5 ms·

During covid WFH, my partner and I moved to Berlin for three months to study German. We stayed on the seventh floor of a nice apartment building, where the elev

by t8sr 4y ago

During covid WFH, my partner and I moved to Berlin for three months to study German. We stayed on the seventh floor of a nice apartment building, where the elevator broke on the second day of our stay. The owner of the apartment offered us some money as compensation, but kindly informed us that repairing the elevator would require a vote by all the people who own the building together and might take a few months to organize. (By the time we left three months later, it still hadn't been repaired.) One day I was in the same classroom with someone who later tested positive for covid19, and the school told us to go home and check with the health authorities about self-isolating. They started us off with a website and a covid hotline phone number, and off we all went. None of the students had the German covid app, because Robert Koch Institute (German CDC) hadn't made it available outside of the German App Store because of invented reasons that no other country in Europe apparently had. I spent the rest of that afternoon trying to find out how long to isolate. The information wasn't available on any website, and the COVID hotline was disconnected, Finally, after finding a phone number at the city health office that was connected to someone who wasn't on vacation (which, at any moment, is about 50% of German government employees), I learned that the rules differed per Borough of Berlin. I had to isolate for 48 hours. My classmate, three blocks down the road, for a week. The same classmate later told me that she had moved to Berlin to work at a German company, but still hadn't finished setting up her residency paperwork. The latest step at that time was receiving a letter from some German department, which she had to put in another envelope and send back, in order to receive another letter inviting her to set up an appointment to come and be interviewed. A friend of mine visited Berlin while I was there - he was looking for a job and had an interview with a German company, who ended up having to hire engineers in the Netherlands, because the German government had banned the sale of some VR headsets in the country, which were needed for the job. Our way back out of the country was through Prague by train. The train was several hours late, but a Deutsche Bahn employee told us we should feel lucky: the day before, there was no train. Now, I've dealt with US government bureaucracy, I've dealt with Czech and Swiss bureaucracy, and my partner has had to deal with residency permits in the UK. None of these experiences compare. (Except, maybe, getting a Czech construction permit.) German bureaucracy is so, so much worse than people think. The Germans mostly have nothing to compare it to, and think it's normal: it is not. And it's costing the country real opportunities: companies that don't get started, people who don't end up moving there, repairs that don't get done because it's hard to organize some stupid paperwork. And it doesn't have to be this way.

q-big 4y ago
> The Germans mostly have nothing to compare it to, and think it's normal: it is not. Many Germans know really well how bad it is. This is one of many reasons why politicians and bureacrats in Germany are hated the same as, I think, lawyers in the USA. It's rather that most German citizens have given up hope that any improvement will happen.
avar 4y ago
> [...] repairs that don't get done because > it's hard to organize some stupid paperwork[...] That German homeowners didn't scramble to fix an elevator at extra collective expense says less about their bureaucracy, and more about how important you think it is to avoid walking up a few flights of stairs.
nirimda 4y ago
> The same classmate later told me that she had moved to Berlin to work at a German company, but still hadn't finished setting up her residency paperwork. The latest step at that time was receiving a letter from some German department, which she had to put in another envelope and send back, in order to receive another letter inviting her to set up an appointment to come and be interviewed. I'm going to guess that letter was some kind of verification from the Department of Labor to say that the person was legitimately needed to do a job that couldn't be done by some EU person. They need to hand it off to the Immigration Department to let them apply for a residency permit. I'm not entirely sure, because I never had any to get any similar letter, and I was exempt from that process. However, as for the question of keeping government departments separate and isolated from each other, this isn't really a bit of German bureaucracy gone mad. It used to be that Common Law countries would like to keep government departments firewalled from each other, to prevent the government from building up Super Files about everyone that they could use to oppress them later on. I think the Common Law countries have generally become so happy with their government that they no longer fear it as a possible source of oppression, whereas Germans have recent history of actual government overreach, and retain or regained this tradition of keeping government departments separated from each other. Obviously the questions of which boundaries can be crossed and which boundaries should not be crossed is going to be an issue that is up to each separate country to decide based on its own history. (For instance, the German government did a police check on me, to make sure I didn't have a criminal record, but I wasn't part of that; whereas to get a residency permit for Australia, the applicant has to get their own police checks - when the immigration department asks for it - and then pass them on.) I think this kind of issue should definitely be kept separate from the question of how difficult it is to open a business, and the use of notaries etc etc. You're entitled to be irritated by it, but it's a political decision of a country about perceived risks, not ignorance or rentseekers who can't be worked around. So your irritation should be directed to the Department for Avoiding Totalitarian Dictatorship, and not the Department for Overwhelming Bureaucracy.

by t8sr 4y ago

q-big 4y ago

> The Germans mostly have nothing to compare it to, and think it's normal: it is not. Many Germans know really well how bad it is. This is one of many reasons why politicians and bureacrats in Germany are hated the same as, I think, lawyers in the USA. It's rather that most German citizens have given up hope that any improvement will happen.

avar 4y ago

> [...] repairs that don't get done because > it's hard to organize some stupid paperwork[...] That German homeowners didn't scramble to fix an elevator at extra collective expense says less about their bureaucracy, and more about how important you think it is to avoid walking up a few flights of stairs.

nirimda 4y ago

> The same classmate later told me that she had moved to Berlin to work at a German company, but still hadn't finished setting up her residency paperwork. The latest step at that time was receiving a letter from some German department, which she had to put in another envelope and send back, in order to receive another letter inviting her to set up an appointment to come and be interviewed. I'm going to guess that letter was some kind of verification from the Department of Labor to say that the person was legitimately needed to do a job that couldn't be done by some EU person. They need to hand it off to the Immigration Department to let them apply for a residency permit. I'm not entirely sure, because I never had any to get any similar letter, and I was exempt from that process. However, as for the question of keeping government departments separate and isolated from each other, this isn't really a bit of German bureaucracy gone mad. It used to be that Common Law countries would like to keep government departments firewalled from each other, to prevent the government from building up Super Files about everyone that they could use to oppress them later on. I think the Common Law countries have generally become so happy with their government that they no longer fear it as a possible source of oppression, whereas Germans have recent history of actual government overreach, and retain or regained this tradition of keeping government departments separated from each other. Obviously the questions of which boundaries can be crossed and which boundaries should not be crossed is going to be an issue that is up to each separate country to decide based on its own history. (For instance, the German government did a police check on me, to make sure I didn't have a criminal record, but I wasn't part of that; whereas to get a residency permit for Australia, the applicant has to get their own police checks - when the immigration department asks for it - and then pass them on.) I think this kind of issue should definitely be kept separate from the question of how difficult it is to open a business, and the use of notaries etc etc. You're entitled to be irritated by it, but it's a political decision of a country about perceived risks, not ignorance or rentseekers who can't be worked around. So your irritation should be directed to the Department for Avoiding Totalitarian Dictatorship, and not the Department for Overwhelming Bureaucracy.