A Passport
How Life is Restricted

• Text zum Nachlesen

  The Passport about Itself

  I am a passport, a Spanish passport indeed, but with a considerable amount of German words, written and stamped, mostly in blue and black, often in admonishing red. And in all sorts of handwriting – I still feel the poking and tickling of the pens, and more vividly, the pressing, yes often the striking, of the stamps. Yet it has been a long time since I was in use...

  One can clearly deduce from me, for that is what I am made for: Issued in December 1962, invalidated in December 1966, after just four years. And yet, there was so much to clarify, approve, note, and endorse. Until I was eventually replaced by a new passport.

  So, I actually have no function anymore, yet Alfonso still keeps me – he is the man about whom I provided information back then. Although I didn‘t really provide information about him, but solely about where, when, and how he was allowed to live and work.

  Anyway, I am glad for his current passport, which has a quieter life than I did back then – and I am glad for Alfonso himself. After all, he was able to settle here, according to official records as the second of several thousand foreigners in Siegen at that time.

  Zusatzinfos

  In 1963, trained carpenter Alfonso López García took up a job in Germany for the first time as a so-called „guest worker“, not through the traditional channels of recruitment commissions, but via the job offer from his brother-in-law, in a workshop in the Frankfurt area. In the early 1970s, during a visit to friends in Geisweid, he became aware of a vacant position as a social worker for the Spanish community at the Caritas Association. His application was successful. When he wanted to apply for an indefinite residence permit (now the settlement permit) – after over a decade in Germany – he was told that among the several thousand foreigners in Siegen, only one person had received it so far. He was likely the second.

  Five Guild Seal Stamps to the Passport

  We are five stamps, perhaps a bit like those that once bore down on you. However, we are old guild seal stamps: we belonged to five different guilds that existed in Siegen in the 18th century: the hat makers, the tanners, the ropemakers, the weavers, and the masons.

  The mobility of people was well regulated even back then, mobility through the world, but also in terms of work. If someone wanted to make hats or ropes or fabrics or leather, or work as a mason, they had to adhere to the rules of their respective guild.

  What do you think, how much paper have we touched or, as you rightly say, struck over time? We still feel it as if it were yesterday, that strictness and clarity. We have always represented that with great dedication.

  But now, as we look at you, something becomes clear to us that we have not seen all this time – perhaps we could not see it because we always had new documents in front of us, and we never really got to engage with any one of them. But if we engage with you, stamped as you are, we realize that you are not just a collection of matters, but that you concern a person who has a name and a life. And barriers were set for this person, just like for all the craftsmen back in our time. We need to think about that...

  Have you experienced this too – have such barriers ever been set for your desires and life plans?
  How did you feel about it?