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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

I document German bureaucracy for a living,[0] and everything is like that. Every life event - immigrating, getting a job, getting married, having a child, buying a car - is mired in slow, paper-based bureaucracy. It is a constant, significant impediment to life in the country.

Just last week, I was telling people that the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark.

I cannot overstate how terrible German bureaucracy is, and how defeating it is to deal with it. A lot of people give up and leave the country over it.

[0] https://allaboutberlin.com

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I am familiar with both German and Finnish bureaucracy.

German bureaucracy is (in)famous for paperwork and using faxes. Citizens/residents have no unique identifier (more and more weakened recently) and need to present documentation for everything. If you have no paper birth certificate you are not born...

Finland has had much higher digitalization for decades. You have a person number and authorities store everything centrally. A big brother nightmare for Germans.

20 years ago many processes in Finland went quickly, much more smoothly than in Germany. However, recently more and more authorities went into meltdown. It takes 3 or 6 months to renew a passport (or you queue in the street for many hours to get it done without an internet reservation). Certificates needed for inheritance processes delayed for many months each, so in the end heirs don't get access to their property until years later. If an elder person needs a legal guardian because they are unable to handle banking or similar anymore, you are more or less openly told: Does not make sense queuing, they will die first.

Where the degradation came from I have no idea. At least digitalization is not a guarantee that things work smoothly. In some areas (but probably none of those examples I mentioned) failed IT projects are the direct cause that processes break down.

For all it's many many faults, I have to say I'm sometimes surprised by how efficient some South African bureaucratic state organs function. To get a renewed passport is a 5 minute online form, electronic payment, and then a 30 minute appointment at a local bank branch to get biometrics taken. Then about 1-2 weeks later you can go and pick up your new passport.

Driving license not much different.

For most people, paying taxes is a non-event, and tax returns happens automatically in most cases.

Then the bad: - Firearm licenses: more like months if not years in some cases. - Birth and marriage certificates: 4-6 months - Permission for building/construction/alterations: Don't even waste your time. - Healthcare: get private insurance if you value your life. - Public transport: lol

It's interesting how in sufficiently large and complex bureaucratic systems (Governments, Microsoft, etc), you get little pockets of excellence because somewhere in the mess of it all, there is someone who cares about their job, and they put the effort in to make it better for their users/customers.

In South Africa's case, these pockets of excellence are often and frequently replaced, because they are being measured by different metrics than what we as citizens care about, and deemed lacking: Party first, enable corruption, etc. So then you have these government institutions that every 10-15 years or so get renewed, and then coast on that renewal while it gradually goes to shit, before someone steps in and fixes it all up, before them being fired again for not allowing the right amount of corruption to take place. Vicious cycle.

This is interesting because I have the exact opposite experience. I'm a South African but I live in the EU, for me, I need to book my new passport 1 year+ in advance of it expiring because it takes on average about that long (if I pay the bribes).

The trick is not to do it at the embassy, but to take a two-week holiday and do it in South Africa.

I was thinking about exactly this was I was writing my original post.

I'm currently also an expat living in the EU. The common sentiment from a lot of other South Africans here is to go back to SA for a 2 week holiday to get your passport. Apparently dealing with anything home-affairs related via your local embassy is a total shitshow. People have been waiting years for birth certificates for new babies and such.

It seems that the intersection between Home Affairs and International Relations (embassies) is in total shambles.

I didn’t have to leave my bedroom to renew my Irish passport!

Our passport office is phenomenal. Too bad about everything else!

> Citizens/residents have no unique identifier

actually that's not true: people in Germany have MANY unique IDs: they have not one but TWO tax identifiers ("Steuernummer" and "Steuer ID"), social security number ("Sozialversicherungsnummer"), national ID number ("Personalausweisnummer"), passport number ("Reisepaßnummer") and health insurance ID ("Krankenversicherungsnumer"), among others.

Yes, I know. But having many IDs means that your information cannot be found by the same ID in all offices and actually many companies, too. That's the way it works in Finland (Sweden, too). While that is a data protection nightmare from a German perspective it should at least allow efficient processes. But as I wrote efficiency is increasingly suffering in Finland, too.

Several of these IDs change when you get a new Personalausweis, Reisepaß, or Health Insurance, respectively. They don't identify you, but the document or contract. Some of the tax identifiers might be specific to you and a tax authority, ie change when you move to a different Land.

For what it's worth, while it does not often come up in a positive light on this forum (and others), Hungary has almost all processes digitalized. Passport renewal is an exception, but after a quick in-person appointment, you get your passport shipped to you in less than a week (usually), even to a foreign country. You have your taxes prepared for you automatically, you just need to click a button to accept the draft. That said social services is pretty bad, especially for elderly care, but to no fault of IT services. They even have a free, state-provided VPN if you want to watch TV programmes back home, from abroad.

IT in general is stuck in blind valley and doesn't make anything easier anymore with its aggressive outsourcing and profit extraction. The only systems which go quickly and efficiently are those against the interests of an average citizen - e.g. the covid certification apps determining and limiting basic citizen rights. Oftentimes I prefer to show up in person with ID and fetch a printout with confirmation, than to install their bloated sloppy apps tracking the shit out of me.

Biggest problem: Germans don't understand digitization.

They often try to recreate the paper process with IT, instead of making a complete new setup.

Example:

Previously, you had to go to the City Hall or whatever in your pace of birth to get a birth certificate.

Now you can email them, pay, and they mail you the certificate via snail mail.

How it should be: Use an online token, log into your account, request a birth certificate and just print it. It should have a URL that can be used to verify that it is valid. This would be faster and the risk of forgery would be much lower. A seal - and Germans love seals, they wank of to seals - can be forged much easier.

> Previously, you had to go to the City Hall or whatever in your pace of birth to get a birth certificate.

> Now you can email them, pay, and they mail you the certificate via snail mail.

> How it should be: Use an online token, log into your account, request a birth certificate and just print it. It should have a URL that can be used to verify that it is valid. This would be faster and the risk of forgery would be much lower. A seal - and Germans love seals, they wank of to seals - can be forged much easier.

That's an unreasonably high (or weird) standard. What country has a process like that? Switzerland certainly doesn't.

Yes those seals rly invite you to misuse them. It’s ridiculous easy to forge them.

Yeah, I worked in a German startup for 2 years, managers were running it like we were manufacutring cars.

Lots of decision's, made no sense in software development.

Aggressive outsourcing is hilariously out of touch.

Western consultancies win contracts to build IT systems. The project is outsourced to India for low cost. Indian outsourcing team hires the cheapest talent possible. Cheap talent provides cheap quality. Website is bloated and slow. Some person on the internet uses these systems, hates it and develops a strong negative bias for all Indian (replace with any 3rd world country) talent.

On the other hand, Indian Govt hires the competent Indians at fair prices. (These aren't even our best or that well paid). It treats them with (moderate) respect and allows them to own their projects. Indian Govt. websites turn out to be seamless, performant and handle 10x the scale of western IT systems. This is a recent phenomenon, but India's digitization of railways, covid management, aadhar, social welfare and UPI has been best in class.

Reminds me of when westerners visit India, eat at the most suspicious looking street food place, and inevitably get sick. You never want your street food (programmers) to be cheaper than the bar set by local middle class (or their taxes). Yeah, outsourcing will save money. But, have some standards.

You get what you pay for.

There is massive corruption and lobbying in the decision chain. I cannot imagine responding positive, without any incentive, to a proposal "Shall we outsource this stuff to Bengaluru?". Anyway this applies mostly to corporate EU, profit extraction in public sector in many EU countries means rather hiring local software house with local students on some non-permanent volatile contracts.

Same experience in Sweden. It took me 1.5 years to get to full European healthcare (i.e European Health Insurance Card). Only to learn that moving within the country, they basically lose all your health records. Seems digitalization is not quite implemented for any non-totally-daily processes and as soon as a single human is needed in the line, there are not enough people.

The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments. These services are expensive and require staff to keep things going. Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease since this will cause the public sector to "make do and mend" and end up running more efficiently, rather than having a knock on effect and decrease the quality of the services. This is the policy direction responsible for the fall in the quality of public services in the UK, and for some reason Finland decided this was an excellent idea and is following suit. The SDP patched things up a little bit, but not as fast as things can be torn down.

I know basically nothing about Finland, and was curious about your comment as I find government spending an interesting topic. So the first thing I did was look up the government budget trends in Finland. [1] As an outsider it just seems that the Finnish budget is growing at an exponential pace? From 2010 to 2019 the budget went from ~50bn to 55bn per year, nearly managing to even create a balanced budget in 2018. From 2019 to to 2024 it seems to have grown to 90bn/year and is continuing to rapidly grow. There's certainly some expectation of an increased budget during COVID times, but it doesn't seem to be coming down, at all?

[1] - https://vm.fi/en/the-budget

Finland has been a very poor country after WW II until the 1970s (compared to Sweden who had no war or Germany who lost the war). An economy best compared to Portugal or Greece.

