Post by Admin on Apr 23, 2024 12:00:59 GMT
Return of the descendants
I migrated to my ancestral homeland in a search for identity. It proved to be a humbling experience in (un)belonging
aeon.co/essays/i-migrated-to-my-ancestral-homeland-in-a-search-for-identity
Aphysician motions for me to enter the institutional labyrinth of Impfzentrum booths. Once inside, my hands press flat and sticky against my US passport, German residency title and COVID-19 vaccine card. The doctor’s cobalt eyes squint beneath her mask, forming deep frown lines as she peers in suspended bewilderment, muttering at my documents. I ask her to clarify.
‘You’re a Buchleitner and not a native German speaker?!’ Her astonishment and disgust flood me with shame.
What does it mean to return to a land you are supposed to belong to as a descendant but in which you are functionally a foreigner?
Misspelled on my birth certificate with a visible strikethrough, my German family name always proved difficult for Americans, making me an easy target for school-playground bullying and assumptions about my nationality that left me feeling alien. Absent any accompanying grandparents’ memories, recipes, customs or folklore, it remained a phantom identifier with a disembodied lineage.
By divine miracle or sheer coincidence, two months after my first trip to Germany in 2009, where I had a premonition while perched on Heidelberg’s arch bridge that I would return, a distant relative contacted my father with news that felt almost like a premonition: she had painstakingly documented the Buchleitner genealogy from 1520 onward, chronicling the emigration of four sets of ancestors from Saarbrücken to Pennsylvania in the mid-1800s, offering answers to our missing lineage. Craving religious and political freedom, avoiding compulsory military service, and overcoming economic hardship were reasons enough to make a hellish months-long journey to a departure port and then dodge outbreaks of cholera, typhus and smallpox in steerage-class ship accommodations.
When I was leaving Germany, it had seemed as if my ancestors were beckoning me to return. But that wouldn’t happen for another decade, after I became a finalist for the Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship and fell in love with a German man I’d met in the Temple of the Reclining Buddha in Bangkok. In 2019, I stuffed my keepsakes into three zip-tied suitcases and, though I had no grasp of the German language at all, decided I was migrating to Munich indefinitely.
With a perception of Germany as a methodical, organised utopia to emulate, I assumed my integration would come naturally due to my lineage and new relationship, sooner rather than later granting me an identity to match my name. Within months, however, the assimilation challenges boiled me down to a flicker. Everyday moments of pretending I understood a store clerk’s questions while flanked by impatient customers proved daunting. When strangers barked orders at crosswalks, I awkwardly smiled and nodded. A deep purgatory of straddling an ancestral place that labelled me Ausländerin (foreigner) amassed. ‘Buchleitner’ became something to justify everywhere names matter: from my Frauenärtzin’s (gynecologist’s) office to the Bürgerbüro (citizen’s office) to airport passport control, producing confusion. Everyone wanted to know how an American, sans German husband, sans emigrated German parents, Oma or Opa, could possess such a name.
I migrated to my ancestral homeland in a search for identity. It proved to be a humbling experience in (un)belonging
aeon.co/essays/i-migrated-to-my-ancestral-homeland-in-a-search-for-identity
Aphysician motions for me to enter the institutional labyrinth of Impfzentrum booths. Once inside, my hands press flat and sticky against my US passport, German residency title and COVID-19 vaccine card. The doctor’s cobalt eyes squint beneath her mask, forming deep frown lines as she peers in suspended bewilderment, muttering at my documents. I ask her to clarify.
‘You’re a Buchleitner and not a native German speaker?!’ Her astonishment and disgust flood me with shame.
What does it mean to return to a land you are supposed to belong to as a descendant but in which you are functionally a foreigner?
Misspelled on my birth certificate with a visible strikethrough, my German family name always proved difficult for Americans, making me an easy target for school-playground bullying and assumptions about my nationality that left me feeling alien. Absent any accompanying grandparents’ memories, recipes, customs or folklore, it remained a phantom identifier with a disembodied lineage.
By divine miracle or sheer coincidence, two months after my first trip to Germany in 2009, where I had a premonition while perched on Heidelberg’s arch bridge that I would return, a distant relative contacted my father with news that felt almost like a premonition: she had painstakingly documented the Buchleitner genealogy from 1520 onward, chronicling the emigration of four sets of ancestors from Saarbrücken to Pennsylvania in the mid-1800s, offering answers to our missing lineage. Craving religious and political freedom, avoiding compulsory military service, and overcoming economic hardship were reasons enough to make a hellish months-long journey to a departure port and then dodge outbreaks of cholera, typhus and smallpox in steerage-class ship accommodations.
When I was leaving Germany, it had seemed as if my ancestors were beckoning me to return. But that wouldn’t happen for another decade, after I became a finalist for the Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship and fell in love with a German man I’d met in the Temple of the Reclining Buddha in Bangkok. In 2019, I stuffed my keepsakes into three zip-tied suitcases and, though I had no grasp of the German language at all, decided I was migrating to Munich indefinitely.
With a perception of Germany as a methodical, organised utopia to emulate, I assumed my integration would come naturally due to my lineage and new relationship, sooner rather than later granting me an identity to match my name. Within months, however, the assimilation challenges boiled me down to a flicker. Everyday moments of pretending I understood a store clerk’s questions while flanked by impatient customers proved daunting. When strangers barked orders at crosswalks, I awkwardly smiled and nodded. A deep purgatory of straddling an ancestral place that labelled me Ausländerin (foreigner) amassed. ‘Buchleitner’ became something to justify everywhere names matter: from my Frauenärtzin’s (gynecologist’s) office to the Bürgerbüro (citizen’s office) to airport passport control, producing confusion. Everyone wanted to know how an American, sans German husband, sans emigrated German parents, Oma or Opa, could possess such a name.