How I juggle multiple nationalities at once

Hello everyone!

I'm Stefan, 20 years old and I can't say where I'm from without making it a huge deal first. First of all, I have three official nationalities: Serbian, Croatian and Czech, the former two being granted to me at birth and the last one, Czech, being handed to me in late 2016 after a long application process.

I was born in 1997 in Prague, the Czech Republic, to a set of Serbo-Croatian parents, who then later divorced, which resulted in my dad marrying my stepmom, who happens to be from Jordan. All this piled up in that I attended the German School of Prague, which resulted in me growing up with German as my school language, Serbo-Croatian as my home language, Czech as my surrounding language and English, which I spoke with my stepmom and then later on used for my writing. By the time I graduated from my school in 2015, I spoke French and Russian along with the other four languages.

After graduation, I moved to Berlin to study Economics and Sociology at the University of Potsdam, which I have been doing now for almost three years. In the meantime, I also published my first book and I run a somewhat "successful" blog (I define it as successful because at least some people read it)

Since moving to Berlin, I've noticed that managing my nationality isn't as easy as I thought. Especially when it comes to the German understanding of nationality, which is more fluctuating than the Czech one. Briefly: In Germany, you can identify as German even when your parents are not German, in the Czech Republic, yeah, nope. It took me 18 years of living there to even get my passport, let alone be seen as Czech.

So where did this lead me? I've definitely chosen to identify only with the three countries that I hold citizenship in and refuse to see myself as German. Simply because I think that living in a place for 2,5 years (regardless of the fact that one grew up with German education) doesn't suffice for you to feel nationally connected to it. Instead, you are connected through other experiences, friends, family, partners and in general your life and/or trip to the country.

I've travelled quite a chunk of the world (35 countries) by now and hope to post more about that, if you want to know why I'm on Steemit in the first place, check out the About Me article on my profile to learn more about me and my writing.