also available as an ebook

Copyright © 2021 Fadi Gaziri Cover design & Illustrations: Svetlana Tokarenko

Editing: Abi Carter / Stephanie Braxton

Published by: epubli – ein Service der Neopubli GmbH, Berlin

To my wife Stephanie

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 At Home & In Your Living Quarters

1.1 Getting an apartment

1.2 Making German friends

1.3 The dos and don’ts if you want to make German friends

1.4 Going to the supermarket

1.5 DIY Saturdays & Church Sundays

1.6 Thrifty Germans

1.7 Pfand: Do not bottle it

1.8 The insurance obsession

1.9 The walk of shame

1.10 Going to the Baumarkt

1.11 Going to the government offices

1.12 A little note about the Anglo Saxons:

1.13 Dos and Don’ts:

1.14 Driving a car in Germany

1.15 Phoning customer service (and why it’s not such a good idea)

1.16 The customer is not king: Just accept it!

Chapter 2 The Workplace

2.1 It’s your first day at work: Bring a cake!

2.2 Icebreakers

2.3 Denglish

2.4 Rules rule the rules

2.5 Nobody told me

2.6 Didn’t you get the memo?

2.7 The CC syndrome

2.8 Results vs. Process

2.9 Employment laws

2.10 Döner Fachkraft Ausbildung

2.11 Job titles

2.12 German CVs

2.13 Your first written warning: The Abmahnung

2.14 Unemployment benefits

2.15 “I’m going to the doctor”

Chapter 3 German Language and Culture

3.1 English vs. German: The polar opposites

3.2 Learning German as a foreigner

3.3 The language

3.4 False friends

3.5 Du or Sie? Addressing people properly

3.6 A quick guide to addressing people in Germany

3.7 The ‘weil’ obsession

3.8 The tone

3.9 The ‘nein’ word

3.10 Apology accepted

3.11 Correcting people & Just criticism

3.12 Terminology Don’t get it wrong

3.13 Words that only exist in German

3.14 Fancy a tongue twister?

Chapter 4 Food & Leisure

4.1 Ein Currywurst mit Pommes, bitte!

4.2 Franzbrötchen

4.3 Weird foods: The Spezi

4.4 Spargelzeit

4.5 At the restaurant

4.6 The Flohmarkt

4.7 At the bakery

4.8 On holiday

4.9 Allotments

4.10 Recreation

4.11 German TV: Tatort

4.12 The German sauna

Chapter 5 Arts, Culture, History & Religion: In a nutshell

5.1 Don’t mention the war

5.2 Humour & Funny Germans

5.3 Popular music

5.4 Schlager Schlager

5.5 Musicals

5.6 Theatre & Obsession with nudity

5.7 Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)

5.8 German literature

5.9 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

5.10 Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)

5.11 Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

5.12 Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

5.13 Max Rudolf Frisch (1911-1991)

5.14 Hermann Karl Hesse (1877-1962)

5.15 German philosophers

5.16 Kant & Nietzsche

5.17 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

5.18 Martin Luther (14831546)

5.19 Religion

5.20 German history: A really short version

5.21 The fifty years of vacation

5.22 The Unification of 1989

5.23 The German political system

Chapter 6 Dating, Relationships & Family

6.1 State your intentions

6.2 Men sit down while they pee

6.3 No machomen here

6.4 Kinky Germans

6.5 Dating tips

6.6 Interviews

6.7 Getting Married in Germany

6.8 Having children: The German way

6.9 Adolescence, upbringing & the German school system

6.10 “Das darf man nicht”

