Exhibition “Citizenships” in the German Historical Museum – Culture

It’s a human right. the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” of 1948 states in its 15th article: “Everyone has the right to a nationality.” This postulate reacted to the massive experience of statelessness in the first half of the 20th century, the age of ethnic cleansing, mass expulsions, politically motivated expatriation and flight from persecution. Statelessness, which the refugee regime of the League of Nations could only makeshift, meant a state of lawlessness in which not even elementary human rights could be enforced.

Hannah Arendt has famously outlined this conditional relationship: “Statelessness on a mass scale has in fact confronted the world with the inevitable and highly confusing question of whether there is anything like inalienable human rights at all, i.e. rights that are independent of any particular political status and arise solely from the mere fact of being human.” The answer was: no, not in the political realm. The fundamental “right to have rights” can only be enforced in a state association.

What was new was that citizens should defend their country with weapons in an emergency

Bertolt Brecht formulated the problem sarcastically in his “Refugee Talks” of 1940/41: “The passport is the noblest part of a person. It doesn’t come about in such a simple way as a person.” One of the most moving pieces of the show, a very long, folded “Nansen passport” covered with stamps and visas, named after the refugee commissioner of the League of Nations, makes the drama of such escape fates vivid.

The German Historical Museum in Berlin opens its exhibition on citizenship in the three neighboring countries of France, Germany and Poland with Brecht’s sentences. The choice of the three examples has a double meaning: first, a comparison is made, which is always good for historical knowledge if what is being compared is on common ground; Second, conditional relationships are shown, because the functions of citizenship always point inwards and outwards at the same time – they have a lot to do with state borders, neighbor relations and migration movements.

The historical starting point is the era of the French Revolution, which for the first time created the figure of the citizen in constitutional texts and legal codifications beyond class differences. The individual and the state now confronted each other directly. It was not only rights – such as the famous Human and Civil Rights of 1789 – formulated, but at the same time enables a new kind of access by the state to its citizens, most dramatically in the case of conscription for men. Citizens should defend their country with arms in an emergency. From then on, equality and registration belonged together.

So it’s about a world-historical upheaval on many levels. The exhibition could have outlined its drama a little more if it had illustrated the old European forms of socialization in estates and urban citizenship. The often vaunted Polish constitution of 1791 shows an attractive intermediate state of corporate floor plan designed according to the model of Montesquieu’s separation of powers and the new legal status of free and equal citizens. But Poland disappeared from the political map for 120 years as early as 1795.

This suggests another attraction of the comparison: the different histories of the three nations. In Germany, the legal institution of citizenship inevitably first developed at the level of the many individual states. A uniform Reich citizenship was only codified in two steps in 1913 and 1934. Until then, one could also become a citizen of Bavaria or Lübeck, with the curious consequence that one could make several attempts to become a “German” until 1913: those who failed in Baden could try it in Coburg-Gotha.

The exhibition’s assertion that the concept of citizenship was first used in a German-language legal text was in the Bavarian Constitution of 1808 is at best only half correct. Because in those that have been circulating in the Napoleonic Confederation of the Rhine since 1807 and will soon become law there German translations of the French Code Civil (Code Napoléon) the term appears right at the beginning in the law of persons – it stands for the French “Citoyen”. And the Bavarian minister Montgelas adopted it from the Napoleonic Code. In the beginning there was also Napoleon.

Human rights began as men’s rights

The acquisition of citizenship is in tension between the principle of descent and the principle of territory. Contrary to the prejudice that France is the home of the territorial principle, the Civil Code first privileged descent: Anyone who had French parents became French, no matter where they lived. Only demographic competition, not least for military resources, made the residence principle stronger in France. Germany always privileged the principle of descent, partly because of the large number of Germans living abroad.

It was also about self-definitions and identities, and therefore also about exclusion. This is where the exhibition has its vivid, entertaining, often depressing focus. She cares for the excluded and disadvantaged of citizenship: women, Jews and colonized populations. Human rights began as men’s rights, affecting voting and military service. The exhibition primarily uses French and German examples to illustrate the struggle for women’s suffrage since the late 19th century; delightful is a fan with the “desire to choose” which a French newspaper distributed to the ladies.

The Jews, who initially did not have equal rights, tried to gain recognition as fellow citizens by voluntarily taking part in the Patriotic wars. A moving painting by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, showing the homecoming of a volunteer in 1813, speaks of such hopes for patriotic-legal participation.

Open detailed view

Inevitably, however, citizenship also became an instrument of disenfranchisement and ethnic homogenization. Every change of territory – for example in Alsace-Lorraine or in West Prussia – raised questions about citizenship and the corresponding “options” for staying or emigrating. In occupied Poland, the Germans acted during the Second World War with graded lists of ethnic Germans, which could also be used for the expulsions after 1945. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which downgraded Jews to non-Reichsbürger status, are well remembered. The last expulsion of Jews from Poland since 1969 is hardly likely to be known.

The two dark sides of citizenship were summarized by Holocaust survivor Ruth Klüger: “The GDR word ‘republic flight’ comes to mind: Man is serf to the state. The opposite means to be stateless. That means, although you were born, you are actually allowed to nowhere to live. Those are common choices of my generation.” To this day, members of former colonies have had absurd experiences of semi-existence or non-existence. A German foreign legionnaire could have children with an Asian woman who became French while both parents remained foreigners.

The positive side is the promise of rights and participation felt most vividly by those seeking naturalization. The DHM lets its visitors experience these procedures on screens – the visits to the authorities, the tests and interviews, in Poland often also an application letter directly to the President. France is celebratory, in Berlin there was already the stuffed polar bear Knut. Behind the bureaucratic processes are questions for everyone: What does it mean to be French, Pole or German today? Dual citizenship also raises identity issues. With them, however, something of the diversity of old Europe is returning.

The exhibition “Citizenships – France, Poland, Germany since 1789” can be seen in the German Historical Museum until January 15, 2023. More information at www.dhm.de.