If you've just arrived in Berlin and you've started making plans to stay, read on. So far you've managed to master the U-bahn, order beer in German (even drunk or while drinking it) and find your way home in the dark. So far it is fun and Bohemian. Cheap and cheerful; Sallowist. But wait.
A few months after you arrive in Berlin, you will need to start thinking about the few thousand pieces of paperwork you’ll need to fill out if you want to be legal. You can of course stay under the radar, bill as a freelancer from abroad, or avoid the head-vice that is German bureaucracy.
In the short term (for as long as you can wing it), this is highly advisable.
But in the long term, you will be screwed: no housing contract, no work, no benefits, no library cards, no discounts, no season tickets, healthcare - nothing. German society will dangle before you like pearls before swine. If you want to fit in, you’ve got to fill out: You’ll need a health insurance number, a tax number, a pension-insurance-number, a registration receipt and an identification number, a VAT-exemption number, a free of church-tax-acknowledgement (a sort of tax excommunication), and a deluge more of digits and codes.
Think you can just come to Germany and be bad at paperwork? Forget it. “Sorry, I don’t speak German” will not get you anywhere in admin HQs, apart from directions to a flyer advertising a beginner level German course & more paperwork under watchful evil eyes. While Berliners do love speaking English, this is in bars or workshops, over vegan barbecues or at parties on abandoned ships. In the sallow towers of Berlin’s bureaucracy, numbers is the only second language.
A few months after you arrive in Berlin, you will need to start thinking about the few thousand pieces of paperwork you’ll need to fill out if you want to be legal. You can of course stay under the radar, bill as a freelancer from abroad, or avoid the head-vice that is German bureaucracy.
In the short term (for as long as you can wing it), this is highly advisable.
But in the long term, you will be screwed: no housing contract, no work, no benefits, no library cards, no discounts, no season tickets, healthcare - nothing. German society will dangle before you like pearls before swine. If you want to fit in, you’ve got to fill out: You’ll need a health insurance number, a tax number, a pension-insurance-number, a registration receipt and an identification number, a VAT-exemption number, a free of church-tax-acknowledgement (a sort of tax excommunication), and a deluge more of digits and codes.
Think you can just come to Germany and be bad at paperwork? Forget it. “Sorry, I don’t speak German” will not get you anywhere in admin HQs, apart from directions to a flyer advertising a beginner level German course & more paperwork under watchful evil eyes. While Berliners do love speaking English, this is in bars or workshops, over vegan barbecues or at parties on abandoned ships. In the sallow towers of Berlin’s bureaucracy, numbers is the only second language.
Germans love precision, so naming any office is like a shooting competition for hillbillies: they have to nail it. These offices have very long names and tend to list everything they do in one long word. You’re unlikely to deal with The Junior Clerks’ Head Office at the Association of Danube Steamboat Electricians -
(Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft)
- but you will probably want to enrol for a German course at the Volkshochschule, the People’s Higher School or the Adult Education Centre.
German words in general inspire order and submission. The words for everything from tiny supermarket products to street signs are eerily long. Monster-words that not even dictionaries can translate loiter across German websites, ready to ridicule the beginner’s dubious knowledge; words that take hours to read, days to translate and years to pronounce.
Trying to read anything in German is like trying to nibble on your own earlobes. While English and other languages often use multiple words together in sentences to express a concept or denote a place or thing, German just synthesizes different words into lettergasms. Such monster words are everywhere, like scaffolding, lawyers or traffic lights.
They’re like zip files or suitcases waiting to be unpacked. A Hubschrauberlandeplatz is a helicopterlandingplace. One doesn’t talk of a wart on a breast, but rather a brustwarze (although to be honest, from personal experience, you might want to avoid talking about both). Types of wart, drafts and annoyances (‘earworm’) have their own names in German. This tendency gets worse the more formal the setting.
