Last week was the week I didn’t exist.
Well, I knew I existed, but I couldn’t prove it to anyone. The document that confirms my identity was out of my hands.
Renewing a US passport used to be a speedy affair: I’d walk into the consulate here in Munich and walk out two hours later with a new document. Now they insist on sending it to you in the mail. You have to wait two weeks to get it.
So I waited, thinking of the things I couldn’t do in that time. I couldn’t leave Germany, obviously. I couldn’t claim any packages at the post office, so I couldn’t order anything online. I couldn’t perform any major transactions at the bank — not even exchange currency. And I couldn’t be stopped by the police for any reason.
In Germany, my passport is my only official form of identification and proof of residency. Showing my press pass or my library card wouldn’t really have the same effect.
I’m very aware of this because once, on a trip to Poland, an American I was traveling with lost her passport, along with the other contents of her wallet. At the consulate, the only easy way to prove her identity was by witness — with a statement from me — because I still had my passport.
Oddly enough, with that same passport, I was barely allowed back into the US. Through heavy use, the page with my photo on it was starting to come apart. Could someone who looked a little like me have slipped in a different photo? All the border official could do was rely on the rest of the document and ask me (sternly) where I was born, how old I was and what countries I’d visited in recent years.
Others give us our identity
We tend to forget that our identity is given to us by others. At the hospital where we are born, we trust that the nurse sends us home with the right parents. A birth certificate from a US authority counts as proof of citizenship, but not of identity. A driver’s license in the US counts as proof of identity, but not of citizenship. We put our signature on everything, but it takes an expert to compare it accurately.
The first passport I ever got, I had sent for by mail. The passport office took my word for it (and that of a notary public) that the photo I’d sent them was really of me. (They’re a bit smarter now and require applicants to appear in person.) My new passport is biometric, but the only biometric data it contains is the shape of my face — based on a photo I took myself. (US citizens aren’t required to submit the iris scans and fingerprints that they demand of foreign visitors.)
The new passport is based on the old passport; the one before that was based on other documents that relied on other people’s judgement or eyesight. So identity is not something we have through a single document; it’s something we create through a trail of documents. Along with other records that rely on those documents, they form a pattern — a pattern of movement, of residency, of purchases, of medical history.
If all else fails, there is one thing that every American can resort to: a secret code. Each of us has memorized a unique nine-digit number that we don’t reveal to anyone except our bank, our employer and the government. Had I not been with my friend in Poland, her Social Security number would have unlocked access to her other documents. Mine is what I would have recited last week. Fortunately, I didn’t have to.