6.11 Thou Shalt Report!

6.12 Dogs & Germans

Chapter 7 Why Germany

7.1 German Media — DER SPIEGEL

7.2 Reasonable, practical & a bit boring

7.3 The Big Survey

7.4 Hofstede insights

Chapter 8 Conclusion: The Adaptation Cycle

8.1 How German are you? The ultimate test

Foreword

I

have been thinking long and hard about writing this book for a while now, but never had the courage to do so. This is mainly due to a scar I’ve been bearing for fifteen years ever since university. I was in my final year at Durham, studying Music and German, and I thought it would be a great idea to take an interpreting course for one of my compulsory modules. It was a tough module, but somehow, I managed to wing it through the first months without working too hard. I was good at speaking German, having spent a year there during my third year at university. My third-year professor, Mrs. Schumacher (a native German herself) loved the quiet, studious female students, the type that would always produce the perfect answer, written neatly on a piece of paper, but were generally very shy when speaking in front of the class. Basically, your typical teacher’s pets. I fitted into that category like one of the Klitchko brothers in a Royal Ballet performance of Swan Lake. So it was quite natural that, from the very first lesson, she absolutely hated me. Months later, after a simultaneous translation test that had gone particularly badly — probably because I was still a student and preferred drinking in bars to studying in my tiny room — I remember Mrs. Schumacher handing me back a marked paper. As she did so, she looked at me with an overdose of Schadenfreude — one of the few German words that has made it into international vocabulary, roughly translatable as ‘rejoicing in someone else’s misery’ — and said patronizingly, and I quote: “Considering that English is not your first language, you did pretty well, Fadi.”

I was fuming, but managed to maintain the appearance of zenness, repeating the mantra ‘Goosfrabaaa’ under my breath over and over. Then, I shrugged it off and carried on being a happy-go-lucky student. It was only many years later that a niggling feeling began to resurface; akin to a cancerous tumour that gradually expands in your body, turning healthy optimistic cells into rotten ‘doubters’. In hindsight, however innocent that comment seemed, it did the desired damage; it told me I would never be able to write like a native English speaker. Without going into great detail about my personal biography, I will divulge the fact that English is my third language. Throughout my young adult years, I constantly felt the need to prove that I was good enough. And having done that as a young adult, first by being accepted into a top sixth form college, and later into Durham University, I had finally managed to put my demons to rest.

But as it turned out, the demons were still there, waiting for something to trigger them, and Mrs. Schumacher supplied it with pinpoint accuracy. It is quite possible that this trigger was the main factor that prevented me from writing this book earlier. Another reason might be the fact that there is a great chance of me being expelled from Germany, should this book ever get published. Taking Brexit into consideration, and the fact that I might become a persona non grata, there is a risk of my being denied a residency visa on the grounds of having an

Anti-German mindset. And, finally, the biggest paradox of all: twelve years in this country have wreaked an irreversible change on my mindset-slowly taking me from a British way of thinking to a German one. Thus, I’m beginning to think and reason like the Germans do. The transformation is slowly taking its toll, and thus, in a year’s time, I probably won’t be able to write this book at all. So, let’s get cracking, while I still can.

DISCLAIMER

“Fadi is an international living in Germany. He has lived in Germany for fifteen years and experienced life as a fully integrated expat. His writing is intended as satire and outlines his experiences in Germany. No offence is intended. However, if you do take offence, you are either too sensitive, too German, or both”.

Since this book is primarily aimed at expats, and more importantly written by an expat, the chapters are arranged in a quasi-chronological order of events, as would happen to a person who had just moved to Germany from another country. Just like a survival guide, the topics are written in order of importance. And thus, getting to know your surroundings, including your workplace and home environment, is an essential step to adapting to life in Germany. These sections are followed by chapters concerning the German language, food and leisure activities. Subsequently, you will get to a bit of information about German culture, history and religion — not every single item of importance, but just enough to be able to converse with people around you, and, more importantly, avoid being branded as an ignorant foreigner; a title which, actually, many expats are perfectly content with. In the latter chapters we round off with topics on dating, relationships and family life. And, finally, a concluding chapter brings everything together, comparing the best and the worst traits, in order to give the reader a (semi)objective view of the Germans, and help them decide if Germany is really suited for them.

Chapter 1  At Home & In Your Living Quarters

H

aving finally accomplished your lifelong dream of moving to Germany — okay, that might be a bit exaggerated, but let’s assume for now that this is actually how you feel — you find yourself immersed in new and exciting surroundings: the language, the culture, the people, the mentality, even the smell — everything is different. But before you can start exploring, you’ll first need to sort out the basics — essential things you need to survive — like finding your nearest supermarket, working out your route to work with public transport, getting a sim card for your phone, or registering at the local government office.