The was a first overheating boom in the end of the 1980s, until a heavy recession took over in the 1990s. The next boom was Nokia driven in the 2000s until the global banking crisis. Since Nokia has fallen (well, it still exists but with a different business and more modest success) there has been little to no growth and heavy deindustrialization.

So basically Finland is back to the previous state of being a poor country with weak industry (I am exaggerating a bit). But the spending has continued to grow like the Nokia boom years had never ended.

Edit: Finland has one of the least favorite population pyramids in Europe. People getting older and no children. Very little immigration until maybe the last decade. And now a far right government with a strong anti-immigration agenda.

The central government took full responsibility of funding healthcare, social services, and some other government functions in 2023. Before that, large part of the funding came from municipal governments.

Then there is the war in Ukraine. Normally, Russia is one of the most important trading partners of Finland. But when it doesn't know how to behave, a large part of foreign trade is missing, and the economy suffers.

A combination of Covid, and the security situation with Ukraine and Russia perhaps.

As Weber observed, the free market requires a lot of bureaucracy.

How much change is that in real value?

> Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease since this will cause the public sector to "make do and mend"

There is some weird notion in populace that if we cut the funding, the public services will "get handle of themselves" and become more cost efficient. That's what a reasonable individual would do in tougher times. What happens in reality is that the nepotist core in public services will entrench and be fine or even better off, while the society will be told to suck it up.

Whereas if funding is increased, that same nepotist core will suddenly discover their spirit of public service and ensure the money is spent on better delivery, instead of further enriching themselves?

Honestly, the whole funding debate for public services is often so facile and ideologically entrenched. Both sides are right: Public services _are_ invariably inefficient, and cutting funding _does_ invariably do little to increase efficiency. But neither side will accept the validity of the other's argument and so we end up with this cycle of alternating governments imposing austerity and generosity.

"Austerity is dropout"

If the German government did "austerity" they wouldn't need half my wage to spend on literal nonsense. Look at the budget over the last decades, as if there wasn't enough money...

One person's Schwachsinn is another's Vernunft.

I've never actually looked at the German budget (quasi B1 deutschkenntnisse and no training in economics, what would I get from reading them?), what I can say is that it's very easy to fall into the trap described by Chesterton's fence and call for the removal of things because you don't understand them, not because they're actually bad.

For example, someone I used to know in the UK said much the same about his taxes paying for schools, just because he personally didn't have kids.

I often see comments like this, but what's a good solution to the ever expanding cost of public services (to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp)? You do need to cut back if you're starting to run a significant deficit or more and more of your budget will go on interest payments.

Any large org tends to get more inefficient with time as it accumulates inefficient components it can't get rid of, but unlike companies, government departments aren't going to go bust and close down.

I genuinely don't know a good answer here, but would be curious about other people's.

> (to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp)

Perhaps that's fundamentally barking up the wrong tree. West-European governments in the post WW2 era have had higher relative spendings then that, without every financial expert and their dog declaiming that doomsday is near and services need to be cut.

We've been able to finance better healthcare before, we've able to finance better education before, we've been able to finance better infrastructure before, etc. So which costs have risen out of proportion to the point that none of that is possible today.

High government spending doesn't mean the government is bigger necessarily. The big expenses are just getting moved right back out to the private sector for agricultural subsidies, energy subsidies, etc...

The better metric would be how many employees work (directly or indirectly) for the government and then compare those numbers.

> Any large org tends to get more inefficient with time as it accumulates inefficient components it can't get rid of

This is really the crux of it. Same incompetence and inefficiency, we see in tech industry. Are there any serious studies on the disease that comes with scale, and possibly its cure?

Renewing your passport is quick and relatively painless in the UK. Founding a company is also reasonably easy. This reads like you have some chip on your shoulder about "austerity" and are needlessly bringing it up here.

It is strange because as a Brit living in Finland there are a for sure a lot of things better in Finland when it comes to public services but renewing ID documents and setting up companies absolutely aren’t.

> Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease

Over time I developed a more cynical theory. As politicians have extremely short-term understandings and targets, they abuse the latent momentum of public services to surf on the inherent delayed response before service quality goes down and gets noticed. By then, they can blame the cause on something else, and move on to the next cost-cutting measure.

Even if there is an outcry, they can gaslight citizens into believing either that a) it was not better before or b) the changes are an imperious necessity that cannot be reversed.

Either way, the personnel and knowledge has been lost, so the service (and the quality-of-life that came with it) are lost forever.

Excellent description, and further additions for the cynicism.

(opinion) Human society large rewards narcissism. Diligence is usually rewarded with exploitation. There's actually academic supporting the 2nd. Therefore, most politicians are largely selfish and mostly interested in being on TV, being the center of attention, and holding sway over other citizens. (Not all, just the majority). The only metric is "what gets elected." However, like "green" anything, the optimization is usually "do nothing, and color the corporate logo green."

Causes further issues. The optimization becomes, "focus on highly incendiary minutia, while avoiding anything risky, and maximizing viewer attention and anxiety." Issues that will allow them to say they're valiant, while exposing nothing especially damaging for the next election.

The American fiscal funding fiasco this / last year is typical. 6 months, and America finally has a budget. All the while, it's mostly arguments about minutia like "Homeland Security impeachment", who the speaker is, where Military can get abortions, whether a base will get funding, migrants on buses, and weekly CR shutdown "thwarting". It literally became weekly federal budgets around Feb-Mar in America... Meanwhile, a lot of enlisted in those abortion / base (yes/no?) states are wondering whether they're going to get paychecks. People on boats complain about having no ammunition to shoot with...

London's sewers are another excellent example. Dithering and dithering about repairs, about maintenance, about public toilets. Except the Thames is bright yellow, people won't go swimming, and when somebody asks, they're response is "well, btw, we're actually £18,000,000,000 in debt. Make -£2,000,000,000 per year. Have for years. Nobody even noticed. lolz." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Water Obvious optimization, nationalize while decrying the evils of the private sector. Quietly also nationalize the debt to the public in a line item somewhere that nobody writes about. Squander resources for years. Sell back to industry claiming the salvation of capitalism.

> The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments.

There was a right wing government in Finland before 2019 and there is a more far-right wing government since last year.

I don't like either of them for their politics, but I cannot see how they could be blamed for authorities getting increasingly dysfunctional. They have not done anything like fired 50% or even 20% of the employees.

>The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments.

This is nonsense. Your statement is flatly an ideological talking point in no way backed by actual practical evidence or a reasoned argument of the situation. Government budgets in most european states, (Finland included) have continuously gone up for decades and increase in complexity. A strong ideological focus on claiming "right-wing austerity" has been a common narrative despite nothing about these growing budgets matching that at all. The very idea presupposes that any current amount of spending, no matter how large, has no business being criticized at all and that it's "extreme" to argue that the state could afford to be more agile in doing better with slightly less % of GDP.

Aside from the fact that government budgets are at record levels of economic output anyhow, no, the state shouldn't just automatically have a right to these absurd budgets with any pushback being called "austerity". or "right-wing".

We had a right leaning government for 16 years and the “Schwarze Null” was the most important for them. Now nearly everything is a fucking mess or near its limit. We don’t have staff for the most important parts of society… but we are one of the country’s with the least deficit.. nice … and now we need als the money to repair the ruins . Germany is a hellhole. The austerity was only so that they can still throw shits of money on the industry.

So the US is usually thought of as more right wing than Europe, so is bureaucracy worse in the US than Europe?

Not every government less cavalier with other people's money is "right wing," not every "right wing" government believes in austerity, and not every implementation of austerity means just haphazardly cutting services to the bone and letting the proles figure it out on their own. So I think it's a bit intellectually lazy to say "oh the government doesn't work because those crazy right wingers intentionally broker it!"

'Services' are things like education, trains, hospitals.

I don't want my taxes to pay for a desk that I have to go to to show my passport to someone so they can make me an ID card with the same information as the card that the man-with-the-gun-at-the-airport thought was OK enough to let me in to the country with, but the bank won't accept as strong enough proof of ID. Bureaucracy is not a service.

It sounds like these are just issues with processes taking a long time. In other words, that there are long queues. Of course that is a problem too, but it sounds like there's less "active time" and it's more streamlined, if still with long wait times?

Anyone know more about this? Find this really interesting and surprising!

As someone who was advised to wait 6-12 months for a tax refund in Finland (not a standard payroll/prepaid tax) [1] I'd say it's because 'the system' is still the old system from the past that hasn't entirely kept up with the fact that in this day and age:

- A limited company is not always a giant manufacturing concern

- An ever increasing amount of the population will not have been born in and will not be living their whole lives in Finland.

IT is a nice frontend for it and can serve you in many languages and with the latest and greatest UX - but the actual processes and decisions are not keeping pace. Changing these is a high-friction, low-reward endeavour for politicians.

[1] https://www.vero.fi/en/About-us/contact-us/processing-times-...

I thought those delays were meant to encourage you to declare everything in advance on your tax card.

Try building a house in germany.

We've been arguing with authorities, send hundreds (not an exaggeration) of papers to different involved parties, but still, one and a half year after purchasing a bit of real estate, we are not even allowed to start building. This includes dozens of funny anecdotes, an example would be changed rules for the width of your fence gate - meaning that you have to scrap the old one and have someone build a completely new one because it was 3cm (!) to narrow. Of course, it would take weeks after applying for the building license before any of their concerns would be communicated to us.

