Feelings of foreigners in Germany about their nationality can be extremely different. Some feel like Germans because they have a German identity card but others still feel belonging to their home country and to their origins. It only depends on everyone's personal feelings and attitudes but also on the mentality of the nation, the person is derived from.

So we have to ask ourselves what the difference between nationality and state membership is and if there is any at all? The dictionary says that nationality designates the ethnical origin or affiliation to a certain group of people and is used as synonym for the legal understood "state membership". But for example if a person changes only his or her "state membership" by the naturalization, with which certain rights are connected, his or her nationality stays unaffected because it is a by-birth-acquired right.

Nevertheless, people who are born in Germany but with foreign parents can also be very obliged to their roots, although they speak perfectly German, have a German identity card and have many German friends or workmates. There are many of those ones who have lived their whole life in Germany but return for a while to the country, their parents came from, because they have such a strong feeling of nationality. Also foreigners who moved in their youth to Germany as political or economic refugees, return to their home country.

The conclusion is that the term nationality can be used in two completely different ways. The first is nationality as the inner feeling of belonging to a country and the second is defined very formal and bureaucratic in being registered in a state, paying taxes and so on , what we call "state membership".

Written by Katharina Schmidt