The Rindfleischetikettierungsberwachungsaufgabenbertragungsgesetz, the-beef-meat-label-overseeing-task-of-price-setting-law, won’t stop you eating a steak -- yet neither will it have given the butcher who brought it to you a headache pronouncing it. Some of these words are so big you need to broaden your margins to fit them in a line on a page. Concepts that are yet to be understood in other lands have already been named in Germany, where tips for using the escalator are Rolltreppenbenutzungshinweise, or Moving-Steps-User-Guidelines.
The Rindfleischetikettierungsberwachungsaufgabenbertragungsgesetz, the-beef-meat-label-overseeing-task-of-price-setting-law, won’t stop you eating a steak -- yet neither will it have given the butcher who brought it to you a headache pronouncing it. Some of these words are so big you need to broaden your margins to fit them in a line on a page. Concepts that are yet to be understood in other lands have already been named in Germany, where tips for using the escalator are Rolltreppenbenutzungshinweise, or Moving-Steps-User-Guidelines.
Language and public administration are equally
meticulous and delight in complementing each other’s painstaking devotion to
precision. The first administrative move you’ll need to make if you plan to
stay longer than three months in Germany is to register, to get your Anmeldbestätigung. Your local Bezirk, or council, will be expecting
you soon and their office should become highly familiar to you --The Bürgeramt or citizen office.
You’ll need to show the Bürgeramt that you
have shown a landlord relevant documents to obtain the housing contract for
where you live. Without this sheet of paper, Germany will be closed to you: No
video library cards, membership schemes, and most importantly, no benefits. You
get a sheet of paper, the state gets another brick in the wall.
I went to my Anmeldung
appointment armed with only my passport and thinking that nothing could go
wrong. I told them I lived with my girlfriend, and that I had lived with her
for a month. This was the truth, so I repeated it twice.
But in fact my girlfriend was registered at her
parents’ house in Bavaria, something she herself was unaware of. So when I told
the Bezirksamt where I lived, they instantly new something wasn’t up.
Offended at their morose faces, I insisted I meant no harm to my girlfriend or
her abode, I simply wished to live with her, with her full consent and in line
with German law. They asked me again if I definitely lived with her, and I
answered yes. I told them I wasn’t married but that I wouldn’t let this intrude
on my respect for their citizen. A trust seemed to be developing between
us, a sort of EU dream, as the council officer typed details into the computer.
It all seemed to be going so well.
Then suddenly the women in the office began to talk
between themselves in an incomprehensible yet clearly threatening tone. Words
were being hurled like chairs over my head. Finally a finger was wagged my way
holding a print out, and thinking I’d achieved the most basic of bureaucratic
feats on my list, I thanked everyone profusely and left.
Two weeks later, a €200 fine for false registration
arrived at our house. One can only be registered in one place in Germany – and
by insisting that I did live with my girlfriend I had proven to the Office of
Registrations that she lived with me and not where she had told them. The moral
of the story is: Know in whose name your house is
registered.
Now that you have your sheet of paper saying where
you live, you’ll need to go to the Finanzamt, the tax office, and get a tax
number. If you thought your first taste of German red tape was bad, you’re in
for worse.
If you work for a company, then you might just be okay. You’ll need no more than a tax number, a Steuernummer, and your employer may well sort out the rest. But don’t bank on this. You may still need health insurance.
If you work for a company, then you might just be okay. You’ll need no more than a tax number, a Steuernummer, and your employer may well sort out the rest. But don’t bank on this. You may still need health insurance.
Health insurance is compulsory in Germany, regardless of whether you’re healthy or not. If you’re
self-employed, health insurance will cost you a fortune and will come to
consume much of the income that you earn. Fifteen percent of my income goes on
health insurance and if I had a penny for each hour I’ve put in rendering the paperwork
they send me comprehensible, I’d be writing this from my palm-flooded beach at
Champagne Island.