I don't think digitalization would solve this. If you have a shitty process and digitalize it, you have a shitty digital process. I do think arbitrariness of the people involved at the government offices and the time it takes them to react is way more of an issue.

If you just give me a bunch of paper to fill in, with actually understandable instructions, that's fine. Digitalization would save me a day here because I'd get it directly, but that doesn't really help if it takes six weeks for the clerk to actually react.

> doesn't really help if it takes six weeks for the clerk to actually react.

Neighbouring country here. The clerk has to react within six weeks, but to satisfy the letter of law, the reply is "we received your requeat and it's being processed"

The actual reply takes ~6 month.

> You have a person number and authorities store everything centrally. A big brother nightmare for Germans.

Should be a big brother nightmare for all humans.

Your number is 666.

So having a health database, drivers license database, social security, banking etc are all ok but creating a proper national ID system would somehow push it over the edge to where an authoritarian government can come about and take control of our lives?

Your argument boils down to “let’s purposely make our government inefficient because it might one day turn on us”

Which, judging from other countries, is actually the opposite of what happens.

The worst offenders of human rights and government overreach are the ones that don’t have their shit together.

Health data is a difficult topic.

But for what do a drivers license database, social security numbers exist? And why should a country/state know your bank account number(s)?

Etatism is cancer.

Why?

There’s always a lot of hand-wringing and FUD around giving people ID numbers, but never a coherent rational argument. What makes it a big brother nightmare for all humans?

Like all automation, having a database of your population greatly increases your efficiency, without regard to whether this power is used to do good or to do evil.

There are many still alive who remember the evils done by the Stasi, when I was a child, there were many who remembered the evils done by the Gestapo; when those are your core examples of a citizen database, such thing naturally seems "big brother".

The irony is the mirror image: America seems almost* totally willing to have private databases while disliking government ones, Europe seems almost* totally willing to have government databases while disliking private ones.

* to anyone about to reply "not I": don't be blind to the "almost", I know many here will be exceptions

I suspect the degradation came from Eastern Europe, what you wrote is what I was told EE looked like in the 80-90s.

What do you mean by that? Did Finland change location over time?

Also, two Eastern European countries that I have first-hand knowledge of: Poland and Estonia are much more digitised and efficient at those things than Germany (and, from what GP wrote, it seems Finland as well?).

The same processes that led to Eastern Europe in 80-90s ending up as a nightmare where everything took ages to be handled happened to Finland with the same outcome. Bad algorithms basically. Maybe PL/EST still remember how bad it was back then and make sure they are running better algorithms, whereas Finland has no clue how bad it can get due to a lack of experience?

I don't know why does everyone on HN think that Estonia is Eastern Europe when it is actually Northern Europe (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Europe). All of the Baltic countries are Northern.

And I thought racism wasn't a thing on HN...

I completely agree. I have been living here for 8 years, and recently applied for a permanent settlement permit.

My application went into a blackhole for more than 4 months, while my existing permit expired, essentially making me a prisoner here (I can stay and work in Germany but if I travel internationally, I won't be allowed entry back).

Meanwhile, my applications for a temporary travel permit were unanswered for months. There is no way to contact the foreign office (no email, no telephone, no fax). You just send your application and pray.

I strongly advise anyone to stay away from Germany if you have better options. This country is a bureaucratic nightmare in general.

Mine too! My residence permit expired in February, and my appointment is in July. I expect to have a valid residence title again by end of August.

Mind you, I applied in December. I will not be able to travel out of the country for most of the summer as I wouldn't be allowed to reenter.

They refused multiple times to issue the temporary permit that I'm legally entitled to. I'm having a lawyer ask again, this time with the threat of a lawsuit.

It's such a common problem that I had to write a detailed article about it. People miss weddings and funerals because the immigration office is months late. The number of lawsuits due to inaction is growing exponentially since 2019.

I'll one up you and say that it's so broken, there are lots of people that basically live on ranges of exceptions.

In my case, I was told I was not eligible for the visa I needed but when I spoke to a migration consultant who knew the process, they managed to get it done. I was pretty shocked as this wink, wink, nod, nod style system is not something I expected from this country.

This sounds like all of you are living in Berlin, which is known as "failed state" to the rest of Germany. ;-)

It varies form city to city, I live in one that I'd say is an exception on the positive side: Most clerks in the various offices are actually helpful and even giving you hints. I had to renew my passport in January and got an appointment the next day. I got the appointment online(!) in Germany(!!). Passport could be collected 4 weeks later. Meanwhile an ex-colleague who lives in Berlin had to wrestle with his nearest office to even get an appointment for a passport renewal, then gave up and made an appointment with the office in the neighboring district, where it was still a 4 weeks wait. He told me there are districts where it takes up to 6 months.

I guess if you want pain and suffering, move to Berlin. :o)

Germany's head of state was involved in the biggest financial scandal of its existence and forgave a corrupt bank that stole millions of taxes just a few years before going into office.

corruption is spreading like a plague with no consequence in sight for anyone involved.

Yes, bureaucrats can act as gatekeepers for things that you are legally entitled to, and create various bureaucratic hurdles. It's usually mere thoroughness, sometimes incompetence, and if you cross them, vindictiveness.

I was told more than once by very knowledgeable people that if you anger a case worker, they can and will make your life hard by nitpicking every little detail and asking for as many documents as they can.

This happens for example if you get angry at their incompetence, or if you sue them for inaction (although in Berlin they see it as normal business by now).

Folks, you can travel outside of Germany for sure, as long as you stay inside Schengen.

Theoretically, yes.

Practically, not anymore: there are block posts on main roads into Germany and they check passports.

Please add a link for people relying on this info.

"Folks, you can travel outside of Germany for sure, just avoid the police, the border authorities and don't get caught."

Try Spain, takes years

I guess that depends on the city and the procedure, but I had to replace my DNI last summer and it took me less than 30 minutes, and they gave me the new one on the spot.

In comparison I also had to renew my Japanese foreign card and later my ID card, and both procedures were a royal PITA, and in both cases I had to wait a month to get the new card.

Not saying Germany is slow, but that is one area where US is far behind. 21 Months - This is the current processing time for a green card after you have sent in all the paperwork to the USCIS for processing. During that time, you get no updates and of-course if you leave the country without AP, your application is considered to be abandoned.

https://imgur.com/a/t8rYOjv

It's the same in Australia; when you apply for permanent residency your application goes into a black hole. I wanted to learn more about my status and all I got back from the immigration people was 'the agent processing your application will contact you. We do not give out contact details for your agent. You will have to wait'. It took about 8 months.

Once your 'regular' visa expires you go onto a bridging visa which same, you can't really leave the country.

It's expensive as hell too: I think in the end I had a total cost of $7,000, just in application fees. Sounds like immigration is horrible everywhere.

8 months is not that long; these days the wait is longer. However, you are aware of how long the wait will be, there information is right there on the Australian Immigration website: https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-pr...

Providing updates to everyone waiting simply wastes time and resources; again, you know roughly how long it's going to take as the estimated times are provided. Hassling the agent on your case is unnecessary.

Regarding leaving and returning Australia - Bridging Visa class Bs are made available if you have good reasons to be leaving and coming back.

I can see this from two sides - my (now ex) wife went through getting temporary then permanent residency in Australia; yes, it was a pain and expensive, but Australia has high standards of living etc, which is why lots of people want to come here. The other side is this - immigration is one of the reasons why there are not enough houses to buy or places to rent, making life difficult for citizens or people who have PR or TR. So if the process of having more immigrants who also require housing is expensive or difficult, I think you'll find a lot of people are not particular sympathetic.

Japan immigration (if you have a college degree) seems to be pretty high up there. PR takes a while, and processing is a bit of a black hole, but generally speaking you apply, application extends your visa a bit, and they get back to you within the period. And it’s maybe $100?

People complain but its generally predictable save for applications for a 3 year visa can lead to a 1 year visa or a 3 year visa or a 5 year visa

Australia "what countries have you been to and when" is fun, if you have traveled a bit. I thought being to Tunisia during arab spring and China and Russia might be issues! Overall it was hours of paperwork. Wife's grandmothers maiden name kinda crap in there too IIRC. Upside is Citizenship was relatively easy after this (because you have done PR already). Just had to learn some stuff about what happens in Canberra :-).

It took me almost two years to get my permanent visa in Australia (Liberals were in power at the time and had just gutted the immigration department shortly before I applied).

However, I did not have any issues with the bridging visa. It gave me full rights to employment, medicare, and fair taxation (unlike the Work and Holiday Visa I started with, which drastically limited my ability to work, had me paying all medical expenses out-of-pocket, and taxed all my income at the highest tax bracket), and I traveled overseas a few times on it without any issues.

The application fees were expensive, but the bridging visa more than made up for it. I made much more money on the bridging visa than it cost me to apply, so even if my application had been rejected, I would have come out far ahead financially and had a lovely 2-year working holiday in Australia — far better than what the Work and Holiday Visa offers.