These things will occupy most of your time during your first few weeks in Germany. Undoubtedly, all of these new experiences will start to throw up a lot of questions, as you try to adapt to the way ‘things are done’ here. Some of these questions and problems will be relatively straightforward; others will be less simple; and a few things will make absolutely no sense at all. In order to give you – the expat — a bit of a head start, this chapter goes over a few of the things that it took me a while to get my head around when I first moved to Germany, in particular those that have an effect on your immediate surroundings.

1.1 Getting an apartment

One of the first things people need when they move to Germany is a room or an apartment. Depending on where you want to live, the task of getting a place can quickly become exhausting, almost like a fulltime job. The cost of living obviously depends on which city you live in, and the neighbour-hood. If you look further afield, you can easily find houses to rent for the same price as a two-bed apartment in Hamburg, Munich or Berlin. Most people who move to a new city in Germany tend to start out with just renting a furnished room, to give them some time to get settled, and to do some location scouting, before they zero in on exactly where they want to live and get searching for their own place.

Tenancy laws in Germany clearly favour the tenant, which is good news. They prevent the landlord from constantly putting up the prices for existing tenants. They also prevent landlords from evicting tenants for the sake of hiking up prices. This is illegal — the laws are clear about that. The only situation in which it is allowed is if the landlord intends to move into the place themselves, and even then, they have to give at least three months’ notice to the sitting tenants. This is the main reason why people in Germany tend to live in their apartments for very long periods, sometimes literally decades. When I was apartment hunting in Berlin, I met some tenants who had been in their homes for over thirty years, and thus were still paying the same monthly rent as when they first moved in. In other words, they were living in a ninety square meter apartment paying just three hundred euros per month, while their newly move din neighbours were paying the going rate, roughly four times that.

Getting your own apartment in the city, as I found out, is a mammoth task, one which takes several months of viewings, sending documents to landlords, and praying that they will pick you. The thing that surprised me most was the sheer amount of paperwork I had to submit to the landlords in advance of even attending the viewing. I was asked to provide an employment contract, a public indemnity, three months of bank statements, three months of wage slips, a CV with a photograph and even a motivational letter stating why I would make the perfect ‘apartment candidate’. According to the various forums I visited as my desperation to find a place turned to despair, the perfect candidates were usually young couples, who both had permanent jobs. Couples with children were less desirable, and pets were outright banned. Amongst the most desired professions were civil servants, teachers, doctors, engineers and police officers. Apparently, the least desirable profession in the eyes of the landlord is a lawyer. It makes sense.

Then came the shock of the actual viewing. As it turned out, details about these are often posted publicly on the rental company’s website, including the exact time and date. When I went to my first viewing, I was shocked to see no fewer than sixty people loitering next to the building entrance. All of them were interested in the apartment. “Bollocks,” I thought to myself. “At this rate I’m never going to get a place of my own.” Eventually, a man turned up and announced to everybody that he was from the rental company. He went up to the flat, and the hoard of hopefuls duly followed him. The apartment was already vacated: all of the furniture gone, the plaster and flooring ripped out. It was basically just a shell that was about to be renovated. I quickly realized that, compared to the other potential tenants, I had come completely unprepared. They all turned up with lists of questions, which covered everything from the type of flooring that was going to be put in and the specifics of the electrics, to the building’s heating system and energy efficiency rating. They had brought their own tape measures and thermometers, apps measuring noise decibels from the outside, and even some other weird apparatus that apparently measured if the place was damp. I started to feel like a pupil who had turned up for a lesson, only to find out that there was a test for which everybody else had been avidly preparing, that I didn’t know anything about.

Over the next weeks, and months, I went from viewing to viewing, repeating the same process over and over, handing in my documents and hoping they would pick me ahead of all the chirpy, smiling, young, civil servant couples. I must have seen close to fifty different apartments. After the first month, my standards dropped dramatically, and after the second month I was ready to live in a dog kennel, as long as it had my name on it and a patch of dirt where I could curl up for the night.

