Alice got German
citizenship. As did Tweedledum and Tweedledee – there was a bulk
discount. They didn’t really need it, it’s not like they only had
a passport from a country soon to be known as formerly a member of
the European Union. It involved paperwork. Lots of paperwork. It
involved having to prove ownership of the ‘property’ in which
Alice & family have made their home. Amazingly, not complicated.
A visit to an office, ten euros paid through a window, all
disquietingly easy. It involved submitting school reports for
Tweedledum and Tweedledee, born in Germany 7 years ago, to prove they
can speak German. It involved passports, degree certificates, tax
returns, employment contracts, health insurance. Birth certificates,
marriage certificate, a promise never to mow the lawn on a Sunday,
and probably Lidl receipts from the last 11 years.
All easy.
All too easy. This is
Germany, after all. A country where you need a license to play golf.
So when the eagerly-awaited invitation to the relevant office
arrived, it was with little surprise but a slight sinking feeling
that Alice read that it was necessary not only for Tweedledee and
Tweedledum to be in possession of a passport from their country of
nationality, but that it also had to be correctly entered in the
registry in their district of residence. Said registration was,
according to the letter, currently “unclear.” Alice required a
certificate stating that this lack of clarity had been clarified,
otherwise German citizenship could not be awarded.
Alice rang the number
provided on the letter. “Well, of course we can't help you,”
blustered the voice on the other end. “That's a matter for the
Citizens' Registration Office where the children in question are
registered. We're the Registrar's Office. Which is an entirely
different thing!”
Fair enough, thought
Alice. I'll ring the Citizens' Registration Office. So she did. And
the number was engaged. And engaged again. And again. Determined not
to be discouraged, Alice looked at booking an appointment online.
Nothing until about September, with the date set for the award of
citizenship in May. Alice is nothing if not tenacious. Right, she
thought, I'll book a slot at Spandau (“Is that the same Spandau as
in Ballet?” she thought, for the umpteenth time, and for the
umpteenth time promptly forgot to bother checking*). It's a
centralized computer system, they're sure to be able to sort it out.
But then the doubts set
in. Was it a centralized system? Alice would have been more than ready to
believe that it was, in fact, not. That each district operated its own
strange, isolated digital repository to which the other districts
had no access. But when else to sort it out? Alice has, after all, a
job.
What to do?
Then, fortuitously, Alice
slipped a disc and needed a very glamorous varicose vein removal,
both in the same week. Three weeks written off work, doctor's orders
to walk or lie down but nothing in between. So a walk to the
Citizen's Registration Office would be a lovely way to fill an empty
Thursday afternoon until it was time to pick Tweedledum and
Tweedledee up from school.
Off she toddles.
The queue stretches
out the door. Alice takes a deep breath, sticks her elbows out, makes
sure her recently de-veined leg is turned very much away from the
restless masses, and walks past them to the reception desk. Two
people in front of her. She waits. And, relatively quickly, her turn
comes. She approaches the hostile civil servant, brandishing the
letter, and starts, politely (always a mistake. No matter how long
she is here, she cannot shake the conviction that being pleasant to
the person to whom one speaks is more likely to elicit a pleasant
response. Wrong! It's clearly a sign of a. weakness and b.
foreignness) to explain the situation. And immediately, the civil
servant is at level three hostility, which is admittedly a high level
for a first interaction. “They're always doing this!” half-shouts
the lady behind the desk. “This is clearly a matter for the
Registrar's Office!”
But Alice is not to be
swayed. “I called them and was told in no uncertain terms I had to
come here.”
A different tack from
behind the desk. “No, wait, look, you'll clearly receive the
certificate on receipt of your German citizenship!”
Alice reads the
relevant sentence, in German, to the German lady behind the counter.
Then she reads it again, applying vocal italics, underlining and
bold to the words that quite clearly (if you've a degree in German
law, possibly accompanied by one in German linguistics) explain why
she needs that certificate right now.
The lady stabs at her
keyboard a few times then heaves a deep sigh. “I can't help you.”
Alice draws breath to protest, but before she can utter a word, the
lady continues, “But I've made you an appointment with a colleague
who might be able to sort it out. Come back at 4.15.”
Why she couldn't start
with that bit, Alice doesn't know. But she goes away, walks until she
has blisters, organizes an alternative pick-up solution for
Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and returns at 4:10.
She is called through
pleasantly quickly. Alice limps into the room, enjoying the fact that
the pain from her blisters is detracting both from her dodgy back and
her bruised post-operative leg.
She launches into her
explanation to the civil servant with the purple hair. The civil
servant looks at her with a mixture of blank incomprehension, anger
and disgust that it is quite simply impossible to replicate outside
of Berlin. Her response is “Häääää?!” an expression the
rudeness of which cannot be conveyed on paper.
She looks down at the bit
of paper in her hand. Alice decides to keep quiet. She looks at her
computer. Alice stays quiet.
“Their nationality is
registered exactly as it should be in our system!” explains
purple-hair lady. “I have no idea what they want from you. I don't
understand this at all!”
She pauses for a moment.
“Do you know what,
though? We don't need to understand it, we just need to do it.”
And with that she prints
out an official-looking certificate, bangs her stamp on it in the
relevant places and hands it over to Alice.
Alice limps home,
wondering how people manage if they don't
have nothing better to do than fight
their way through the system.
But at least she has
learned something. She doesn't need to understand it, she just needs
to do it.
* Obviously Alice wasn't
going to not check, having forced accountability on herself in such a
way. And the answer is, sort of but only very indirectly. Alice kind
of wishes she hadn't checked.
