So the meaning of this for me may be primarily symbolic, as a small measure of restitution for what the Nazis took from, and did to, my mother and her family – depriving them of far more than citizenship – but it isn’t entirely so.
For my son, on the other hand, I think it represents the opening of an entirely new world of opportunity for him. After all, being an art historian is a great deal more portable internationally than being a lawyer! Especially for someone with his language skills, which clearly must have skipped a generation. (My mother was fluent in three languages, proficient in another, and still had a good reading knowledge of Latin when I was a child. Me, not so much – I can still sort of read French, even though I haven’t studied it in 45 years, but that’s about it!)
I’m sure I’ll have mixed feelings at the actual naturalization ceremony, though. It would be impossible not to. It’s not as if I’ll be relinquishing my U.S. citizenship, of course, but realizing that I’m also a German citizen will be an unavoidably strange experience – even though my mother and her ancestors lived in German-speaking lands for at least 1,000 years until the Nazi era.