The representative from the German consulate in Atlanta handed me a pen. As I held it over the documents that would restore German citizenship to my American family, I glanced at the black, red and yellow German flag a few feet away. For a moment, I imagined my Grandpa Fred as a 21-year-old looking at the black, red and white Nazi flag as a young man in Munich—and deciding to run away from his homeland.

I signed with big, bold strokes, an act of defiance, yes, but also of forgiveness. This moment in January 2024 had begun seven months earlier, after I learned that Germany was offering citizenship to descendants of German men and women who had relinquished their citizenship “voluntarily”—like my grandfather did in 1936 when he became a United States citizen. Prior to this opportunity, first offered in 2021, only Jews whose citizenship had been revoked by the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and their patrilineal descendants could apply.

Many friends have wondered why I would want German citizenship for myself and my two teenage children. Some guess that it is for the benefits that we stand to gain for school, work or international travel. Others assume I am seeking an escape hatch from political changes and/or rising antisemitism in the United States. While there may be numerous benefits from having dual citizenship, for me and others like me, the greatest gains may be internal.

Restoring German citizenship, I believe, offers Holocaust survivors and their descendants an opportunity to try to recover from past trauma and encourage spiritual growth. I see it as an act of reunion that might help return us, more healed, to the world.

Over two decades after it was recorded, I listened for the first time to an interview my Grandpa Fred—my father’s father—gave to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997 in which he recounted a particularly cruel story. Just 20 years old in the spring of 1933, not long after Hitler was appointed chancellor, my grandfather had taken his watch to a Munich repair shop. As he was paying for the service, he realized the time piece was still broken. When my grandfather complained, he said that the owner “slapped me in the face and called me a dirty name.”

Grandpa Fred sought council from his father’s attorney, who simply shook his head and said, “There’s nothing you can do.”

Troubles mounted, and Grandpa Fred was forced to leave law school once Hitler rose to power. After losing ownership of what is now Löwenbraü brewery, my Great-Great-Uncle Schülein, a man who had been a friend to a former king of Bavaria, said to my grandfather, “If I had to shovel coal in Hawaii, I would go!” 

Soon after, my grandfather and his five siblings secured visas and split up, immigrating either to the United States, the United Kingdom or pre-state Israel. But the older generations did not leave. The Cahnmann, Schülein and Krämer elders died in ghettos, on trains or in camps. None who remained in Germany survived.

As a girl in Des Plaines, Ill., just outside of Chicago in the 1980s, I didn’t hear a lot from Grandpa Fred about his past. In fact, he didn’t talk to me much about anything when we visited his South Side home other than to call us to the Shabbat dinner table. Humming Hebrew prayers, he would wash his hands with a metal cup and bowl and bless wine in a silver cup—Judaica pieces that he’d brought from Germany that looked tarnished beyond normal wear, as if they’d been carried through torrential rains from a past I would never understand.

My Grandmother Harriet, the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants who was raised for many years in an American orphanage, spent most of her time in her kosher kitchen. From chicken soup to bundt cakes, we ate classic Ashkenazi foods, recited traditional prayers and rarely spoke about either grandparent’s griefs or fears.

My grandparents were the most Jewish people I knew, and they seemed proudest of my faraway cousins who lived in Israel and those who practiced Orthodox Judaism in New Jersey. When visiting Grandpa Fred, my greatest worry was that I would never be Jewish enough because I didn’t like attending my Reform synagogue’s Hebrew school and preferred to hang out with my Colombian, Persian, Irish, Greek, Italian and African-American friends rather than only other Jewish kids.

Instead of learning Hebrew, I studied the language that was available to me in public school: Spanish. Instead of studying abroad in Israel, I went to Mexico and Spain. I wanted to become fluent in America’s newest language of exile because it felt useful and relevant. It wasn’t lost on me that my immigrant grandfather arrived in the United States at age 21 with little English. And that when I was that same age, I was training to become an English-language teacher to Spanish speakers newly arrived in this country.

Could I ever be Jewish enough? That question burdened me throughout my childhood and, to some extent, even today in my interfaith marriage. It was something I was still wrestling with when Katharina Bergmann, a German doctoral student at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, emailed me in 2020 as she prepared to defend her dissertation. Bergmann’s academic focus concerned Jewish emigration narratives during the Third Reich and whether any Jew “freely chose” to leave Germany after 1932. She had been researching Munich Jewish families during the 1930s, including the Cahnmanns.

Around the same time, Munich had begun installing memorial plaques at the homes of Germans killed during the Holocaust. The installations feature names and images of the victims engraved on gold-plated stainless steel and placed on an exterior wall of their last-known residence, or on nearby sign posts with a gold-plated sleeve. Bergmann knew where the homes of my great-grandparents and great-aunt and great-uncle had stood and knew we qualified to have them commemorated. She offered to help me apply. 

