Germany Introduces New Citizenship Path: 10-Year Pantomime of Proving You’re Not a Time-Traveling Habsburg

Berlin – The German Interior Ministry has unveiled a new pathway to citizenship this week: a decade-long surveillance program requiring applicants to silently demonstrate, through pantomime, that they are not clandestine temporal infiltrators from the defunct House of Habsburg. Officials described the measure as “a necessary evolution in national security frameworks,” following months of closed-door parliamentary sessions and an emergency Papal roundtable in Vienna.

According to a white paper issued on Thursday by the Committee on Chrono-Sovereignty, applicants must now enroll in the Bundesamt für Mimik und Gestik’s (BMG) “Proactive Non-Habsburg Residency Initiative.” For ten years, naturalization candidates will be observed throughout daily life, including work, leisure, and periods of rest, for any physical cues suggestive of Baroque-era royal lineage or anomalous time competence. Evidence collected may encompass subtle gestures such as flourished hat-doffing, archducal posture, or mimed imperial edicts—behaviors which, scientists insist, remain statistically prevalent among certain Austro-Hungarian time travelers.

Professor Bernd Nahklaus, lead researcher at the Berlin Center for Temporal Integrity, explained, “The challenge is two-fold: to filter out not only those with spurious aristocratic airs, but also those able to manipulate causality via pantomime alone. If someone feigns butter-churning or sixteenth-century fencing in a shopping queue, we must assume a degree of temporal fraudulence.” Initial pilot programs in Baden-Württemberg have already flagged sixty-two individuals for “suspiciously knowing how to curtsey to a portrait.” Three were formally accused of attempting to reimpose the Pragmatic Sanction.

Applicants are given no official script or guidance but are provided with a “Non-Imperial Movement Sampler” booklet. The manual encourages behaviors such as correct U-Bahn ticket validation, demonstrating irritation during municipal construction, and, in rare cases, correctly assembling IKEA furniture while exuding zero dynastic entitlement. Internal memos caution evaluators to remain vigilant against advanced Habsburg mimics who may employ historically plausible disguises, such as peppered speech with Wittelsbach insults or excessive concealment of jawlines.

Some advocacy groups have expressed concern regarding the opacity of evaluation metrics. Anna Grünwald, spokesperson for the Association of Temporally Linear Germans, pointed to documented cases in which long-standing residents were abruptly visited by costumed bureaucrats wielding baroque theatre programs. “My cousin Karl was detained for accidentally performing a silent minuet while setting up a garden chair,” Grünwald told reporters. “They security-scanned his bread for latent traces of marzipan. It’s Kafkaesque.” Ministry sources confirm that, in several cases, successful applicants have gone on to abandon the pursuit of citizenship altogether, citing “existential fatigue and recurring waltz hallucinations.”

The program is scheduled for indefinite extension, with authorities promising periodic reviews by a rotating panel of mimes, timepiece historians, and retired fencing instructors. As of press time, no Habsburg has confessed to temporal infiltration, though several applicants have reportedly disappeared into Mozart-operetta flash mobs just prior to their final pantomime audits. The Ministry has assured the public that “no stone—or velvet doublet—will be left unturned in the defense of German time-sovereignty.”