Your Right Of Passage
December 10, 2015 7:57 AM   Subscribe

 
Tom Topol also collects old passports, mostly relating to German History.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:58 AM on December 10, 2015


I have my grandparents 1915 US passports. They are single sheets of heavy vellum (or so they appear) folded down to the size of modern booklet editions. No pictures.

I also have my grandfathers 1910 student bicycling club ID, because before 1914 Americans didn't need passports. A more civilized age.

(I do not have my father's from the seventies, which annoys me no end. He traveled regularly to middle east where each visa took an entire page. Consequently he had extra pages added in, repeatedly, until it was as thick as a your basic airport novel. Israeli passport control was tactful enough not to stamp it as they understood this would invalidate the document for the other countries he visited.)
posted by BWA at 8:15 AM on December 10, 2015


It seems strange to admit that in 2015, the right to exist in certain physical spaces on Earth—spaces bound by imaginary lines drawn on maps by our governments—can be prevented by a pocket-sized paper travel document.

To be pedantically literal, why would that seem strange, just because it's 2015? It is a regime that has been in place for a couple of hundred years, and there seems be little reason to think, on the basis of the 20th century, that it was going to drastically change, except for changes in the EU that let citizens cross borders more freely for work. I get that he's establishing that he thinks it should not be this way, but really, what would be surprising would be for nation states to all decide that they weren't going to bother with visas and immigration laws any more.
posted by thelonius at 8:16 AM on December 10, 2015 [4 favorites]


It is a regime that has been in place for a couple of hundred years
That's actually not true. Passports have only been required for about a hundred years. In 1915, the idea was new, and a lot of people didn't like it. It seemed unnatural and weird to require people to get some sort of official document in order to travel. Travel seemed like a basic right to a lot of people, and people didn't yet take for granted the idea that nations had a right to regulate who did and didn't enter their borders.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:27 AM on December 10, 2015 [10 favorites]


Israeli passport control was tactful enough not to stamp it as they understood this would invalidate the document for the other countries he visited.

This is still true; Israeli passport control will stamp your visa on a separate sheet if paper if you ask because several Middle Eastern countries won't allow anyone with an Israeli visa in their passport to enter.
posted by Itaxpica at 8:44 AM on December 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


To be pedantically literal, why would that seem strange, just because it's 2015?

Because were supposed to have a one-world state new order by now, on our way to the utopian future.

Our are we supposed to have the Eugenics Wars first? I can't reminder Khan's revised backstory.
posted by happyroach at 8:52 AM on December 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


(If I may interject, I suspect the author is talking about the outsized impact that nationality, and thus passport possession, can have on one's ability to be mobile and escape crises like the Holocaust and Syria. Given that we saw the consequences of limiting mobility through strict enforcement of things like quotas during the Holocaust, it is depressing that similar processes are still being enacted and enforced even in light of another significant refugee crisis).
posted by ChuraChura at 9:00 AM on December 10, 2015 [4 favorites]


One of my favorite old/weird passport facts is that Ertugrul Osman, the last member of the Ottoman royal family to have been born under the Ottoman Empire, spent most of his life travelling on a homemade Ottoman passport because he considered himself to be a citizen of the Ottoman Empire and no other state, only stopping after the security changes after 9/11 made him switch to a passport issued by a state that had existed in the last 75 years.
posted by Copronymus at 10:03 AM on December 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


That's actually not true. Passports have only been required for about a hundred years.

That is very interesting! I was lazily figuring that they had been around since like The Congress Of Vienna or one of those deals where the rules of modern nation state-ing got made
posted by thelonius at 10:13 AM on December 10, 2015


Thanks for posting this, this is great!

This is nitpicky but I wish we could blow up the images, they appear to be quite high resolution and I would love to get a closer look at some of the text, especially since I find that older handwriting can be difficult to decipher.

Also it's interesting to see how much French there is among the passports, especially the pre-war ones, and the gradual shift to English as a second language (+ the passport's "native" language) as time goes on.
posted by andrewesque at 11:06 AM on December 10, 2015


From the second link:
The western word “passport” was derived from a French phrase—either “passe port,” meaning literally to pass through a ship’s port, or “passe portes,” describing the act of entering a city’s gates.
OED (updated June 2005):
Etymology: A borrowing from French. Etymons: French passeport.
< Middle French passeport (1420 denoting a certificate from the authorities for the free circulation of merchandise, 1464 denoting a safe-conduct issued by an authority guaranteeing the liberty and free movement of a person, 1616 in figurative use; French passeport) < passe- (see pass- comb. form) + port port n.1
I don't know whether the author has reason to doubt the OED's etymology or was too lazy to look it up; based on my experience with journalism and language, I'm betting the latter.

Regardless of my etymological nitpick, thanks for the post—I love passports! (And am happy to have my father's stash, since he was in the Foreign Service and has all sorts of exotic visa stamps.)
posted by languagehat at 11:51 AM on December 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


Thanks for posting this. I've been an immigrant for the last 4 years. I've had a lot of time to think about passports and papers and how strange it all is, because I spend so much time sitting and waiting in various rooms with institutional lighting--waiting for my number to come up on the little screen so that I can walk back through the cinder block hallways to a bored-looking bureaucrat, who will look over my papers while I sit and wait, twisting my hands in my lap. And when I'm lucky, they nod to themselves and flip through my passport to find a new clean page, and I know that means I'm going to get to stay a little longer.
posted by colfax at 12:10 PM on December 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


I found some of these passports especially interesting so I thought I'd link to them directly: posted by Joe in Australia at 11:43 PM on December 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


> passport from the Soviet-Chinese Occupation Zone (what had been Manchuria)

Wow, that's fascinating:
The area of Luda (Dalian), Guandong, is probably the most fascinating and historically important post World War Two zones in China. Following the Red Army’s advance into North East China in September of 1945, where they liberated what was up to then the Manchurian Empire State, the area now was under their influence and their presence.

This region was under Russian control from August 1945 until May 1950: Though politically run by the Chinese Communist party, financial, military and external issues where controlled by the Soviets. They even formed a separate banking and postal system for this region: specially designed Soviet banknotes poured into the city and special postal stamps where issued and used internally and for letters being sent outside. This was a separate governed area, known as Guandong Zone, or in Chinese as 关东区.
I knew nothing about that! I wonder why Stalin turned it over to the Chinese? He wasn't big on letting things out of his grasp.
posted by languagehat at 9:20 AM on December 11, 2015


I'm puzzled as to why he's doubting that someone could travel around the world even as a cosmetician. Take a look at my 5-6 passports some time.

The romance of passports and visas quickly goes away once you have to fill out a ton of forms just to pop over for a holiday.
posted by divabat at 8:06 PM on December 11, 2015


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