Into my third month of apartmenthunting, I got a tip off from a friend about a block of flats currently being renovated. It was relatively close to work, in an area with shops, parks and all the essential amenities. I went to the viewing (along with sixty other candidates), and to my delight, got a call from the rental office the following week, offering me one of the apartments. To say that I was over the moon would be a gross understatement. I didn’t even care to ask which exact apartment they were referring to. I accepted blindly and hung up the phone.

1.2 Making German friends

Once you’ve found somewhere to live, it’s time to sort out your social life.

Ever since I moved to Germany, most of the people I hang out with are expats just like me. Mostly either Scandinavian or native English speakers: Brits, Americans, Swedes, Egyptians, Norwegians and Danes. German people have only ever made up a modest proportion of my friendship group — somewhere between 0 and 5 percent, if we’re talking specifics. There is a natural reason for that: expat people tend to hoard together with other expats. You meet them at your language school, or at the meetups organized in pretty much every major city in the Bundesrepublik. At work, you will cling on to the other international people and naturally you will have a lot more in common with them than the seasoned Germans. The language barrier is a given, but you’ll find that German people are actually very good at speaking English (at least, they are in the major cities) and they will go out of their way to show off their language skills to you, however limited they may be, particularly at social events. This should come as a pleasant surprise, particularly to those who have experienced French hospitality — when it comes to speaking English.

Despite this fact (and the fact that I already spoke very good German when I arrived), I have always wondered why, in my nineteen years in Germany, I have only managed to truly bond with a few natives. If you pressed me for an answer, I’d tell you that I put it down to two cultural differences. The first one I tend to refer to as the ability to ‘take the mickey’ out of (make fun of) one’s counterpart, which, as it turns out, is much more important to me than I had ever considered. The second one is a lot less complicated: I have come to the realization that talking German while trying to relax is a bit like doing math in your head while trying to go to sleep. In other words, it’s like mixing oil with water (or chalk and cheese, as the British saying goes). Thus, unless German is your native tongue, speaking it will always involve that extra bit of effort on your behalf, putting you in a state of not quite being yourself, and preventing you from feeling completely at ease with your German counterparts.

That means you only have two options: the first one is to limit the amount of contact you have with German people and build your own expat circle (it sounds quite absurd, considering you live in Germany, but it is actually quite possible, if you so wish, and you’ll come across plenty of other expats who are perfectly happy to pursue their social lives in this way). Or, the second option and this is the one I would like to encourage you to pursue (although I can appreciate the irony of this remark, considering what’s coming up in the rest of this book) — is to embrace the language, culture and people of this country, and have a real go at making some German friends. In reality, going down this route is the only option you have, if you intend to successfully integrate in the German society and enjoy living in this country.

So why is it so hard for some expats to bond with the Germans, you may ask? Taking this from an English-speaking point of view, I’d like to highlight a few differences in the way people go about bonding in Anglo-American and German cultures, as follows:

Pisstaking or mocking is an essential part of male bonding in Britain (since I don’t really have any experience in ‘female bonding’, I’ll just stick to male bonding). So, if you’re talking to your British friend just after they’ve been for a haircut, you’d ask them whether they had an accident while mowing the lawn. Another example would be asking if your mate used all his savings on his new C&A jeans, or telling him that, with a face like his, his only chance of scoring would be in the Dark Room at Berghain1. In German, the word for pisstaking is verarschen, which can loosely be translated as ‘arising about’. Unfortunately, the word has a very negative connotation.

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1 This, essentially German reference cites an underground club in Berlin, famous for its wild parties and sexual freedoms. The Dark Room refers to a room with no light that is a designated space where complete strangers have intercourse.

and anyone suspected of taking the piss will only invoke hostility, rather than smiles.

