In primary and secondary education I loved starting school in the US. Mainly because no one there knew me, so things started off on a clean slate. My freshman year of high school I even managed to change my name. Admittedly it was a fluke, because when I filled in the forms I omitted the fact that people had called me by my middle name up until then. I hated my middle name with a passion. It reeked of old women who were definitely not cool but who would rally the troops for the sake of making trouble. Back then the term “Karen” had not yet been invented, but that’s essentially what it was. 

Had I known then that it was extremely popular in the Latino world, to an extent that made it instantly recognizable but not overused, my relationship with my first name would have been an entirely different one altogether. But as it stood, the name stood for everything that I hated about myself and – though I had just started verbalizing it softly among some friends – especially my parents. They were the ones who had saddled me with that abomination, a name no one could pronounce and no one really knew how to spell either. Even my childhood friend kept pronouncing it with an inflection that was never meant to be there, but worked with the local dialect in Germany. 

But becoming a freshman somehow magically fixed all that, as I discovered when I started my first day of school and everyone called me by my first name. By the time kids started talking to me at the end of the day, I’d embraced it with a passion I never wanted to let go, unless it came to introducing myself around people I didn’t like. I’d always had names I preferred for myself, sometimes based on a name I’d overheard, other times because of a particular character in a book or a movie / TV show. My favorites came and went, but they still hung around somewhere in the universe, always making me smile when I came across them again. Though, of course they also came with certain expectations.

And the obligatory, inevitable disappointments e.g. when Tamara, who looked like Lori Singer (an actress my 9-year-old self found incredibly beautiful) and carried the name of one of my favorite actresses turned out to be a grade A bitch, who even tried to bully me a little, because her mother didn’t like mine for reasons that were completely out of my control but also understandable when I thought about it over the years. 

Or when Heidi, who was the only English-speaking person at my school in Germany aside from myself, didn’t share my opinion that she and I should be besties (like Tamara, she was older).

But Daniela was cool and not only openly stood up for me in front of our mutual frenemy but also declared her allegiance to me to anyone and everyone who mattered, despite my (other) best friend (Esther) being a religious fanatic most people left alone.  

In the US people took the name I gave them and ran with it, but things took a different turn altogether in Germany, where most people knew me by my middle name. I was used to my name being changed somewhat. My first time in Chicago (I was nine, so still using my middle name), three kids on my block asked me to come over and introduce myself as I was exploring the neighborhood on my own.  They were two years older than me, all girls. The twins were called Chrissie and Carrie (two names I’ve loved ever since) and the ring leader, Kim (a name I liked but was also on the fence about). She was the one who staunchly declared that there was no name they could remember a name they’d never heard before in their lives and promptly told me they’d be calling me something else. I liked the new name, it gave me a new identity with the kids on my block and made me appear to be one of them, even when we ended up going to different schools later when September rolled around. 

In Germany, I wasn’t told of my name change when my mother’s boss decided to address me as Adelheid. It threw me off for a minute because my middle name was nowhere close to what she was calling me, phonetically or through any stretch of the imagination when it came to meaning. As it soon transpired there was a more sinister element to her bestowing such a Germanic name on my poor teenage self. Frau Schmidtke was a Nazi, one who openly spoke about the times her father had chauffeured Hitler around. At least that’s how my mother told it. 

Looking back on it as a grownup I’m guessing there must have been that one incident when he escorted Hitler somewhere or assisted in getting a driver, or a some similar event that was significant enough to be embedded in his daughter’s memory. And if you think that’s impossible, this was a town where all the old school Nazis who couldn’t make it to South America (or didn’t want to leave their great nation) settled to stay connected and infuse their offspring with their lost dream. As was also evident by how several teachers catered to the neo-Nazi student at the school I attended. But that, dear people, is an entirely different story for a whole other day.