Also Tania Muller-Kaul, Tania Lu Müller-Kaul, Tania Muller-Kaul, Lu MuellerKaul
— all of those have shown up on official paperwork. International travel makes it possible, and oh joy, airport admins love it when the greencard and the passport have different spellings.
Even coworkers occasionally introduce me as “Lu Muller” — that one I hate almost as much as “Tanja Müller” which must be one of the most common names of my generation in Germany.
My grandmother already wanted to make sure she didn’t get the last name “Müller” by marriage and that’s how we ended up with the clunky hyphenation, no more marriage necessary. My father was born a “Müller-Kaul”, my mother started out as “Winkelser” and then became the “Müller-Kaul” by marriage. In her generation, the hyphenated names started popping up more frequently when women didn’t want to give up their original last names. Their husbands, however, just kept the one they had before.
So when I was in my late teens, filling out the first official forms, I got some odd questions — “you’re already married???” —
yes, Germans are a bit more candid than Americans, and no, Germans do not marry in their teens. If they do, it’s weird, and they’ll be under suspicion of being some sort of fundamentalist or desperate for a residency/work permit.
I’m writing this post for a project. I would like to see what kind of traction a brand-new blog gets, and I asked my accountability-group-friends to do something similar as homework.
First week: Just make sure you can be found when someone searches for your name. For my name that doesn’t even require a profession, specialization, location — there’s only one. So instead I’m posting something that can be useful when someone gets the spelling wrong — this post should work as a landing page for misspelled Mullerkuals and whatnot.
Q for Lu 