Only recently, I was at Hamburg airport going through security, and a very polite gentleman working on the x-ray scanner asked me to empty all my pockets into the tray, take my laptop out of its case, and place it in a separate tray. He had a facial expression I can only describe as that of someone who is really dying to go for a big Thomas tit (cockney rhyme slang for going for a number two), but can’t because it isn’t the end of their shift yet. He asked me if I had any liquids on me — basically the usual spiel you get at airport security that most of us have probably been through a gazillion times before. When he asked me to take off my top and my belt, I put on my usual cheeky smirk and asked if I was allowed to keep my underwear. His reaction was quite dramatic: he looked at me with hatred and shouted, “Wollen Sie mich verarschen?” — as in, “Are you taking the piss??” I was mortified. It made me feel as though I had really offended him, as though, instead of poking fun in a subliminal attempt to cheer him up, what I had actually asked him was, “Can I sleep with your sister?” Of course, in retrospect, he probably was just tired of hearing the same joke for the umpteenth time.

With that in mind, I’ve compiled the ten commandments of ‘Dos and Don’ts’, if you want to make any German friends. (Unfortunately, I could only come up with eight, but ten sounds more meaningful).

1.3 The dos and don’ts if you want to make German friends

• Do not use wit or sarcasm; it will never be understood

• If you do tell a joke, be sure to say, “That was a joke,” immediately after. Be prepared to explain the joke if they don’t seem to get it.

• There is no friendly way of taking the piss out of Germans; just don’t do it.

• A good conversation starter is to talk about your health problems, your doctor’s appointment, or the latest insurance policy you have taken out.

• If somebody is telling you about how they had to call in sick and go to the doctor because they had a runny nose or a sore throat, do not — whatever you do — mock them. Be understanding and compassionate. Throw in words like, “Ach du armer!” (Poor you!) or “Gute Besserung” (Get well soon!)

• When another person is talking, be attentive and show empathy, for instance by mimicking their facial expressions. Paraphrase their responses when it’s your turn, and never interrupt or interject when the other person is talking.

• When asked a question, be informative, precise, elaborate, and serious. Do not offer short or wishy-washy answers like, “Could be better” or “Yeah, alright”.

• Make appointments with your friends, and be on time! I can’t stress this one enough.

1.4 Going to the supermarket

I remember the first time I went to a supermarket in Hamburg, as most people remember the first time, they drove a car, or the first time they went on a trip without their parents, or that time they fell off their bike. I can’t really say if it was because of the psychological trauma it inflicted upon me, but I vividly remember every detail.

Basically, it went something like this:

09:58 — Enter the supermarket.

10:02 — Some tw*t barges into me without saying anything. Does not apologies.

10:04 — Standing at the grocery section, contemplating whether my Mac book Pro needs another memory card update, and some douchebag reaches right across me, again without uttering a single word. Instinctively I turn and say, “Sorry”, to which I get no reaction.

10:05 — Shop assistant ignores my attempts to get his attention because I can’t find the dairy section. I could well be standing in one of the mazes hidden inside the Egyptian Pyramids, surrounded by ancient hieroglyphs, or teleported to another galaxy, and I would be equally lost.

10:08 — Yet another aimless walk around the shop without any luck.

10:10 — After walking three times through every aisle of the shop I finally manage to find milk, bread, some toilet paper, and something that looks like chicken breasts.

10:12 — I get in the queue and wait. A guy walks right past me and queues up beside an individual checkout. “How rude,” I think to myself, making a mental note, but doing nothing.

10:13 — A woman walks right past me and does the same bloody thing. My head is about to explode, but this time I’ve learnt the lesson. I take a step forward into the left line and wait for my turn.

10:15 — I’m finally being served by the cashier, who looks at me with disgust and asks me which types of ‘Brötchen’ (bread rolls) I’ve selected. The three rolls are in a seethrough plastic bag. I shrug; my whole body takes the shape of a question mark. Apparently, I am supposed to know exactly which type of bread roll I have selected (and there are at least twenty in the bakery section). I apologize profusely and promise to memorize the names for all the different types of Brötchen before my next visit. The annoyed cashier demonstratively looks through the list behind her till. At the same time, I can feel the aura of disapproval emanating from the people behind me in the form of a quiet, but distinct murmur.

