COMMON HISTORICAL ROOTS
577
While in Berlin, I was often advised to request from the German
authorities that they recognize my German ethnicity, on the strength of
my birth in Bukovina and my German linguistic roots. Many of my
compatriots had done so and were already comfortably established in
their new citizenship. I could have requested German citizenship, like
many of my former neighbors and colleagues from Suceava, capital of the
region called Buchenland. (Buchenland means "country of beech trees ,"
although in my case, "Buchland," "country of books," would also have
been a fitting name for it. It is not by chance that the greatest German
poet of the last half century is the Bukovinean-born Paul Celan.) But it
so happened that at that time I heard a story that made me reconsider
requesting Gem1an citizenship.
A well-known German writer from Romania, who had just emi–
grated legally to West Germany, found herself confronting at the
immigration office a clerk who was not very sympathetic towards his co–
nationals from abroad. "I have heard your declarations on television ,
ma'am," the clerk said to her as he was checking her immigrant file.
"You have left Romania because of its dictatorship. You have made vio–
lent accusations in the German press against the Romanian dictatorship .
It is true?" "Yes, it is true ," the writer agreed. "Then, it is obvious that
you emigrated to Germany for political, not national reasons," declared
the clerk. "In that case," he added in a decisive tone of voice, "you must
go to the office next door and apply there for political asylum." It was
an amazing bureaucratic trick, whose absurd and infallible logic was hard
to challenge and even harder to accept. The German writer, known as
such both in Romania and Germany, where her books had been pub–
lished, was, of course, also an open adversary of the regime of political
tyranny in Romania. She had finally been forced to leave her country
and ask for hospitality in her new fatherland. Dumbfounded, the writer
wandered for several days around Berlin , telling her adventure to friends .
Finally, she returned to the same clerk at the immigration office. "} shall
not request political asylum, but German citizenship," she announced,
full of spite. "I am German, and I request that this fact be recognized. I
have proof that cannot be doubted. I am German, my father was a
member of the SS." The reluctant clerk was silent at first, then started to
stammer. "In this case, of course, of course."
I could not bring the German authorities a similar proof. Yet this
story troubled me and all of a sudden gave the question of identity a new
dimension.
The homeland unveils its ambiguous meanings especially during the
violence of rupture, which renders more urgent and more intense the
need for self-questioning. The world of estrangement means also alien–
ation from self, not only from others: exile in the humblest quotidian
