I am now an officially registered Wienerin (resident of Vienna).
Austria, like Germany, has a requirement that everyone who lives in the country must register with the local authorities. The registration process is not too onerous – I brought a form signed by my landlady; my passport with a valid visa. I also brought proof that I have a source of income although I don’t think I was asked for it.
The official recognition of my presence, or Meldezettel, was necessary before I could open a bank account. There are no doubt other instances, such as registering a child for school, where this stamped paper would be required.
This is quite routine for Austrians and Germans, who must repeat this process any time they move. As an American, however, a few things about it strike me as strange.
First, the Anmeldung application asks me my religion. Surely no Jew living in Austria or Germany considers this an innocent question! I have been told this information is collected because those registered in a particular religion have some of their tax money allocated to their demonimation. I have also been told that many people leave the religion question on these forms blank, or put “none” or “Nichtglauber” – nonbeliever – on their forms.
I, however, took great pleasure in registering as a Jew, and I’m disappointed that the official certificate I received does not include that information. The Austria of the 1940s and 1950s was known for being extremely unwelcoming to those deported Jews who might have sought to return, so I feel pleased, even decades later, to contribute in some small way to the return of the Jewish population to a city in which we once played a vital role.
Apart from the issue of religion, however, the entire registration process would probably cause a great uproar among Americans. Imagine the concerns about state intrusion and threats to privacy if each of us, any time we moved, had to go to City Hall, report our address and provide documentation that we had a right to be where we are. These days in particular any discussion of “registration” brings to mind some of the more disturbing and punitive xenophobic excesses of our current administration.
While Germans and Austrians think little of this requirement, however, in general Europeans are extremely protective of their privacy. Online privacy is far better protected here. Every time I open a website I get messages asking me to “opt in” if the site uses cookies or any other form of tracking, which is certainly not the case back home. Indeed there have been continual struggles between EU regulators and companies like Facebook over tracking practices.
Germany went over two decades without conducting a census because privacy advocates objected to such widespread collection of information. The European Union required each country to conduct some form of census in 2011 and Germany did comply after much negotiation over data protection.
And yet, as far as I know there has been no pushback at all against the Anmeldung requirement, which would seem to me to be more intrusive than a census in which information is meant to be anonymized. I guess it shows how much our sense of personal privacy is shaped by cultural norms.
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