Claire Duncan
My Journey towards Citizenship
My mother was born Frieda Fanger to parents David and Dora (Duschka) on 8th August 1918 in Berlin. Her family were non religious Jews who ran a tailoring business in Friedrichstraße and lived comfortably. She left Berlin in 1938 at the age of nineteen because as a Jewess there were no opportunities to study or work (she would have liked to train as a kindergarten teacher).
On arrival in England she worked as a maid in a household in Leeds. After this Friedel met and married my father (who was a Quaker and conscientious objector) on a peace project where he worked on the land and she helped in the house. Her parents also fled to England from Berlin in April 1939, only allowed to enter the UK because of finding a guarantor in South Africa who kept them so that they would not be a financial drain on the British government. They all became British citizens in time.
My father, after the war ended, worked all his life for peace on an international level with the Quakers (Society of Friends). As a family we all moved to Vienna in 1952 where both my parents used their language skills hosting peace discussions at the Quakerhaus there for Russian, American, German and English diplomats. We returned home in 1956 after the city had been reunited. This period in my life engendered a sense of belonging to a wider society, adding to the feeling of European identity which I had inherited from my mother.
Friedel never did manage to become a teacher as she had dreamt and always carried a feeling of being inadequately educated and not good enough in Britain‘s more class conscious society. Although I have returned to Austria and Germany over the years, she returned only once. She took me at age twelve to Dresden to meet relatives where I was shocked to hear their experiences of surviving life in Theresienstadt and seeing their arms tattooed with numbers. Also, to hear of the loss of all other family members at Auschwitz. My mother had never talked to me about this.
I was happy to be born as a British girl but also as a European. My second language was German and I spent several years living in Vienna as a primary school pupil. Later I was also happy to be a European citizen; able to travel or stay in 28 countries of the EU, host German students in the UK and enjoy the freedom of movement within the Schengen area.
But, the sky darkened with the attitude of Margaret Thatcher’s government towards the EEC and the emergence of the Brexit movement demanding Britain leave the EU. This came with a series of tropes about “foreigners” harming our society. As I found out more about the Shoah I realised that this narrow view of humanity and the targetting of people without financial or political power,has unpleasant echoes of my mother’s story and that of Nazi Germany. Germany recognised the harm which the Nazis did to my mother and she was awarded some restitution for her loss of education; a small German pension until the day she died. She was lucky to get out in time; I would not have been born.
I was happy and proud to be awarded German citizenship because, for all its problems, Germany has recognised its past actions. The empires of Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the USA and others have never come to fully recognise that what they did to black, brown and yellow people was from the same awful playbook the Nazis used.
While it is difficult to forget what the Nazis did to my family, it’s vital to remember that the vast majority of modern Germans were not even born before 1945. Why should they carry the burden of guilt?
I wanted Friedel’s years as a German citizen to be honoured.My initial application was turned down. The Couchmans’ tireless fight for a change in the German law meant that my application was accepted two years later. I enjoyed wonderful assistance from the embassy staff in London. It has since been my pleasure to be welcomed by German parliamentarians at the Reichstag. I now feel that I and my family are now rightful and accepted citizens of Germany. I also appreciate not losing the citizenship of the country which took in my mother, enabling her and her parents to survive.