Grace is the family name handed down on my husband’s paternal English side of the family. His grandfather, a decorated officer of the British Empire, was captured by the Germans in 1940 — as his grandmother swiftly pointed out to me the first time we met.

“Do you know Laufen?” she asked. “My husband was a prisoner of war there.”

Image Raymond and Christine Grace, my husband’s paternal grandparents, in 1936, shortly before they married.





It was one of the rare moments in my life when I was acutely aware of being German.

But things have changed. On June 24, I woke up to the news that Britain, my current home, is leaving the European Union. Ever since, my German identity has stopped being an afterthought.

I belong to that lucky generation of Western Europeans who did not experience war and were barely touched by the Cold War. I was a child when the Berlin Wall fell, and I came of age in the 1990s, that brief vacation from history before Sept. 11. My generation studied, dated, lived and worked across borders, taking for granted the peace our grandparents had fought for and our parents had harnessed and amplified.

My mother marched for abortion rights in the 1970s, and my father was a leader in the 1968 student movement in Berlin that forced open the taboos about Germany’s Nazi past. War is not an abstract concept to him. To this day, the firecrackers on New Year’s Eve remind him of the bombs falling on Hamburg when he was 5 years old. When he reads about Aleppo, his eyes well up.

The big debates of my youth centered on fine-tuning the market economy. Nationalism, nativism, fundamentalism and identity — these were concepts that belonged in the 20th century. Or so I thought. Will they now define my children’s future? What will their names and their passports mean to them when they grow up?

When we named our children we opted for my husband’s surname, Grace. It had a nice ring to it, we thought. One European name was enough, and so, surely, was one European passport. All three children are British citizens.