Is it painless if you don't have a permanent residence yet? I spent a 98-99 in Berlin after living in the US for several years and Deutsche Bank Berlin wouldn't

Is it painless if you don't have a permanent residence yet? I spent a 98-99 in Berlin after living in the US for several years and Deutsche Bank Berlin wouldn't give me a checking account even though I still had the DB savings account I had since childhood in Stuttgart. Same story at Sparkasse so I had to first move to a real appartment, then open an account, then I could do banking. I never did manage to get an EC card. Hopefully things have changed since then but it certainly wasn't easy then, even for a German citizen without any bad credit. Other than that I always thought German banking was a lot better than the craziness with checks here in the US. Luckily checks are rapidly going away, though. Can't remember the last time I wrote one.