It was only recently that I found myself in the most absurd situation yet regarding my Deutsch-ness. I had appeared on BBC Radio 4’s “Moral Maze” on the topic of freedom of expression in order to talk about the ban of _Mein Kampf_. I had “co-authored an article for this magazine()”:http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/dessislava-kirova/8360-why-mein-kampf-must-be-banned, arguing for a continuation of the ban after the copyright expires in 2015. I appeared on the show and tried to explain the singularity of the Holocaust and the role Adolf Hitler and his book played in German collective memory. A while after the show, the father of a friend told me that he was very surprised to hear how I had adopted this dark part of German history as part of my identity.

My friend’s father was genuinely surprised and interested in understanding me and my motivation. But what he didn’t understand was that by doing so he identified me as non-German. I had nothing to do with the Holocaust and I had nothing to do with the aftermath of it, he implied. It was not my history and not my burden – so why on earth was I taking on that burden out of free will? He had unknowingly poked his finger in an old wound of my identity: What did the Holocaust and WWII, what did German guilt and post-war responsibility, mean to a German with a migration background like myself?

I felt like a hypocrite



No one in my family is German; they’re all Bulgarian. My mother moved to Berlin with me when I was eight years old. I grew up here, I went to school here, I carry a German identity card in my purse, I speak German, I think German, so I’d like to call myself German. Yet there’s a fissure.

I took on German citizenship and gave up my Bulgarian one eight years ago. I didn’t feel particularly German at first, but by now Berlin has become my home and Germany my country. Yet one thing remained difficult all these years: accepting what often is referred to as the darkest chapter in German history as my own history. I couldn’t say “we” when talking about anything that had to do with the matter – it felt wrong, it felt like a lie to incorporate myself in the German “we”, and I felt like a hypocrite. There was a small man in my head that would always frown and look skeptically at me, shaking his head whenever I said “we”. And he was right, so I stopped. Yet a question remained: How could I claim to be 100% German if I was not able to be part of that darkest German “we”?

The problem was one of family ties. Whenever I talked about anything connected to WWII or the Holocaust, there would appear before my inner eye a Hollywood-style, old-fashioned, yellow-brown map of Europe and the camera focus would travel southeast from Germany to Bulgaria. The German history is not my history today because it hadn’t been my family’s present in 1939. The thought that crystallized in my head was that _my_ grandfather had not been in Germany when WWII happened; my family had not been part of the state that committed this horror.

Normally there is an overlap between the dominant historiography of a nation and its citizens’ family histories. When it comes to history, “Blut und Boden” (blood and soil) apparently _does_ matter after all. Although most of my German friends hadn’t known their grandparents or known what their roles had been in WWII, they were connected to this part of the German identity through family ties. This way, it didn’t feel like hypocrisy for them to say “We have a responsibility to keep up the remembrance and to never forget so it does not happen again.” I firmly believed and deeply felt that sentence too. But whenever I said it out loud, the little man in my head and the likeness of my friend’s father would frown and look at me wondering.

Rescue from a self without history



After Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, something started to change. Both parts of my identity were now part of one larger unity: the European Union. One of them did maybe enjoy a kind of second-class membership, but it did have membership. Europe was a common unifier, not only for the various states on the continent but also for the two parts of my own self. This new perspective that went beyond the borders of single nation states also helped me find a better take on the grandfather question. WWII and the Holocaust were European tragedies. After the end of WWII and the rise of Communism, the continent had been severed in two for over four decades. Nations on both sides of the Iron Curtain shared varieties of one phenomenon that had plagued Europe throughout the 20th century: totalitarianism. For the East, the nightmare would change appearance but go on for another forty years. The European Union was the living proof that we had overcome that darkest of ages and were capable of moving forward and learning from our mistakes.

So, what am I now? I am a European, proud of the long way we’ve come, mindful of the deep abyss of totalitarianism we’ve left behind. I am aware of my responsibility as a German citizen and I commit myself to it both as a German and as a European. I remember the arguments between my mother and grandfather back in Bulgaria: my mother, supporting the dissident and newly founded Union of Democratic Forces in the early 1990s; my grandfather, an old Communist skeptical of the new developments. I can accommodate all of these personal and national histories under the European umbrella. It may sound a bit exaggerated to you. But for me it’s a rescue from a self without history.

My grandfather, by the way, was only a teenager in 1945. His father, my great-grandfather, died when my grandfather was only a boy. I know nothing about the political affiliations of either of them.