ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on literature that places questions of race and gender at the center of postwar West German history as well as scholarship that highlights the significance of gender in citizenship law and its applications. It expands on both by illuminating the ways in which regulation of mixture became a part of postwar West German democratization processes, implemented via the citizenship law. Policymakers, considering the implications of the constitution's equality statute, which was supposed to go into effect 1 April 1953, had decided to look favorably—at least in theory—upon requests by West German women for retention or reacquisition of citizenship if they married a foreign Muslim man. However, the equality reflected in the compromise, struck between the various state and federal ministries, was limited at best. While West German women no longer automatically lost their citizenship upon marriage to a foreigner, as they did prior to the implementation of the equality statute, a variety of factors, legal as well as cultural in nature, effectively resulted in the regulation of mixture by denying foreign husbands (and the couple's offspring) West German citizenship, thus precluding the realization of true gender equality.