Some of the US citizen-facing services are very backlogged too. For example, it's around 18 months to get a response when you apply for the US-Canada travel fast lane ("NEXUS").

It is at least valid in the meantime, and doesn’t affect travel rights like the immigration examples mentioned in various countries, but I agree that this is mildly annoying.

Part of the reason is the green card queue size for US is much larger than that for Germany.

The USCIS website also shows your status and gives a rough timeline.

As far as I know, it's par for the course for immigration in most countries I ever heard of. On the other hand, anyone who heard of consistently nice immigration procedure for normal people (not Messi) should chime in.

From a incentive strucutre POV, they lose nothing from false positives (denying entry to someone who would have been fine) as candidates will probably try again anyway, and no one will come after them for their shitty procedures as by definition applicants aren't full voting citizens and stay in a weaker position possibly all their life (imagine filing a complaint and having your name on a black list the rest of your immigration life, even if that list probably doesn't exist. That fear alone is enough to let a lot of things slide)

> From a incentive strucutre POV, they lose nothing from false positives

I strongly disagree. If you try to attract skilled labour, such hurdles can keep many of them at bay. Germany can become known as a country that's not worth the fight. I have seen a _lot_ of stories about people giving up and leaving, usually because of immigration office delays, but sometimes because they were worn down by other demands.

It also affects the bottom line as Germany becomes a country businesses avoid, either because it's too much effort to set up the business, or too much effort to attract international talent.

You are right that immigrants are invisible as a voter base, but the cumulative effects of their neglect are significant to the German economy, and to the pensions of people who can vote.

Other countries that see immigration as an opportunity have systems that are far far superior to that of Germany. In Germany it's often not clear what status a process is in and no way to get updates. There often is no web portal or anything like that, it's nuts. For instance you submit an application for the retention of your German passport and then basically wait 2+ years for the answer to come back. No one answered my questions. It's very frustrating. On top of that I got threatened with the BKA if I didn't surrender certain documents without ever having been asked to in the first place. Straight to escalation. It's just very unpleasant. Maybe that should be their motto.

Yes, the country needs to be both competent and strongly willing to court new comers and permanent residents in the first place.

On your experience, it really feels like a PITA. It won't help, but Japan and France are basically the same. You'll see procedures listed as typically taking 2~3 months, check back every now and then, and low and behold a year and half later you have absolutely no idea of what's going on, if your submission has been forgotten or is contentious. There's no recourse as long as you haven't been refused, so it's limbo until something happens.

People are right to bitch about these lengthy and utterly frustrating procedures, I just don't see a way out of it short of being rich, famous or finding a loophole that lets you force a government agency do something in a timely manner without getting a target on your back.

To note, France had much progress in the last decades, in that bullshit requirements were made illegal a few years ago. At least you can check everything needed on an official site and not be subjected to petty additional requirements when dealing with the local entity (yes, that was a thing, probably to make it extra hard for specific portions of the population to properly file procedures)

>Other countries that see immigration as an opportunity have systems that are far far superior to that of Germany.

Do you have any examples for this? Genuinely curious.

From where I stand most EU countries right now are talking steps backwards on this as they've become overloaded with migration waves, housing shortages, stagnating wages, which increased the far right support, so the hot topic now is how to discourage ALL immigration, not how to make life better and easier for SOME immigrants to attract them.

Sure, you obviously want to encourage the useful skilled immigration, but like I said, from where I stand it seems countries don't distinguish and are trying to make life hell for all immigrants just to plase the right wing voters since those would be frothing at the mouth if they heard their government is rolling out the red carped to attract SOME immigrants, so then for simplicity the political issue is binary, IMMIGRANTS or NO IMMIGRANTS.

As someone that became a permanent resident and later a citizen of Canada, the process was relatively painless compared to what I read for other countries, and could be tracked along its different steps using a web UI.

Denmark is the same.

The official website says the wait time for permanent residency is "up to 10 months", and searching Reddit suggests 3-6 months is more normal.

Denmark is not particularly welcoming to immigrants, but they do with rules rather than inefficient paperwork.

The entire second paragraph is negative selection. Some countries like Germany, Switzerland, US are highly desirable but there is no reason to be so arrogant about it. This way e.g. Germany chased away entire generation of millennials from post-Communist countries. Now Germany is receiving the profile of immigrants they deserve - they have a handful of passports and diplomas each, and most are forged.

My sympathy for your troubles, but please keep in mind: Everybody is processing Ukranians and Arabs. The system was never meant for such a rapid influx of people.

The people working on immigration are not lazy or unmotivated, they are exhausted.

Have you gone through the process? The system wasn’t “designed” at all, it’s completely broken and chaotic. It is 100% the fault of this system and not that of the immigrants going through it.

Some of the people involved can also be extremely unpleasant to deal with, even if you speak German.

I accompanied several friends through the process.

My observation was that by simply changing the view on what is happening and extrapolating how to act based on that one can achieve quite a lot.

I told people the following:

1. The person dealing with you is not there to help you, they are simply executing an act of governance. Rather than wanting them to help you, try to help them close their tickt.

2. You are the type of immigrant people actually want. These popele see lots of drama, lies, heartbreak and hopelessness. If you are pleasant and well prepared they will probably like working on your case since it will not make them feel bad.

3. Things take time. Be as early as possible with everything and realize that there early is a way to speed things up.

Keeping those three things to heart worked very well. That does not make things faster, but it takes a lot of frustration out of the process.

Not myself, but I accompanied my wife every time, and she’s now a permanent resident. The last time we just wanted to extend her temporary residence permit, they even advised us that we have no reason to do that and could just apply for permanent residence (which we then did).

Waiting times are annoying, but that is because of an overloaded system, everything else was pretty painless.

>Some of the people involved can also be extremely unpleasant to deal with, even if you speak German.

Isn't this just German culture, though? I had that experience just buying groceries and going through the checkout line!

It was already a shit show 10 years ago, so while the influx surely didn't help, it isn't like it wasn't broken already.

Syria, Brexit, covid, Ukraine. At this point they should have adapted.

> Everybody is processing Ukranians and Arabs.

That’s nonsense. The Ukrainians go through an expedited process. Before the war we put in an application for my spouse - 3rd party national spouse of an EU citizen process - we applied pretty much the day after we arrived and a few days before we left the country to live elsewhere (2 1/2 years later) we got a letter that they are considering giving her an appointment.

The German bureaucracy sucks hard.

It’s the same people that get allocated tasks generated in those processes. They even get shifted between departments.

It does not really help to have separate queues if those are served by the same worker.

This happened to me recently in Switzerland (canton Geneve for insiders, that already explains a bit), but for 12 months.

After being here for 10+ years straight, fully working. Existence of my whole family here and our whole life depended on it, yet I clealy hit a very incompetent (and completely unreachable) bureaucrat. My boss went through same process during mine, 3 weeks and done.

The difference? He is from western part of EU, I am from eastern. Shouldn't make a difference just like colour of skin shouldn't, but it does, in 1000 ways, subtle or not, but this was by far the worst and coming from state/canton.

Utterly miserable and prolonged experience, being in legal vacuum with small kids, while doing everything precisely and timely just like Swiss do and like to see in immigrants. Lost quite a few ideals about Switzerland during those desperate times.

My friend has the same experience in Geneve.

He is living here for like 20 years and still has to fight every year or so for the permit extension.

From a USA perspective, I find that usually when a bureaucratic process is hopelessly broken, it is because a small portion of the population actively hates the people that would benefit from the process and want to harm them. However they cannot legally or popularly discriminate against them so instead they destroy the processes that benefit the hated group. Do you get that impression where you are too?

If foreigners are in of the hated groups, my personally lived experience serves a counter point.

During my naturalization I was caught by surprise by how quickly my application had been handled. The agent giving me the exam winked and said: "it's election season".

Whatever that means.

Are you highly educated?

My father has only a certificate and no degree or anything like that.

It took him 20 years to get citizenship. We came 3 years after he come here and we all became citizens together.

My friends whose parents were doctors or had masters degree would get their GC and citizenships in like 5 years.

Given the amount of immigrants in Europe in general and in Germany in particular, I don't think they are trying to deter people. Or if they are trying it's not working.

The incompetence is not confined to immigration, it's pretty much everywhere. Same goes for France actually.

i wonder how much of the "incompetence" is really just under-staffing, and how much is the public servants being paid to essentially do little/no work.

The impression I got from the last time I was in Germany (some ~7 years ago), there's a going concern among at least some people that a certain ethnicity of immigrants is "taking over". This might be a pearl-clutching minority, or I may have completely misread the situation.

I love this comment because it's such a Rorschach blot, to be read any way you want.

To properly read this in your intended meaning, do we need to find the political and ethnic makeup of the immigration department? Or society at large?

(as a fellow American) They almost certainly meant this as "politicians, or their voters, have some bias/hate against something, so they destroy the bureaucracy that benefits those people".

Eg. Republicans hate taxes, so they defund the IRS (tax collectors), to make it harder for the government to audit tax evasion.

I wasn’t even speaking specifically to immigration, but I can understand why everyone thought that because of who I replied to.