10:17 — “DREIZEHN NEUNZIG!” the cashier barks at me. I produce the only bill I have in my wallet, which is a fifty euro note. As you can imagine, this doesn’t go down well. I feel like Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom, about to get discovered by the mob. Another step in the wrong direction, and I will be compromised. I will end up rotating on a skewer with an apple stuck in my mouth.

10:18 — The cashier rolls her eyes at me in disbelief, followed by a very long sigh, then takes my bill while muttering something under her breath.

10:19 — Again, I apologize, take my change, and make a dash for the exit without looking back, like the sole survivor of a zombie movie.

1.5 DIY Saturdays & Church Sundays

It’s no secret that Germans like order and structure, and this mantra extends into pretty much every aspect of their daily lives. Since the supermarkets are closed on a Sunday (as is everything else, for that matter), most people do their family shopping on a Saturday — which is why you’ll find it a most unpleasant experience, should you foolishly decide to venture into ALDI, EDEKA, or any other major supermarket chain on that day of the week. For people who do not like food shopping, there are options to get your groceries delivered, but Germans are not very keen on that, for some strange reason. Another favourite activity reserved for Saturdays is DIY and the ominous and unavoidable trip to the Baumarkt, which is where you get all your home supplies. There is a separate chapter dedicated to this later on.

As a foreigner, you need to know that DIY is not allowed on Sundays in Germany – by law — hence why the Sabbat is also known as a Ruhetag (quiet day). So, things like drilling, mowing the lawn, vacuuming and even singing are prohibited. As you can imagine, Germans are very precise about these types of things, and they love making rules. Put two and two together, and voilà, you’ve got a list of rules of things you can and cannot do on a Sunday. So, for example, vacuuming is allowed but only if your vacuum cleaner produces sixty-five decibels of noise or less (no joke). Anything above that is out of the question. Whether or not you are allowed to wash your car (which you can only do at designated car wash places), is a rule that differs from federal state to federal state. Washing your clothes, on the other hand, is okay. I don’t want to be the one to tell you, but ignoring these rules can cause a lot of agro with your neighbors. They might even call the Ordnungsamt (a regulatory body responsible for the upkeep of such regulations) on you, and they are entitled to do so.

As a rule of thumb, Sundays are reserved for Sunday breakfast, which must include certain things for it to qualify as such: at least two different types of bread rolls (Brötchen) and one type of sweet pastry like croissants; at least two types of savory toppings like cheese, ham or salami and at least one sweet topping like marmalade or jam; sliced vegetables and, of course, coffee and tea. For most Christians, a trip to your local church is a compulsory activity on a Sunday, while others may choose recreational activities such as jogging, cycling, hiking, or long walks in the forest, basically anything that can be classified as exercise. In the afternoon, you usually have Kuchenzeit (cake time), spent with your family, in-laws, or friends. After your Abendbrot (dinner), watching an episode of Tatort is obligatory, to put the cherry on top of your perfect German Sunday. More on that later.

1.6 Thrifty Germans

In my younger days in Germany, when I used to go food shopping with my flat-mates, I was often baffled by the thriftiness that possessed them. It’s not that I’m throwing money around left, right and centre, constantly living it large. Not at all. However, in comparison to my German counterparts of the same age, I definitely was. To them, I was borderline careless with money. For example, if I picked up a packet of cheese that didn’t have a red reduced sticker on it, I was promptly told to put it down. And if there was a similar item that was — let’s say — seven cents cheaper in a supermarket a fifteen-minute walk from us, then it was always the obvious choice to go for the cheaper item there instead. Another example of my apparently cavalier attitude towards money: the cashiers at the supermarkets would never let you off if you turned up even one cent short of the sum required. I’ve tested this myself, and every time I was told to produce the missing cent. The truth is, German’s love saving money, and they love boasting about it too. Indeed, such a topic is very popular in all social circles, whether at work, in a pub, at home, or in any other setting. There is never a wrong time or place for this kind of a discussion. Germans are happy to discuss the money they have saved on car insurance, food shopping, gadgets, clothing, or even their last meal with friends. Incidentally, that last point deserves a special mention. If you find yourself dining with your friends or colleagues, it is very common to split the bill at the end, down to the very last cent. There won’t be anybody saying, “Just give us a tenner mate” or “Let’s just split it all equally” and definitely not, “Just buy us dinner next time.” Instead, there will be a meticulous process of calculating how much each and every person owes, including the tip, followed by each individual paying separately to the waiter. If the staff are particularly useless, in some instances, you’d be expected to add the sums and pay together — one bill, that’s how it works over here.