I don’t think my grandfather, who passed away in 2001, could ever have imagined that, in June 2023, a dozen Cahnmann heirs would stand outside of his Aunt Clementine and Uncle Max Krämer’s home, which had been seized by the Gestapo for their own use, or that we’d hear a local police commissioner acknowledge wrongdoing:

Ninety years ago, the SS leader Heinrich Himmler took over the Munich police—the darkest day in the history of the department. In only five weeks, as chief of police, he crippled the Munich police into a willing tool of the Nazi terror regime. The Munich police is aware of its responsibility to the past.  

After the first ceremony at my great-aunt and great-uncle’s home, we went to a second dedication in my great-grandparents’ Sophie-Stehle-Strasse neighborhood. A modern structure has replaced the home that stood at this address when my grandfather was a child.

Having bicycled there, I arrived at the cobblestone block thirsty and in need of a bathroom. Several neighbors clamored to attend to my needs. One quickly escorted me to his apartment and apologized for the tiny size of his water closet and the archaic pull chain used to flush the toilet. When I came back outside, another neighbor ushered me to a banquet table laden with food. She poured me a drink and urged me to fill a plate with treats prepared by residents. 

A few neighbors had brought folding chairs for the ceremony, but there weren’t enough to go around. Surrounded by elders, I didn’t expect a chair, but a woman in her 70s insisted I take hers. I felt embarrassed and declined. Please, she said with her hands. Take it. I felt what she was really saying was, I am so very, very sorry. 

How could I not forgive? Forgiveness is a little death or like anger losing its tarnish and restoring some of a good metal’s shine. 

The plaques bearing the names and faces of my great-grandparents, Sigwart and Hedwig Cahnmann, will stand, I hope, for a very long time near the address where my grandfather spent his first two decades. The bright gold metal will surely fade, but on that June day it was new, and my relatives and I sparkled with pride next to it.

Daniel Amman, an Austrian journalist who has written a proposal for a book about my family titled The Cahnmann Saga: The Epic and Almost Lost Story of Jews in Germany, attended the ceremonies. He spoke about his research and shared his draft of a family tree of Cahnmanns who were and are German citizens. At the bottom were two of my cousins and their children whom he had added because, in 2022, they had received German renaturalization papers. 

I became determined to add my name and my children’s names to that tree. Not long after my return from Munich, I applied for citizenship for myself and my children, Oren and Liya. (Spouses who are not also Holocaust descendants cannot apply.)  

I also joined a Facebook group of “new German” Holocaust descendants that includes hundreds of the nearly 30,000 Jews who have successfully obtained German citizenship in recent years. I have learned how unusual it is that my application was processed in less than one year, which I suspect is because I used German on the application, rather than expecting my information to be translated. Presumably it helped that my cousins had previously gone through the process and that our family’s history was well documented. It is also remarkable to have my ancestors’ homes be among the first 200 recognized by the municipality in Munich, which is no doubt due to Bergmann’s efforts. 

After my family’s warm reception in Munich, and upon becoming a German citizen, I experienced a sense of peace that comes when one fully accepts an apology. Seeking and giving forgiveness is built into Jewish religious practice. Every year at the High Holidays, we are commanded to seek teshuvah, which is often translated as “repentance” but also means “return.” Judaism commands us to both apologize and forgive so that the soul can scrub itself free, repair its brokenness and return to its original, unblemished self.

I sensed that in becoming a citizen of Germany, I was seeking this kind of return, one that would connect me to my grandfather, who during my childhood refused to speak German or even mention the country to me. In a small way, I wanted to forgive my grandfather for not sharing much about his life while he was alive. In a larger way, I wanted to forgive a country.

My husband, a descendant of Scottish immigrants to North Carolina, understands what a gift this new citizenship is to our family. We store the three “Bundesrepublik Deutschland” mossy green papers alongside our three newly acquired red European passports and four dark blue United States passports in our family safe.

I expect every year or so to take out these papers and marvel at them. I know the limits of such documents, yet I also know how meaningful this process has been to get them. As with many objects, the value is not in the thing itself but in the ways in which we endow the papers, the heirlooms, the cemetery stones and the engraved posts with meaning.   

After the dedication in front of my grandfather’s childhood home in Munich, my family visited the Jewish cemetery where my great-great-grand-parents, who passed away before World War II, are buried. The Cahnmann name is still visible on their headstones, but several of the neighboring burial markers haven’t held up so well. 

I was immediately moved to recite the Kaddish prayer. After so many years without mourners, my cousins, aunts, uncles, husband and I stood by the giant headstone of my grandfather’s grandmother and posed for a picture, resolute in the respect for our German Jewish heritage and in the determination to hold onto that part of us that Nazi atrocities—and Grandpa Fred’s reticence—could not erase. 

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Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor is the Meigs professor at the University of Georgia and the author of six books, including, most recently, The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook. She lives in Athens, Ga., with her husband and two teenage children.