This perspective remains kinda crazy. Why do US people keep trying to route control of major parts of their life through a system where they believe people who "actively hates the people who would benefit from the process" have significant influence?

People come up with this from time to time but the logical conclusion is small governments. It has been a few centuries now and there hasn't been any progress in improving the quality of the politicians; it isn't going to change. Every single government, literally, has people in it who would be morally comfortable in a Nazi-style dictatorship. Any plan that involves empowering these people is stupid.

Being a white, middle-aged, middle-class male in America I can say I have no productive things to say about how my local, state, or federal government has benefitted myself or my family beyond the things everyone else also benefits from. I don’t get assistance for anything, I don’t get breaks on anything, no free services, etc.

If your first reaction to this is “well you don’t need anything!” you must be one of the people that was astonished at how the 2016 election went.

No I didn’t vote for the guy and I hope he loses this time.

> Why do US people keep trying to route control of major parts of their life through a system where ..

Because sometimes you don't have a say, or you don't expect to use it. No politician ever campaigned on making the lines at the DMV move faster. But we (mostly) all agree you should be required to get a license before you drive. Most Americans drive, and few have chose to route this "major part of their life" away from the DMV.

Immigration process (as this thread illustrates) sucks. It's also not a process used by voters.

The process to apply for welfare in most parts of the US sucks, but the actual welfare is valuable. People think by making it harder, it will instead result in people who are less reliant upon it. Welfare recipients are a huge political target constantly. They're the individuals who are "actively hated" in this example, and they're entirely dependent on the system in that moment, because thats how misfortune works.

Many cities making construction permits hard to get, because local residents don't want their neighborhood changing, so they petition local politicians to make the process slower/harder/more-expensive. In this example they "hate" the new construction.

If you're not a high schooler and you're applying to a state-funded university, the process to prove you're a local resident can be surprisingly complicated. This is because it's designed for high school students and all the edge cases are optimized to avoid accidentally providing tax-subsidized "in-state" tuition to an out-of-state resident. For example, I wanted to take a for-fun class at a local university and because I didn't have a local high school to vouch for my residency, I needed to provide (among other things) 50+ pages of tax documents. It took 2 semesters (1y) to prove I lived in the state, and the minimum amount of time you need to live in-state is 1 year.

People who live their life in the "happy-path" case often don't deal with the government, and don't understand the struggle of these edge cases. Plenty of activities require the government. No way around it. Sometimes, people who think "small government" is the solution end up making those processes terrible by making it understaffed or convoluted to "avoid waste".

Sure. But why accept these people in the first place? I think if there was a consensus, then they would not be accepted. The US is not shy to refuse them entry or to concentrate camp them somewhere. The reality is that there is two factions; one is for and one is against. So you are in for a wild ride.

Nailed it. Then you get Hanlon's Razor obsessed people rushing to defend the government. It works wonders

As the other user said, this is just the conspiracy politcs obsessed partisan weirdos would like for you to believe. After all, if their side is so benevolent and immigrant loving, why haven't they pushed any genuine immigration system reforms instead of just creating a captive subclass in the form of illegal immigrants?

For instance, if Republicans are really so hateful of certain minorities, why do they not properly go after things like H1B mills (which benefits minorities more than the rich white people that they supposedly want to limit immigration to)? or take effective action to seal off the borders and make immigration policy stricter? As an immigrant myself, I'd take even that over the current hellish system where you spend a decent chunk of your life in limbo, unable to fully settle down because of the uncertainty, since at least then there would be the finality of immediately knowing the doors are closed. The only way the current system is bearable is if you approach it with total apathy, where you avoid getting too attached and just convince yourself that you can also make it in any other country.

Rather than negotiate measures to fix the immigration system (in either direction), both sides would prefer to keep expanding the class of people who are one technicality away from being kicked out, for Republicans it gives them the ability to promise stronger borders every election year, and for Democrats it gives the ability to promise aid to specifically illegal immigrants and of course once elected they can just say that the last guy left a mess and they had their hands full fixing just that or any version of "the other side isn't cooperating/compromising".

A particularly glaring example of this being their inability to agree on a stronger path to permanent residency for PhD holders. Considering that PhDs are generally funded by grants, not offering very easy immigration for PhD holders amounts to training foreigners at your own expense and sending them back to compete with you. PhD holders typically fit the "we only want the best of the best" position of the Republicans (even if we accept the conspiracy that they actually hate all minorities, it'd be a convenient way to 'wash' that image, without having to accept all that many minorities), and for Democrats it would be a very easy "look, we're slowly working to fix immigration" action.

I don’t like to both sides many things but immigration is definitely one case. The system is broken on purpose because US agriculture, construction, and many other labor intensive trades can’t operate profitably without a migrant labor underclass. Nobody wants to fix this. Not Democrats, not Republicans.

Add to that the fact that the Republicans now have a second reason not to fix immigration: they can’t run on it if it’s not broken.

If Trump gets in again he will do a lot of anti immigration theater for his base but nothing will really change. Democrats won’t fix it either. Someone has to pick berries and trim hedges.

In the US, there is a path for PhD holders, to my knowledge, it's called EB-2.

This is not a USA perspective. This is a conspiracy theory perspective from spending too much time in liberal/progressive echo-chambers that repeat fearful, hateful myths about their political opponents.

I’m glad you can believe this is true, genuinely. I have hope that maybe this means things will change.

But as a white guy from middle American (in that I lived there for 40 years) who has voted Republican and Democrat and has enough conservative ideas that people are often confused about my political leanings, I can tell you there is some truth to this.

I’ve been in the room more than several hundred times when people who were working in the American bureaucracy openly "decried the horrors of the Mexican invasion ". I will admit the majority of that was my ex’s father but it wasn’t only him. I’m certain he did not make things easier on his Mexican applicants (dmv in his case).

I’ve also heard racial slurs used hundreds of thousands of times, very few people engaging in this voted democrat.

I’m sure there are endless stupid conspiracy theories in progressive echo chambers, I hear them from time to time they are just as silly as republican ones and I would love nothing more the above comment to be correct.

In the end, their experience definitely does not match up with mine and we should all be sad.

The same kind of thing happens in the US. A relative (a Brit) needed to renew his visa, put in the application and heard nothing for months, and a immigration lawyer told him that it could take over a year to process.

But the lawyer also said that it would be worth trying a consulate overseas, as they were often a lot more efficient. So (as his wife had business in Berlin) he made an appointment with the consulate in Frankfurt. From interview to getting his passport back with visa - five days.

They use this book called "Der Process" as a manual

You can really feel that Kafka was an Austrian in his writings.

Is that a correct assignment? Austria-Hungary was a thing back then, but someone born and mostly living in Prague I would not call Austrian today.

It’s not just Germany - I’ve got a similar can’t leave situation in UK currently

I am a bit flummoxed how you can stay in the country after a permit expires. I’m not for stricter rules but I’ve heard this from several people (I think people in the US as well) and it seems like “permit to enter/leave” is a very weird structure instead of “permit to be here”.

I think most immigration offices in the world are pretty much black boxes, mainly because that’s their coping mechanism to deal with the influx of bargaining from rejections they would otherwise have. But it would be nice to have… some proof of progress.

> I am a bit flummoxed how you can stay in the country after a permit expires.

In many countries this is viewed as "it's not your fault, it's the state's fault that the state hasn't processed your application yet, so we will not punish you for the state's tardiness"

Hmmm… that makes more sense. My experience was getting a visa automatically extended for N months on application, and applications not ever being processed slower than that. But I can totally see the US having wild backlog, for example

> I am a bit flummoxed how you can stay in the country after a permit expires.

I think most countries are like this. Essentially, you are in a "on-hold" status until immigration decides your fate. It's supposed to be temporary but it can take years depending on the country and the circumstance.

This exists in Canada as well. Ad long as u apply for the next resident permit (e.g. student permit) before the old one expires u have an „implied status“ that continues as long as u don’t leave the country.

I went down to the local Ausländerbehörde in Berlin (a place where foreigners register with the state), having very very minimal German. I was promptly handed a form in German to fill out. More than slightly flustered and in a bit of rush to get it done, I put down "25" in a box that I thought was age, but in actuality was the number of times you were married. Never much helped my application that I think!

That's strange, I remember those forms were trilingual, 12 years ago. German, English and French.

> I did not understand what I was doing, so I just did something random, and it did not work out for me.

Sounds like that one was largely on you…

Uhm... In Chile I was in same limbo for almost 4 years - my temp residency expired, before the expiration had option to either leave the country or request permanent residency. I opted for the latter, submitted all the documents and... waited almost 3 years for the resolution. In the meantime I had my ID but it expired and I couldn't request new one. Supposedly with a certificate that I'm in the process of getting permanent residency I could use the expired ID but lots of institutions, especially banks, would simply ignore the law and reject the ID as invalid...

That happens in many countries and usually experience is exactly the same

mine took like a few weeks and was very painless, even in berlin. anecdata ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It used to be painless indeed but only and solely in Berlin.

Perhaps too many software developers in the city government of Berlin broke the process to a point it now actually works.