Once in a while, many German people deliberately forget their thriftiness for one evening, a weekend, or even a week, and that’s when they go and splash the cash. The German term for this is gönnen — literally meaning, to treat oneself. I’ve seen this many times in my experience as a hotel musician. Couples would arrive for a weekend package at a five-star hotel, the kind of place where a room without breakfast starts at about three hundred euros. They would wine and dine, cocktails, champagne, fancy dinner, the whole smorgasbord, and as the weekend progressed, they would visit the spa, go for various massage treatments, do walks on the beach and so on and so forth. Others might treat themselves to a cruise, a holiday to Mallorca, or a skiing trip in the Alps. The principle is the same. It is quite common for the Germans to reward themselves for the hard work they do, and indeed, Germans do work a lot.

1.7 Pfand: Do not bottle it

Germany is a country obsessed with the environment, carbon footprints, and recycling. Perhaps only second to the Netherlands, Germany has one of the most sophisticated recycling systems in the world. For example, it was one of the first countries to introduce charges for the use of plastic shopping bags from the supermarkets, long before anyone else followed suit. The Bundesrepublik has always portrayed itself as being a pacemaker in matters like reducing carbon emissions, wind and solar power, renewable energy, and so on and so forth. But perhaps the most cunning invention that was introduced by Germany is Pfand (literally translatable as ‘deposit’, it is a system for recycling plastic bottles). It’s simple enough: you pay an extra twenty-five cents at the shop for each drink in a plastic bottle (or eight cents for glass bottles), and, when you bring the empty bottles back, you get your money back. Simply deposit your empty bottles into one of the recycling machines, which you will find at pretty much all supermarkets, listen to that crunching sound it makes as your bottles are squashed down to the size of a coin, and presto! Once you get the hang of it, it becomes a bit of an obsession, so even if you buy a bottle of Coke at a football game, you hold on to it and take it home with you, because otherwise that’s twenty-five cents you’re throwing away! The most extreme case of this I’ve witnessed in public was at a classical concert venue: a guy was refused entry because he had an empty Coke bottle with him. He protested vehemently, shouting, “But it’s PFAND!”2

1.8 The insurance obsession

Relatively recently, I ordered some cinema tickets online. Before the booking was finalized, I was taken to another page which asked me if I wanted to ensure my tickets, which I found a bit absurd. Presumably, some people feel the need to take out insurance on cinema tickets which cost about nine euros each, in case they fall ill and can’t fulfil their commitment.

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2 If you’d like to know more about recycling in Germany, you could do some further reading on the https://www.nabu.de — the nature preservation society. What I learned there, was the fact that there are in fact two systems of recycling bottles: the socalled single use, and multiple use one. As the word suggests — single use are your cans of coke, and anything that can’t be reused, while other plastic bottles can actually be used again, hence the term.

It’s no secret that Germany is the most insured country in the world, statistically speaking, ranking even higher up than the USA. There is literally insurance for everything. It’s no wonder that the Germans have incorporated insurance into their list of acceptable small talk topics. I can think of one incident that elucidates this better than anything else. I was playing football on an enclosed pitch next to a bike path, and at one point the ball was kicked over the fence. I went to fetch it and then kicked it back towards the pitch. The ball went up, then down, bouncing multiple times. Unfortunately, there was a female cyclist on the bike path. She saw the ball bouncing towards her and panicked, like a deer in the headlights, left, right, centre, wobbling back and forth. She didn’t know where to go. As Murphy’s law would have it, the ball ended up hitting the front wheel of her bike, square on, breaking her light — or at least knocking it off, slightly. It was almost as if the whole thing had happened in slow motion (if you’ve seen the steamroller scene in Austin Powers, you’ll know what I mean), or a deliberately and comically absurd fight scene in a movie. Call it what you like, the collision was inevitable.

