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Most mothers teach their kids to brush their teeth and study hard; my mother, a refugee from Nazi Germany, counseled me on strategies for surviving dictatorships. “Never register with the police, if you’re required to,” she frequently advised, and also, “It’s a good idea to have more than one passport.”

Oddly enough, my mother, who died in 1977, had no passports. After growing up in Hitler’s Berlin, she had no intention of ever leaving what she considered to be the safety of the United States. For years, I shared that opinion. I was born in West Harlem in 1944. I had seen plenty of the underside of my country’s ideals — I joined the Freedom Riders in 1963 and worked as trade-union organizer in 1968 — but I had never considered leaving. Then Donald Trump was reelected with a promise to rule like a dictator and exact revenge on his enemies.

I thought of my mother as I sat in the austere reception room of the New York Consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany on a chilly afternoon last February, two weeks after Trump’s inauguration. I had come to apply for dual citizenship. It wasn’t that I was planning on quitting the country of my birth. It was more that obtaining a second passport suddenly seemed like a wise idea.

I qualified as part of a program under which Germany “restores” citizenship to descendants of the victims of the National Socialist regime. My mother often spoke about her final days in the country. As the Nazis intensified their attacks on Jewish citizens, my family tried desperately to leave. My mother and her parents went to embassy after embassy in Berlin, trying to secure a visa. My aunt Inge, my mother’s older sister, once showed me a letter she’d gotten from the Canadian government: “We are not interested in immigrants who are having a problem with their government.” Attempts to obtain visas to Mandatory Palestine and Australia failed. The family wrote to everyone they knew in the U.S. and begged for help. Finally, just as the Second World War began, a wealthy American named........

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