Other people have already written this, but Berlin is not a good representation for Germany as a whole. It has been known for decades within Germany for having a dysfunctional government structure and administration (due in part to unclear division of responsibilities between districts and the city).

Elsewhere in Germany, bureaucracy tends to be tedious but functional.

The neglicence of the state of Berlin is actually illegal in many cases. I once even asked a lawyer if I could sue them for their delays, but he wrote back to me to the effect that he was too much on good terms with them to sue, but that I could pay him some money (out of my pocket, of course) so he would go "talk" to them.

> Elsewhere in Germany, bureaucracy tends to be tedious but functional.

Data to back up your assertion that it’s only Berlin? I can speak for Düsseldorf, which is a total nightmare. Literally everything folks talk about regarding issues in Berlin also happens as a matter of course in Düsseldorf.

A friend of mine is high up in the NRW civil servants apparatus and he confirms it’s fucked across the board in NRW.

I only cover Berlin, but the relocation consultants I frequently talk to will confirm that it's even worse in other medium to large cities. The Berlin immigration office is doing well given the hand it has been dealt.

The immigration office in Lübeck, STB inner city, is overworked like everywhere, but they are competent, friendly, and decently digitalized. From what a US friend of mine who lived in many cities in Germany told me, it’s pretty much an exception, though.

What do you dislike about the city stuff? I think all bureaucracy I had to deal with with the city of Düsseldorf have been better than the state or federal agencies. Kita Navigator, Straßenverkehrsamt, appointments for the Bürgerbüro were all working pretty well online. Not all the way, of course, but post COVID Straßenverkehsamt is a million times better than pre COVID Straßenverkehsamt.

Like everyone else here, I don't have any data (I searched, but couldn't find anything), only anecdotes - my own experiences from living in Cologne and Berlin, and those of friends who live in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, etc.

There are issues everywhere but Berlin is particularly bad. We weren't even able to hold a regular election without messing it up.

Do you know the causes for why there's so much bureaucracy? I wonder what the potential solutions are.

The bureaucracy problem is compounded by not wanting to link databases between government organizations and a general resistance to anything digital that involves personal data (except Facebook et al. for some reason), which reduces efficiency a lot.

However, this is understandable given German history.

Could you tell us the lawyer please?

I'd need someone who is well-versed in "talking". (Feel free to dm via my email.)

I'm not the person above, but Fiona Macdonald is my go-to immigration lawyer, and she has a lot of experience with suing the Ausländerbehörde.

Read this as a primer: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/berlin-auslanderbehorde-ap...

Amazing, thanks!

We lived in Tübingen/BW and it the bureaucracy was dysfunctional there as well.

Just wanted to say thanks for your awesome work! allaboutberlin.com was a massive help when I moved here—and continues to be, whenever a new paperwork hurdle presents itself :). You’re doing great work!

Truly, it's one of the best and clearly laid out resources out there. I've found a lot of online resources around Berlin life to be frankly hostile (e.g. r/berlin ) to people seeking information on how to approach things like appointments and complying with state regulations.

allaboutberlin.com seems to be comparatively devoid of frustration and objectively lays out the situation + steps to be taken in each situation.

Thank you!

I often think about starting a community that functions like /r/berlin, but with a professional moderator like dang to maintain decorum, deduplicate threads, and generally keep the place tidy.

With Toytown Germany simply vanishing, there's both a need and a market for it. I just never want to be a moderator again.

>I often think about starting a community that functions like /r/berlin, but with a professional moderator like dang to maintain decorum, deduplicate threads, and generally keep the place tidy.

If /r/berlin is anything like /r/japanlife, the problem IS the moderator.

I got married in Japan so was curious about the differences. The two differences seem to be needing to schedule an appointment and needing proof of income. Doesn’t seem really much worse than most countries (tho I can get Denmark being easier)

I do place some blame on embassies not issuing documents in local languages. I’m not asking for proof I’m not married for fun! Extremely unhelpful, tho a good job generator for translators.

In the end tho, lots of these convos are based off of people coming from the Wild West of common law, which leads to the US government saying stuff like “well we don’t know if you’re married but you can sign an affidavit in front of us”. The American Empire, barely capable of a proper census!

Things can and should be improved, but I do think it’s good to be cognizant of the fact that many countries off of differing axioms (especially when it comes to things like the need/interdiction of knowing where your residents live)

The common law jurisdictions are simply more honest. If German requirements force people to marry in Denmark, and registering a foreign marriage in Germany takes 4 years to process (the actual waiting time in Berlin), then Germany doesn’t know if someone is married either. They are just more willing to pretend that they do.

> which leads to the US government saying stuff like “well we don’t know if you’re married but you can sign an affidavit in front of us”. The American Empire, barely capable of a proper census!

How would a census help? That's just you declaring your marital status in front of them, without having to sign anything; it has even less probative value than what you're presenting as a stopgap measure that wouldn't be necessary if the census worked better.

No, you’re right. Census is the wrong word. Just… having a list of residents and marital state seems pretty table stakes for an administrative state

They can't function without it, so the list does exist. The IRS keeps records of residents and their marital state (a required piece of information on the form).

But those records aren't really fit for the purpose of certifying that someone is not currently married, because (a) they do not include people who don't need to file taxes; and (b) they are only updated once a year.

For pretty much every other administrative purpose, it doesn't matter whether you're married or not, so I don't really see why you'd want the tax records updated more often.

I think that's vastly overstating how bad it is. Maybe it's different if you are a German citizen. Just as an example, I never did anything other than signing the contract to get a job. I filled in a single form for each of my two kids when they were born. We got the forms in the hospital and just left them there. Similarly for registering a car -- there was a single simple form.

I disagree. This is not in any way overstating the state of things.

Have you ever changed cities and needed to change Finanzbehörde? Have you ever registered for driving school? Have you ever tried changing from one driving instructor to another? Have you ever got married in a district where there are no appointments for marriage? Have you ever been unable to take your children out of school to attend a family funeral in a different country? Have you ever purchased a car in a State different from the one that you live in? Have you ever had to experience the nightmare of applying for unemployment money? Have you ever tried picking up your child's sick notice without their insurance card, but just only your own ID?

I could go on and on... Not all of these are on the same level of annoyance/senselessness but there are countless more examples. The bureaucracy and stiff insistence on following processes and rules at the expense of common sense are everyday occurrences.

In my experience what is most amazing is how most citizens of this country just accept this and don't find it unusual.

> Have you ever registered for driving school?

What's so difficult about that? That was 10 minutes long process for me. I changed cities so I had to change the driving school as well and there were no issues at all.

> Have you ever tried changing from one driving instructor to another?

I haven't but my school encourages people to do that if they find that they don't click with their instructor.

Not arguing with the rest though.

When I was in school, we went to Spain on a vacation that cut a bit into school days (= after the end of the school vacation). So my mom told the teacher, and it was fine. The teacher said the holiday will be a lifetime memory and great learning experience, too.

However, I read several more recent stories where parents in the UK got into trouble (had to pay fine, or got in contact with the police) because their kid did not attend a few school days, but with the parent's consent.

Both countries have mandatory school laws.

> In my experience what is most amazing is how most citizens of this country just accept this and don't find it unusual.

Most Germans are obedient to authority, which seems one of the main reasons why the holocaust could happen (read about Milgram's 1961 obedience experiments worldwide, Munich "scored" top on this sad metric).

Also, people that have only lived in one country don't know it any other way. Perhaps everyone should move to Estonia for a year to open eyes...

It’s much less of a problem for people born in Germany because the burden is spread out over many years of their lives.

If you immigrate to Germany then you need to instantiate yourself in the German bureaucracy everywhere at once, and that bureaucracy has a hostile indifference to the concept of immigrants.

Really I think this is overdone. I fully appreciate Berlin is disfunctional, but in other regions (I live in Thüringen) things go quite quickly.

I don't think that it is overdone. It's bad everywhere, and it's much worse in Berlin.

If you've experienced anything like a modern bureaucracy, Germany is infuriatingly backwards. The article is painfully accurate down to the minute detail.

I have lived/worked/banked in four countries (UK, US, ES, DE).

Germany is not at the cutting edge, but it is far from the worse. The interactions I have had with bureaucratic systems in Thüringen have all been entirely fine. Friendly people, clear process, done quickly. Obviously that is only an n=1. It is a rural area that is not overloaded as Berlin is.

Which country would you consider "modern"? My experiences:

In the UK the way you prove who you are is literally a physical copy of your water bill.

Spain, some things work well enough, others are insane.

US, massive variability from state to state and government department.

My biggest gripes, summed up:

- The requirements are arbitrary, undocumented, and largely depend on how the case worker feels on a given day. Common wisdom is to bring far more documents than asked for, just in case.

- Everything is paper-based. You are expected to act as a transport layer between offices that won't talk to each other. Everything is mailed, because digital communications are distrusted and digitalisation lagging far behind.

- Everything takes far longer than it should, partly due to the above, and due to chronic understaffing of government offices.

This is a problem in all major cities, and many of the smaller ones. In this case, n is a pretty big number backed by the many relocation consultants I work with. You got lucky, and I envy you.

