Waiting for my Number

About a week ago, I stood in a crowd of over a hundred people outside the Kreisverwaltungsreferat, or KVR, the German registry of foreigners and nationals. It was almost 7:30am and the doors were about to open for the day. I looked around me—I saw curly hair and straight, tall figures and small, big puffy jackets and the sleeveless arms of those impervious to the early fall chill. At the top of the stairs before me, I heard the doors open and felt the inexorable lean of the mass into the building. My feet began to inch forward, several small steps before each rise of the stair, as shoulders crowded in about my ears. The doorway acted like a dam, and we the torrent of water breaking through it.

Once inside, the knowledgeable broke away from the inexperienced, racing to their respective wings for housing registration, background checks, and work permits. I was there for the last of the three, in search of a right to live and work in this country that is not my own. As I waited in line for a number, then waited for my  number T16 to be called, my memory called out to me. In March of 2016, I had been in a similar situation in Rome, needing to declare my presence to the Italian government and receive my permesso di soggiorno. As a researcher affiliated with an institution, the declaration felt like a formality rather than a necessity. I did not understand the value of the permission I sought. That morning over a year ago, I traveled to the Italian immigration office with a laptop full of articles to read and a cavalier attitude. But my sense of security lasted only until I arrived at the lonely building on the outskirts of Rome.

As I sat in the German waiting room last week, my mind recalled the chaos outside the high, chain-link fence of its Italian counterpart. I remembered the sickening sensation of being escorted past the exhausted and the desperate. Crowds of migrants and refugees clustered along the fence line, pleading with their voices, their gestures, their eyes. The urge to give up my scheduled appointment, not having fully realized its import until that moment, was nearly uncontrollable. But a part of me held back. I couldn’t give up my place: it would not be given to one of the undocumented migrants crowding before me. And perhaps in that moment I glimpsed the depth of my privilege and I coveted it, suddenly fearful of my own tenuous status.

As an American and an academic, I am privileged to view a permesso or a blaue carte as a formality. My education allows me, as many of us, to be a citizen of the world. Germany is a very different place from Italy: German nationals are as plagued with visits to the KVR as immigrants and temporary residents. The experience is more communal, subsuming the assumption of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ But that hint of desperation still lingered, hanging in the silent waiting room of the KVR. The search for belonging—and the proof of that belonging—consumes us all as we wait for our number. T13… T14… T15…

 

Erin Giffin (’08) is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the field of art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. After completing her degree at Smith College in Art History and Italian Studies, she went on to a master’s and PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle, WA.

 

 

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