Einbürgerungsgesuch

Well, the wheels of our naturalization process finally became unstuck and last Friday we had the first family interview, the one whose purpose is to gauge our level of swissness.   Up to this point, our application has been judged administratively, for instance whether we’re in arrears on debt obligations or have committed any crimes.  Fortunately, speeding tickets apparently don’t count.  I’ve lost count of how many of those I’ve collected although it’s not as felonious as it sounds since a mere 3 mph over the limit will earn you one here.  I took the invitation to the above-mentioned interview as an implied recognition that we passed this objective hurdle and were deemed ready to have our level of assimilation assessed.   Integration is a very important part of the process and is evaluated on four levels; social, cultural, political and economic and the first step in doing this is via the family interview with your case manager, in our case a nice young woman named Frau Nonic. 

The interview took place in the same office building where we received the application a year ago and as we sat waiting our turn, Paige, who wasn’t present for that perfunctory exercise, made an interesting observation that I’d missed even though I’m better positioned than she to have made it.  She remarked about the total absence in this Swiss government building of any flags or pictures of government officials.  In the US, you can’t swing a dead cat in a government building without knocking over an American flag or endangering a picture of the president, and Paige, who’s never been in a US administration building other than the embassy in Bern, was somehow able to see this.  What explains this lack of nationalistic ornamentation?  Probably the same reason why you will only rarely see Swiss politicians with little Swiss flags adorning their lapels.   I can unequivocally say that the Swiss are just as proudly patriotic as Americans but as with most things, not overtly so in a rah-rah sort of way.  Call it typical Swiss reserve.   Hopp Schwiez! has its place during a World Cup soccer game but in an office building?  What’s the point?

In any event, this interview is the first of two, intended, as I said, to subjectively assess how integrated we are into Swiss society.  I would like to note at this point that we’re more than okay with this expectation.  Switzerland is a small country and as such could be susceptible to significant changes to its cultural norms brought about by immigrants more interested in making Switzerland meet their expectations than respecting and adopting the traditions and conventions that make Switzerland what it is.  Change happens here but it’s slow and that’s okay.  Swiss citizenship is not a right due us or anyone else and it’s incumbent on us, as immigrants, to demonstrate that we seek to gain the privileges of being citizens of the Switzerland that is, not of another Switzerland more closely resembling the United States. 

The interview itself went well.  Frau Nonic began by putting us at ease and kindly asked whether we’d prefer to speak Schwyzerdütsch or Hochdeutsch.   For Paige it doesn’t matter but for Lisa and me, it makes the difference between comprehension and blank stares and we gratefully accepted her offer to speak standard German.   Her questions were about our backgrounds, how we interact with Swiss people and why we wanted to become Swiss (still sounds strange when I put it that way).  At one point, as she was reviewing our file, she asked where our other two children lived and it occurred to us that because Lindsey had never been registered here it was, from the Swiss authorities’ perspective, as if she didn’t even exist.  One more ignominy for the poor child who found herself split off from the pack thirteen years ago when we dropped her off at Cornell and fled the country.  She had the only revenge she can muster when she did her study abroad in Australia instead of Europe but has since made peace with this turn of events, no doubt helped by the eventual coalescing of the greater part of the offspring in the US.  The discussion went pretty smoothly with the only unexpected question coming when Frau Nonic asked me what my father did for a living, which wasn’t a problem except I didn’t know the word for Human Resources.  Towards the end, she spent a few minutes giving us pointers on how to prepare for the next interview, which will be more intimidating because it will be with a panel of seven people.  Also, the focus will be on factual specifics about the government, geography, politics and history, not just about the clubs we participate in and how we like our jobs or school.  This is the test that most of our Swiss friends say they’d likely fail themselves although, as native language speakers I point out that they could more easily bullshit their way through it than Lisa and I could.  When she told us that Basel offers a course specifically designed to prepare applicants for this interview we let slip, at the risk of appearing a bit too eager beaver, that we were already signed up.  She nodded, seemingly not surprised then concluded by outlining the next steps and telling us that the invitation to the panel interrogation would probably not come until after the summer holidays and that we’d receive another bill in the coming weeks, neither of which surprised me.

Next step, the class, which sounds genuinely fun and interesting but which I've yet to convince Paige to attend.