I can confirm that moving out into the bacon belt of Brandenburg drastically improved the quality of my public services interactions (as an immigrant). Getting an anmeldung done didn't require a 3 hour ordeal and the local Ausländerbehörde answers their emails.

My favorite Berlin anecdote is when my wife (then girlfriend) and I first arrived in Germany, she was unemployed for the better part of a year as no-one would give her a chance. She actually got quite depressed about it, and reached out about state sponsored integration courses as the language lessons she was taking were expensive and she wanted to do something more holistic. The authorities told her in no uncertain terms that they didn't care and that there were no places available.

My biggest bugbear with Germany is that the state intrudes extensively in your affairs, most of the time they are being benevolent but that intrusion brings in a tremendous amount a bureaucratic baggage. And that baggage is slow, paper based, and becomes a significant barrier for doing anything. In many countries the kind of paperwork you have to slave over here just doesn't exist in the first place.

FWIW my wife and I got married in Denmark. It was impossible for my wife to provide an up-to-date (less than six months old) translated copy of her Chinese birth certificate. Theoretically she could have traveled back to china (in the middle of the pandemic) and begged her backwaters local police authority to print a new copy but they weren't obliged to issue her one. Denmark was happy with her passport and some declarations from the local authorities in Germany.

Some days I really wonder why I continue to put up with the hassle, probably just sunk cost at this point and stubbornness. Wouldn't recommend Germany for anyone with a low frustration tolerance.

As bad as Germany is, it is better than average. Eastern Europe is harder, and Asia borders on impossible. Africa is literally impossible.

> Asia borders on impossible

Japanese bureaucracy has a bad rap, but it isn't that bad. There's still paperwork (not much has moved online) but the public servant staff are super helpful and guide you through things and are helpful when there is some blocker. Especially in the past 3-5 years there have big improvements with a lot of paperwork and stuff that required your personal seal has been removed, and the MyNumber card makes doing anything online very easy. I've never ever had to fax anything as people joke about (and a friend in Germany actually had to do)

You know, I would try and defend (South) Africa at least, but I really can't. I won't call it impossible though, again at least for ZA.

In my experience, ZA bureaucracy is simpler than e.g. Germany or Greece, but general operational incompetence and corruption makes it just as slow. It's a tradeoff of more easily understanding what you have to do, but you'll have to sit in a queue for 6 hours and hope they don't tell you "the system is offline".

The closest thing to legal bribery is to go through specialist firms that deal with the bureaucracy for you, for a fee. This is also much faster as they know who's who within each department to get things done faster.

I've had friends request old documents only to learn 8 months later that the archival facility burnt down a few years ago so they don't know what documents they do or don't have. Ask a firm to do it, pay a couple thousand Rand, and they'll get it done within 3 weeks.

    > Eastern Europe is harder

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? I doubt it.

Africa and Asia are pretty easy, you just pay a bribe

Maybe your information is not up to date. 10-15 years ago you were probably right.

Since then Germany is trending down and Eastern Europe is trending up - and bureaucracy along with it. Digitization, customer friendliness, you name.

Even some random office in Serbia seems more pleasant than dealing with Germany.

Germany is trending towards becoming a has-been, like the UK (with the difference that in the current geopolitical context it's even proving to be an obstacle).

Get married in Denmark: This not a joke, but my friends did it (German woman, Indian husband). It Germany it would have taken two weeks. In Denmark you get it done in an hour (minus the booking of the time at the civil registry).

I fail to imagine a scenario where "getting married fast" is a requirement. I mean you've supposedly been living together for a few years already at that point, so why is 2 weeks too much?

> I fail to imagine a scenario where "getting married fast" is a requirement.

This rubs me the wrong way a bit, and it’s because it’s clearly quite obvious there are many reasons you’d want to get married fast (emergency health issues, unplanned pregnancies, visa issues, etc etc. can come up with a million reasons easily).

You are really asking in a very ungracious way why doesn’t everyone just simply live like an ideal German.

Me and two of my siblings have had marriages to facilitate work visas, permanent residence and access to health care during a pregnancy. (Also because we liked the other person, but like, we would have kept liking them regardless of whether we got married.)

Most pregnancies take a while, two weeks is plenty of time. Don't even get me started on how long immigration bureaucracy takes -- two weeks is a drop in the bucket.

You could say the same about forming a company, or purchasing a house, or countless other things. It's when they all add up the issues begin.

I had to get married fast because my travel agent failed to get our wedding license to Jamaica fast enough for our destination wedding to be legal in Canada. So we got married a few days before leaving to Jamaica and had the pastor on the resort “officiate” for the family experience even if we were already married (nobody knew except us). The “two weddings” were only a few days apart. My pastor at home dropped everything to marry us the afternoon we called him with our dilemma.

We ended up going the Denmark route due to the German process requiring, what was for us, unobtainable documents.

We've had a number of friends do the same due to similar issues, plus the German process can be very cost prohibitive once you start including official translators and such.

The Danish authorities accept a passport as a proof of ID, and the supporting documents can be in Danish, English or German.

If it's less work, it's less work. And it can take months if one of you is not German.

So this is pure anecdata here, but as a foreigner who married a German, it took a while, but it was relatively little work.

The biggest issue was that we needed one of my documents (the birth certificate) to have a seal of authenticity from my home country, which then all needed to be translated officially. That took longer than it needed to because we didn't realise it needed to be authenticated and so we got it returned at one point and needed to resubmit it. But apart from that, it was mostly a case of waiting for the formalities to go through - that took a couple of months in total, but it required relatively little work overall. I suspect in total, getting married in another country would have taken more work to organise and arrange, although it would probably have been quicker with the right combination of country and pre-existing documents.

Yeh two weeks would be very quick for a German marriage involving foreigners, more realistically a few months at-least all things considered.

I have a friend who got married “on emergency” because her visa was expiring and she would have to get back to her country of origin if she didn’t find a job in a few weeks. So .. yeah.. could happen. And it’s also not just about the time .. it’s also about the amount of documents, forms and all the offices you need to contact.

A last-minute decision to be married before a baby is born. Being married can simplify other bureaucracy if the mother dies or is incapacitated.

People often forget marriage is also a legal contract (in Germany it simplifies so many things, eg. health insurance, joint income tax filings, etc).

I think most immigrants who get married in Germany are doing it for legal reasons primarily.

A baby takes 9 months to develop, if you notice 2 days before birth that you should be married so that you don't have to adopt (or whatever other reason), that's just very poor planning on the parents' side.

And in actual emergencies, these processes can be accelerated, like every other buerocratic process in Germany

These are the cases which Germany wants to avoid: "Scheinehe", where people get paid to marry and give the other person an "Aufenthalts- und Arbeitserlaubnis" -> allowed to stay and work in Germany.

There is quite a business around this.

Ironically, on the one hand, the government views marriage officially as a "contract"; on the other hand, if it is "just a contract" between two consenting adults, then it is considered fraud! It makes little sense.

I think it is outrageous for a government to allege, or even just to investigate, particular causes for marriage unless one of the parties was coerced into it rather than wanting it out of their own free will.

"German government" does not see marriage as a contract.

Lets combat marriage fraud by making it a kafkaesque ordeal to get married in the first place.

Big brain move, how many innocent couples get caught in the net, versus how many fraudsters can you realistically catch (organized crime has figured out how to game the bureaucracy, no doubt).

Germany has laws and traditions around marriage.

If one doesn't respect German laws, best to go to a country which works differently and stay there.

I've been living in Germany for more than 7 years and I can only verify this. The offices in big cities are overloaded with requests and getting an appointment for things like renewing documents can takes weeks if not months. Not to mention the naturalization process which can take up to two years[0].

A solution for this in my opinion would be to centralize these processes and make them online, like making a government portal for the whole country. But for that many rules should be changed, which is highly unlikely.

[0] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/zwei-jahre-warten-auf-die... (German)

You can't centralize them, as in, it's simply not possible because Germany is decentralized. It's not that many rules would have to be changed, the Constitution would have to be changed. It's completely impossible.

The processes are going to be online, this is mandated by law, it will take years, but it is being worked on (some are already available online). They will still be provided by the respective municipality.

From the examples, I can only fully appreciate the marriage part. When a foreigner wants to get married in germany, they need to prove they aren't married in their home country yet. Getting these documents can be a huge hassle or even impossible. This made a few international couples I know go to denmark to get married.

Any process around immigration seems pretty awful, just based on the overwhelmed and (often) unhelpful offices (based on reports from the former friends again).

On the other hand, buying and registering a car was quite easy and possible online, besides picking up the car at least. (With some caveats though. Wanting an electric license plate at the time needed me to go by in person to show them the certificate of the car.)

Your site was a complete godsend when I lived in Berlin, though eventually the excessive paperwork was a major contributor towards my decision to move elsewhere.

A few other people I know who left after a couple of years say the same - endless bureaucracy and extremely dysfunctional local governance (eg: the clusterfuck with rent control where some people had to pay backrent) made the decision to leave easy.

Where did you end up? What made you choose?

Your website is amazing and has helped me personally thousands of time. It became the first quick english reference for everything when I first moved here. Thank you!

