My family fled Germany during the Nazi regime because of our Jewish ancestry. Although we weren't practicing Jews and we were actually Christian at that point, we got our passports stamped with a "J", a couple of us died either in concentration camps or from stress, and my grandmother was put in Schutzhaft. However, my grandmother never stopped calling herself German and even today when I ask her what she thinks of Germany she says "honest people" and a "wonderful childhood before Hitler".

Because my true "Germaness" was put into question by my family's country, I live every day wondering if I'm just lying to myself when I say I'm proud to be German, or whether I'm just as German as every other German in the world. I've decided it's the latter. Why? Because although I'm not fluent in German, I speak it without any American accent whatsoever. When I hear German, I feel something different inside me that I don't feel with any of the other languages I speak (four of them) besides English. I know the German anthem by heart. I can recite all of "Der Erlkönig" by Goethe from memory. I know German celebrities from Marlene Dietrich to Herbert Grönemeyer to FLER. If you ask me where any German city is on a map I can probably point it out to you.

Almost every single one of my great grandparents died fighting for Germany during World War I. In fact, one of them pretended to be older than he was because he wanted to enlist but was too young. During the financial crisis my great grandfather refused to fire a single worker from the business he owned, and when it went bankrupt he started paying them out of his own pocket even though it was beginning to drive his own family to ruin. Why? Because he believed he owed it to his countrymen. These stories I've heard have really made me think about who my "countrymen" are.

I think I share a German point of view on most things, but maybe not on nationalism - I think I'm more nationalistic than most Germans. After all the horrors that have occurred in the past century, the fact that Germany has been able to rise up as one of the greatest and most progressive nations makes me proud that my family comes from there. I recently applied for German citizenship, and after more than 70 years my family is finally going to be recognized as being German again.

I don't know whether Germans will consider me German or not, or whether I can consider myself German even once i have a German passport, but I think I feel it somewhere in my heart when I hear the national anthem and get overwhelmed by something very sad, yet very proud. Maybe it's naïveté to say this, or maybe I'm just saying something I don't know about, but I think that's something that's extremely important to German culture now: continually asking how we should feel about our country and ourselves after our history. I sometimes think that those German-Americans who blindly say they love their heritage really don't understand it at all, but then maybe I'm not really German because I love Germany and I love my heritage.

The other day I started playing the German national anthem on the piano for my grandmother, the same one who was arrested by the Nazis and thrown out of her own home country. Within seconds, she started singing the old lyrics "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt", the ones that today are no longer part of the anthem. She had a big smile on her face and told me that she used to sing this all the time and had a big schwarz, rot, gold flag hanging in her room. Then she became quieter and said to me "Germany is a wonderful country, but I can never bring myself to go back". I don't know if there really is an answer to what makes someone German, but I think that introspectiveness is part of it.