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While the technical details of immigration and asylum legislation remain the domain of a comparatively narrow field of experts, debates about nationality law often cause widespread attention within domestic academic circles. The latest reform was a case in point: in 2019, the government proposed depriving terrorist fighters of German nationality (provided that they have another passport) and suggested prohibiting the naturalisation of those with several spouses, thereby triggering a heated debate among experts. This contribution sets off to embed the legal-doctrinal analysis into a broader reflection on the role of nationality law as a forum for and vehicle of broader societal debates about the collective identity of Germans in the early 21st century. The article scrutinises this double function from an interdisciplinary perspective and shows that it is entrenched in the history of German nationality law with the extensive reform of 1999 as its climax. By contrast, the latest changes do not bring about a major conceptual or practical shift, since they continue earlier developments. Depriving terrorist fighters of the German passport adapts an established ground for the loss of nationality of those serving in foreign armies to the international context of asymmetric warfare; blocking the naturalisation of foreigners with several spouses reacts to a court judgment and complements several other small reform measures that have reinforced the integration paradigm within German nationality law over the past two decades. Against this background, the time may have come to disentangle nationality law from broader debates about collective identity at a time when many former immigrants have a German passport anyway. Such reconstruction of the national self-image beyond naturalisation may be addressed analytically from the standpoint of the citizenship paradigm, which remains normatively contested, but transcends technical focus of immigration, asylum and nationality legislation.
