By Lara Bingger

Living in Romania for more than two months already, I’ve come to experience a lot of new situations and connected to that as well emotions, some of which I expected, some I didn’t. But one thing really came as a surprise to me: The wish of having a different nationality. I had to think a lot about this, since it’s a rather odd circumstance.
To clear any misunderstandings right away, I don’t actually want to have another nationality, I am entirely aware of how lucky I am to having been born in a country with such a high standard of living, it’s more of an irrational wish, which is the consequence of being ashamed in certain situations.
As a German, I am used to feeling shame for my country, considering its very nefarious past, but in this case the feeling doesn’t derive from that. On the contrary, it doesn’t come from the crimes Germany has committed, but from the advantages it has to be German.
I first noticed that, when I felt uncomfortable after telling someone in Romania where I’m from and they somehow acknowledged that, as if it was an achievement. After that I paid more attention to how people would react to me being German and also what their general sentiment about the country is. Maybe I misinterpreted everything and what I’m writing here is completely ridiculous, but I often got the feeling that it was kind of impressing the people and at the same time I felt the need to excuse myself.
I understand why one might be impressed by Germany, or more specifically by its economy. I also know that German brands and especially cars are internationally seen as high-quality products, but it’s nothing I can I relate to at all. As I mentioned, it even made me feel the exact opposite of proud to belong to that nation, because of the way the average German citizen handles that wealth (at least from my experience).
First of all, many people aren’t really aware of how privileged they are, and I don’t blame them for that, this refers more to a problem about the educational system and what topics the media considers to be important. Even though they might lack aware- and gratefulness, what many persons don’t lack is a good amount of arrogancy. This can be seen in many different situations, for example when I had accepted this project in Romania and started to tell people about what I would do for the following seven months. Of course, the responses varied a lot, depending on to whom I talked, but generally spoken the first reaction was rather negative than positive. “Why Romania? Weren’t there any projects in nicer countries?” was certainly the most common response. (Interestingly, nobody who actually has been in Romania before, would reply like that.) The majority of the people I talked to either knew nothing about Romania, to which I will come back later, or would only talk jokingly about the same stereotypes over and over again. They basically also knew nothing aside from the fact that country is poor compared to Germany and also not very close, which would make it less important and therefore nothing worth to dwell upon longer. So, there’s ignorance in the first case and added to that arrogancy and hubris in the second one.
On the other hand, Romanians seem to know quite a lot about Germany and people here appear to be more conscious of their EU citizenship. For example, many children from the schools we went to knew the colours of the German and other flags, whereas in Germany only a very little amount of people my age and younger would know what the Romanian flag looks like.
And this is where I’m just as bad as everyone else in Germany, because before I considered to do volunteer work in Romania, I knew absolutely nothing about this country. Even though I was interested in the European Union, I somehow never informed myself about the member states and it also doesn’t really come up in the daily news or as a topic of conversation.
Since being ashamed of something you aren’t responsible for is just as pointless as being proud of it, and now that I’ve gotten the awareness of what situation I’m in, I might as well stop talking about this literal first world problem and start using this energy to try to make other people at home overthink their current point of view.