Time to be on form. |
If you find yourself wiping the tears away from
your face with VAT-exemption forms, don’t forget that you are not the only
person despairing. Even some Germans have picked up on how bureaucratic
they are. Reinhardt Mey’s song A Request to file a Request for an
Application (Einen Antrag auf Erteilung eines Antragsformulars), a
parody of the impossibility of successfully dealing with German bureaucrats,
serves only to remind foreigners of the pain ahead.
And it isn’t only German offices that have long names. Germans also take
their nouns very seriously, so seriously in fact that they give all of them a
capital. They hate the definite article; the word ‘the’ in its infantile
universality is deplored for its simplicity. “It’s just too definite.” Rather
they like to give the word ‘the’ hundreds of possible variations, all
intricately linked to a mathematical grammar that would turn Pythagoras into a
crack-peddling pimp. You will however hear yourself introduced as “the Alex” or
“the John,” “the Marie,” “the Sylvia,” – or whatever.
You are not
special. This is just how Germans talk. When someone new enters a room,
introductions sound like a roll call. “Ze Clara iz here! Clara, have you
met ze Michael, ze Jan, ze Nele, ze Johann, ze….
Like Italian, French, Spanish and romantic languages, German uses
genders. But unlike the Mediterranean languages, which limit themselves to two
genders, German indulges in a third, the neutral: for
rocks, machines and soulless designates of their own, you’re thinking. But if
you count on intuition - men are masculine, women are feminine, sort of thing -
you’re wrong. Men are masculine and women are feminine, but stop right there.
Girl is already neutral.
None of it makes sense, which haunts Germans. They need to make sense of
everything for they are the western world’s OCD philosophers. Germans talk of a Weltschmerz (World pain) and Lebensmüdigkeit
(Life tiredness). They have a
ghost for everything, even a spirit of the age. This is a self-perpetuating
vicious cycle; new words are forever formed to describe contemporary variations of
previous words. Even the zeitgeist gets its own shadow ghost eventually. To
keep up with old and new words, your best friends will be leo.de, the online
English-German-English dictionary or better still, linguee.de.
Friendships with Google Translate are a two-edged sword: move with caution in this respect.
As you advance up the linguistic ladder past total incomprehension and
into being vaguely understood, you will find the words that you will encounter
in German have no English equivalent. Or the dictionary simply refuses to offer
them up, like translations kept hostage with access only by means of a special
password.
German verbs are also a slippery affair, with compounds
placed together like reluctant pandas made to mate. Generally they stick
together and do the job but in certain instances the compounds coldly split and
are practically unrecognizable as the original verb.
So while einfahren is to drive in,
Ich fahre ein is - I drive in. Remember;
this is all to keep you on your toes. Particles will fly around sentences like
drunken undercover agitators in search of chaos. You will spend hours plotting
through these mind fields. A German sentence is like a thousand word puzzle –
different pieces need to be rearranged before anything can be understood. “The
joy of language is to have to work things out, not to just understand and speak
be able. That is too boring, really.”
German is not one of those
languages that simplifies things. For starters most things are written backwards.
Nothing happens until every little last detail has been specified of when,
where, why, with whom and how it will happen. The verb quite often sneaks its
way to the end of the sentence, leaving you reading a load of side clauses that
are incomprehensible. That is why Germans says things like “Would you like with
me, tomorrow, at 20:00 hours, for film from France in the city with the friends
for fun having to cinema to go and watch?”
The only way you’ll be able to survive is to sign up for a beginner German course at the Adult Education Center, the Volkshochschule.
Here you will be drilled like a Dubai skyscraper in your articles and
declensions, your side clauses and main sentences, your gerundives versus your
datives. This is a rite of initiation for any long term Anglo Saxon or
foreigner, planning to successfully move to Berlin. Millions of us have been
through it, only the bravest both enrol and avoid it. If you enrol, you will be
thrown into a world of German-only explanations. If you avoid it, you will
forever be destined to live a shadow life at the mercy of expats.
Just do
it.