The place of one’s birth, together with his family name, is an integral element of one’s psychic totality.  That is to say, each is a validation of who one is. A family’s surname is symbolic of recognition, giving one a sense of belonging.  Some are happy with their given names and wear them with pride.  Others might need to apologize, laying the responsibility on others, such as their parents, who had made the choice, even going to the extremes of foreshortening, or changing said names.  

It was typical of the Jews in Germany to only use their chosen, first names, with that of their fathers, until 1808.  In 1790, one of our early ancestors was named Salomon Joel, another, born in 1799, was named Elias Levy.  On March 31, 1808, however, Germany mandated a decree that article 15 would henceforth regulate the requirement that, within a period of three months, all first names were to be accompanied by a secondary (permanent) appendage.  To ensure that Jewish residents followed both the letter and spirit of the new law, recalcitrants were faced with the alternative of either choosing family names on their own, or having Prussian civil servants select for them, punishing the residents by giving them deliberately ridiculous/insulting or defamatory last names.

I have always liked my family name, probably stemming from the time that I first learned to spell it.    This combination of favorable impressions is accompanied by a distant memory of my parents, while flush, sending me across the street (Washing, corner Ward Road) to a small store (delicatessen?) to purchase an ounce of liverwurst for our minimalist version of an evening meal.  While still too small to be able to look over the store’s counter, I became involved in the ritualistic “What is your name,” to which I habitually answered “Sonja Krips, K-R-I-P-S.”   Why I spelled out my name remains unclear to me, maybe because it was always misspelled or, perhaps, my parents wanting to burn said name onto my brain because, during the German Nazi period, they had been eliminated as individually named human beings and replaced by numbers.

Later, in Germany, my given name, “Sonja,” was the cause of my having to repeatedly correct my friends’ and colleagues’ perceived mispronunciation. They had continuously used the German pronunciation for a decidedly non-German name, replacing the sibilance of “seen, sun, somnambulant,” etc. with the Germanic “s,” as used in “zone,  nausea, museum,” etc. What does any of that have to do with what is perceived to be an atypical German name and my repeating my father’s experience at Shanghai’s German General Consulate, October 1939? It brings forth the contemporaneous institutionalization of yet another German decree:  On August 18, 1939, Jews were mandated to attach recognizably Jewish given names to those given them by their parents.  As an aid to far-off reaches of German bureaucracy, a list of approved given names for all new borns was used to guide the approval/disapproval of their infants’ parents’ choices.  My father was told that the name “Sonja” did not appear on such a prescribed list. His mind, regarding changing his chosen name for his first-born could, fortunately, not be changed.  As such, the German Consulate General’s official name for me remained  “Baby” Krips until, three months later (December), the “Public Health Department of the Shanghai Municipal Council” stamped my being with my parents’ designated name.  My dad subsequently told me that “if you ever encounter difficulties, you can always return to Shanghai, insofar as that is where you are registered.”

I believed in the fact of that safety net for a very long time until, some years back, I carefully examined my brother Peter’s birth certificate (Shanghai, March, 1945).  Printed in English in dark blue script, it contained neither an official stamp nor registration number.  Rather, my father had used the certificate’s obverse side to scribble into the “Medical Certificate of Birth.”  That got me to thinking:   true, we were in the middle of the war, lived in the occasionally bombed Honkew Ghetto, and who, in fact, was available to register new the born?  Our father would have had to line up outside the Japanese police station (Dee Lay Jao police district) for hours, waiting for an exit permit to leave the “Designated Area (i.e. Ghetto)” without even so much as knowing whether the required stamped document  would have even been given to him.

Peter’s birth certificate from the Ward Road Hospital categorized all new births according to their nationality.   His stated “former German,” whereas mine (1939) said “German.”  The doctor who delivered “Baby” Ehrlich, born just seventeen days before me, managed to change “German” to “stateless.”  The child’s father subsequently reneged on the hospital’s suggestion that he enter his new son’s birth with the German General Consulate because not two weeks elapsed before he requested that the Shanghai “Municipal Health Department” enter the baby’s name as “Tommy (TOMMY).”   One gets the sense of the Registrar’s sheer joy at being able to record a chosen name by his deliberate use of bracketed capitals.

Ruth Baruch’s brother was born in the Sainte-Marie Hospital, Shanghai, in November 1939. Five months later, the German General Consulate entered his name in the Baruch Family Descendant’s booklet (“Familien Stammbuch”), number twenty, as Isaak. The chosen name seems not to have avoided alteration in that it was one of the recommended, designated “Jew names.” Curiously enough, though, that list spelled the name as “Isaac,” and not in the typical German “Isaak.”

While my mother always told me that shortly before leaving home for my birth in the “Country Hospital” of the “Chaofoong Welfare Home,” and being offered an extra portion of a jam sandwich, her hospital stay was paid for by the Welfare Committee. Isaak Baruch’s and Jacob Will’s bills, on the other hand, were settled by (the beneficence?) of the Abraham family, members of Shanghai's century-old Sephardic (Jewish) community.