I ran up to see if she was okay, which obviously she was, but, having seen the broken light, she immediately asked, “Haben Sie Haftpflichtversicherung?”

“What the heck is that?” I retorted.

What she had in fact asked was if I had any ‘public liability insurance’. The German term is a compound of three words: Haft, Pflicht and Versicherung. Put them together and it’s enough to make your tongue do a double knot. Your saliva will project ten metres forward as you attempt to pronounce it.

To Germans, the word is an institution in itself; a pillar upon which they identify themselves as Germans; a proud social common denominator — the German DNA, if you like. In other words, if Frank Schmidt is on holiday in Portugal, and feeling homesick, it is likely that he will find someone from his own country to talk to about Haftpflichtsversicherung. It’s the perfect antidote to homesickness. The fact is, although public liability insurance is not mandatory in Germany, it may as well be, given how many people have it and swear by it.

Since then, I’ve witnessed many conversations like the one I had with the broken bike lady. If you have an accident, a breakin at home, your bike stolen, an emergency that cuts your holiday short, or literally anything that has not gone according to the master plan, be prepared for the fact that the first question anyone is going to ask you is if you are insured against whatever just happened. Paranoia, you might say? To anyone who is not from Germany, a definite yes. But to Germans, this is a simple fact of life. They hate surprises and unforeseen circumstances, things not going according to plan and things that happen — and I’m going to use the most blasphemous word in the German lexicon — spontaneously. Every German is constantly asking themselves, “What if?” And nothing would irk them more than a scenario in which that question remained unanswered.

“What happens if I fall over?”

“Do I have insurance that covers me?”

If you are reading this with skepticism, thinking, “Oh, this guy is just bitter,” or “He’s got a tiff with the Germans,” you are more than welcome to put my hypothesis to the test. Next time you talk to a German person, throw in a couple of happy go lucky phrases like, “We’ll see what happens,” or “Let’s play it by ear.” You will immediately notice a reaction, which might be more or less visible, depending on the amount of Germanness the person opposite you is in possession of. But be assured you will get the reaction. It will be either in the form of immediate quickfire questions demanding you explain what you mean, or there will be a long silence during which they display a confused expression on their face. Like that of a computer that has been fed a formula that contradicts itself, which it keeps trying in vain to compute. Eventually the mainframe caves in, and the CPU explodes from overheating.

In other words, everything must be logical and coherent, like a formula. A must equal B, and A plus B must equal C. There are no if formulas. This logical thinking is very closely related to the notion of control. Most Germans are obsessed with trying to control every part of their existence, and that ties in with their need to always see things through properly. In their defense: have you ever read the small print in an insurance contract? Probably not, but if you did, you’d find all sorts of nasty sentences that limit the insurer’s accountability for things that you, as the insured person, probably take for granted. A good German person grows up with a mechanism that ensures they read the small print. This instinct is conditioned from a very young age. You’ll have come across this reflex if you’ve ever visited an ‘official’ institution in Germany, be it a bank, a university, a tax office, or government office. If you forget something, or get some minute detail wrong, the first thing you’ll hear is an accusation: “Did you not read the information on the website?” or “Did you not read the small print?”

This explains, at least in part, why this topic occupies so much time in Germany, whether at home, at the workplace, or during social gatherings. The average German person — depending on their age, of course — will have anywhere between nine and twenty different insurance policies attached to their name. Here is a list of most common ones:

• Public liability insurance (Haftpflicht)

• Car insurance

• Roadside cover

• Home insurance

• Travel insurance

• Sickness insurance

• Legal cover insurance (Rechtschutz)

• Bicycle theft

• Two types of pet insurance (if you have a dog, a cat, or a horse)

• Life insurance

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. All types of insurances have different premiums, which include or exclude a myriad of additional services. I’ve read through all of them and I can tell you that some of them border on the absurd.

- Ende der Buchvorschau -

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