Yvonne Adler’s father waited three months (December 1940) following the birth of his daughter, Yvonne, before attempting to officially register her existence at the German General Consulate, Shanghai.  Since her name did not appear on the approved list of Jewish names, she was entered in the official (stamped, signed and numbered) certificate of recognition as, “Sara,” with her mother noted as being a “former German citizen.”   The Consular Secretary, First Class, makes note of an attached area of discussion regarding special attention.  Clearly, a Jewish child was not allowed to be the bearer of the name “Yvonne!”

The requirement that German Jews were mandated to add either “Sara” or “Israel” to their given names was the result of the Second Order re the implementation of the law concerning the alteration of first and last names of August 17, 1938, amended on August 18, 1938 to include the decree’s guiding principles.

 Documents from the “Ward Road Hospital” validated Manfred Worm’s birth certificate, with his German citizenship status crossed out and corrected with “Without Nationality.”

Twelve months later, “The Public Health Department of the Shanghai Municipal Council” used the birth certificate’s obverse side to duly register and stamp (Chinese script) his being, just as it did mine.  Several years ago, while in Shanghai, I asked about, amongst other things, the whereabouts of the city’s archives, and whether documents reflecting the registration of births still existed.  I am still waiting for the reply.  In the meantime, I have seen beautiful, colorful, marriage certificates.  Divorce records exist, and we even own a death list.  Are there still copies of death certificates?

Ever since being handed a copy of Noemi Strauss’ birth certificate (almost identical to that of my own), I knew that our exile in Shanghai was registered in discrete, separable sections of the city.  For example, the registration number 33/40, accompanied by an obverse stamp from the “Community of Central European Jews, means that Noemi was more than certainly the thirty third child born in 1940, as registered by Shanghai’s Jewish Community. Noemi’s sister, born in 1944, the parents received the Jewish Community’s DIN A4-Memo as her certificate if birth, together with the registration number 230/44.  Were there two hundred and thirty births in 1944 or was the sum total an amalgam of Czech, Hungarian, Russian or Polish newborns?  And where were the many Indian babies registered, even though this document notes “it has been announced to the S.S.M. (Public Health Department).  Using this incomplete, Japanese list of foreign residents in Shanghai’s Honkew District, (“Exil Shanghai, 1938-1947:  Juedisches Leben in der Emigration/Jewish life in the Emigration” (with accompanying CD-ROM of foreign residents, ISBN 3-9331471-19-2), I have been able to document fifty five-year old children, fifteen of which were of Indian heritage.  In all of the passports of those who, today, have reached their sixty-fifth birthday, and those born in the years afterwards, Shanghai remains their city of birth.

Up until November 1941, all of Shanghai’s German/Jewish refugee population still holding German passports, were citizens of the German Reich, even though the Nuremburg Laws of September 15, 1935 withdrew their citizenship and human rights.  That is to say, citizenship was maintained even though the edicts of September 15, 1939 ran counter to the new “citizenship protocols” and the “laws governing the protection of German blood and honor.”

As of November 25, 1941, however, all dispersed (German) Jews were disenfranchised by the racist policies of the National Socialist government and subsequently deemed stateless, insofar as that date legitimated the Eleventh Amendment to the Citizenship Right’s Law.  In short, citizenship was withdrawn from all Jews who had “transferred settlement” across the country’s [fluid/expanded] border, including those who had emigrated. 

I have examined several birth certificates, and they read as though passages out of a book:  Both Catherine Ruth Neumann’s (1946) and Henny Gitta Gothelf’s (1947) are especially beautiful.   Printed on transparent paper, the English script is pink, and subordinate to the newly appearing red, Chinese lettering.  Were the birth certificates for males printed in blue?   Again, the obverse sides contain the official stamp, but validated, this time, by the “Public Health Bureau of the Shanghai Special Municipality.”  Gitta’s 1947 birth certificate answers the question “Province of Origin,” as being Stateless, although the date bespeaks that a full two years had elapsed since the end of the Potsdam Conference (July 17, 1945-August 2, 1945).

 On December 22, 1939, the article,” Babies Increasing-Ranks of Emigrees [sic],” appeared in “The Shanghai Evening Post,” with the news that up until the previous six months, the birth of an emigrant child was a rare and headline-making phenomenon.  I have to assume that the referenced birth was that of my girlfriend, Doris Kasswan, born in June 1939. Her parents were able to escape Germany for Shanghai, saving more than just their lives. Neither Doris nor Jeanette Izbicki (who lived in the Chinese section of Shanghai) had birth certificates, and, like me, had to spend their lives patiently explaining why they had been born in Shanghai, so far away from their parents’ native country (Germany).  Sometimes, they might even have encountered situations as occurred to my (then) sixteen-year-old brother, Peter.   Having inadvertently driven his motorcycle into the wrong end of a one-way street, and subsequently being stopped by the police, he had to produce his driver’s license.   The police officer looked it over and decided not to ticket Peter, with the comment, “Oh!  You were born in Shanghai (China).  There is no way you could have been familiar with German signage.”    

Sonja Mühlberger

translation by Yvonne Adler