This is exactly what I'm aiming for since 6+ years. It's really happy to hear that it's working.

If u really wanna have "worst of all worlds" though, i can only recommend Austria.

Basically it's the German-grade paper bureaucracy described here, but spiced up with a truckload of what i would describe as "negative global southern stereotypes":

- Everything has to be strictly processed by the book, but ... - "the book" closes Friday at noon, no wait, today it was 10:00, come by next month, we only process such requests on the first friday of the month. Oh wait, Mrs Soandso is on vacation next month, would June suit you? - the one managing "the book" doesn't like your face/surname/tone/something? You might wanna try another city ...

In short: it's all strict and utterly beaucratic like you'd expect in Germany, but at the same time ripe with small time corruption, incompetence, and petty xenophobia

(Small anecdote: I actually once had to get a lawyer to register a company, since the person responsible for my file at the business court thought my surname was sounding a bit too "foreign" and demanding I present a valid staying permit -- which I do not need (and therefore couldn't even get) in Austria. Straight up refused to process my filing until my lawyer requested a legal statement in writing)

I just want to take a moment and say your website has been a real lifesaver. So many headaches avoided by consulting it!

From all the comments in this thread it seems like everyone is in agreement Denmark has less bureaucracy. Is it also a better place to set up a company? Do more companies get acquired from Denmark than Germany?

What are the redeeming qualities of Germany?

A country that is incredibly rich in historical significance (both good and bad), cultural traditions, art (historical and modern), regional variety and nature. Cities are walkable, public transport is mostly decent (it's perfectly fine to live without a car if you're in the city), crime is low, poverty is low, the economy has been tanking a bit recently, but has traditionally been doing well.

In terms of mentality, Bavarians are very different from Rhinelanders who are very different from East Germans. Berlin is a bubble in and of itself and can't really be compared to the rest. In general, Germans tend to take comfort in clear rules and structure, and are used to a certain kind of cutting through bullshit, both of which may be a good or a bad thing. I'll also add that, to my knowledge, no other country has reflected its own role in history as deeply and critically as Germany has, which to me comes as a bonus even when there is a tendency to overcorrect.

Food is IMHO not great (except Käsespatzle), but beer is some of the best in the world.

Don't forget bread. Whenever I travel to the US I'm appalled by what is considered good bread there. Not throwing shade here, it's just what it is. On the flipside, buying Avocados here in Germany is akin to a crime against humanity.

One of my pet peeves is how Germans have amazing bread, but then put the blandest possible stuff (like very tasteless Cheese, and one leaf of salad) on top of it, while Italians have great stuff to put on bread but the bread itself is so boring.

You can get good bread in the US at a bakery. Supermarkets are iffy depending on the region.

You can get fantasic bread in the US, but just like everything else food-related, you're not going to find it at Walmart or a typical grocery store.

Then travel to Switzerland and IMHO German bread is just average anymore.

Germany has some great burger restaurants. Cafes are pretty good too.

Orderly, rational people. Hard working, rich country, despite no natural wealth. No cutting corners, one of the reasons bureaucracy is so horrid. You are expected to have your shit together, still people are as lenient as they can be. Things work, you can trust people. Low crime, clean streets. Good sense of morality. Country is capable of much more, still holds itself back a lot, preference in humbleness. Things are built on solid foundations. Not a bad place to be.

> clean streets

Living here, i disagree. Just on my way to the train station i saw at least 10 cigarette butts on the ground. And its like that across the whole city.

I just had some friends visit on the way to their home country, after spending 4 months traveling through Spain.

They liked Spain a lot, but the first comment they made when we went for a walk was how clean the streets and the surroundings where.

Your cleanliness mileage may vary per Land, I guess.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not - but in case you're not - seeing "10 cigarette butts" - instead of, say, piles of trash, dung, old broken down cars, and/or drug paraphernalia - seems pretty clean to me, as cities come.

>rational people

Hardly. A lot of people buy into FUD without questioning it. A lot of people never question their government or rules no matter how stupid they are.

They'll just tell you to follow the rules even if you explain to them in a 100 page essay why those rules make no sense and are even detrimental.

They never acknowledge the possibility that their government/bureaucratic systems in palce can be faulty. If it doesn't work for you, then it must be your fault, not the system's fault.

It's the kind of blind trust in the system that lead to the Wirecard scandal happening under the watch of the entire world.

Rational people constantly question things, not trust and follow them blindly.

> clean streets

There's junkies fighting for crack in their underwear in minus degree weather right in the center of Frankfurt, shit and needles everywhere all around hauptbahnhof, come on.

Note that I am a German. I would say there are few. Bad education, especially in schools, a broken railway and public transport system, as well as incredibly high taxes. You may say "free healthcare" and a point can be made here, but when you take a look at the high taxes you have to pay, it's not worth it, if your income is above average. All in all it's a mess and I haven't even begun speaking about German people and their mentality, as well as poverty and unsuccessful immigration.

Incredibly high taxes? Denmark has higher taxes.

And don't forget Germany has one of the lowest annual working hours in the world

https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

Mmmhh... I don't think the OECD data is not working comparing countries:

"The data are published with the following health warning: The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of the level of average annual hours of work for a given year, because of differences in their sources and method of calculation."

Yes, in Germany are many part-time workers but overall mostly they are not working 6 hours the day . Normal is - afaik - 8 hours per day on approx. 220 days in a year.

> And don't forget Germany has one of the lowest annual working hours in the world

Of course if you are a civil servant or part of some mega union, but for the rest of the private plebs it is often 9h daily(because lunch break is not part of contract) and most do a long commute(because of eternal housing crisis) which may raise it to 12-14h easily.

You're misinformed. Second highest tax burden [1], in Europe and the OECD [2].

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/tax-burden-on-labo... [2] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/tax-burden-labor-europ...

(rants)

yep, you are German alright!

Truly the worst thing about living in Germany is the apparent national hobby of complaining about things that perhaps aren't great, but really aren't as bad as you might think.

In practice, German schools are pretty decent, but they obsess about PISA scores and so neglect to ever notice what the schools are doing well. The train networks are fairly extensive, can be quite cheap depending on how you travel, and consistent across the country, but a lot of Germans would much rather complain about how late they are than recognise anything positive about the system. The general public transport networks (i.e. transport inside towns and cities) are amazing, and one of the things that I would most miss if I went anywhere else.

I think part of it is just that if you're German, you rarely see these systems from an outside perspective, so you only see the points that chafe regularly. But another part of it really is just that German tendency to criticise first rather than to view things holistically.

In certain parts of Germany the German equivalent of "You really can't complain" is the highest form of praise.

Looks like you really want to move to Switzerland :D

To then start complaining about the costs of living..?

The best I'd say is a sense of collectiveness that is somewhat higher than other countries.

It's not nationalism. Rather, there is some amount of willingness to give up personal comfort for some sort of general/societal greater good.

This is really something I've noticed compared to say the UK, Australia, certain asian countries, etc.

Not sure why it hasn't translated to improving bureaucracy.

Collectiveness?

I can't wait for the new Nigerian immigrant to swing his beer at Octoberfest arm in arm with the second generation Turk from Munich, all while the waitress, a temporary worker from the Czech Republic, rushes on.

It's not going to happen. Social cohesion is very low, and Germany failed to foster a sense of shared values among immigrants.

> I can't wait for the new Nigerian immigrant to swing his beer at Octoberfest arm in arm with the second generation Turk from Munich, all while the waitress, a temporary worker from the Czech Republic, rushes on.

Wait, isn't that what's happening already? I'm pretty sure the temporary worker from the Czech Republic is there, as is the second generation Turk voting for Erdogan. Not fully sure about the Nigerian immigrant though.

> The best I'd say is a sense of collectiveness that is somewhat higher than other countries.

I wouldn't say that this comes anywhere close to many other countries in Germany. Societal coherence in e.g. Russia or Norway is much higher than in Germany.

I think it's rather the other way around: The countries you're comparing to might be exceptionally bad at it, and Germany is average.

> Societal coherence in e.g. Russia or Norway

Russia (with the exception of its ethnic minorities) is one of the most atomized societies in Europe, actually. The Russian dream is a house in the exurbs with a three-meter-tall impenetrable fence around the lot where you can do anything you want inside and no one will bother you.

Can you elaborate on societal coherence in Russia? This in particular piques my interest; what I hear from Russia is that it's a place where any interpersonal conflict is resolved with (verbal) violence.

Can you provide some examples of what germans bind together for the "greater good"? I seem to have missed it.

Almost one million volunteer firefighters (Freiwillige Feuerwehr). These are 96.95 % of all firefighters. (For comparison: the UK quota is 2.31%.)[1] Very popular to participate especially in many rural parts of Germany.

[1] Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freiwillige_Feuerwehr#Deutschl... (in German)

Following and make the most pedantic rules. Germans loooooove setting rules and expect everyone to follow or else they rat you or or sue you even. (see neighbour conflicts about hedges growing too far etc)

Mild summers, good work-life balance, the European Union, decent healthcare, ease of travel, nature.

Even though I'm currently in a "it's complicated" relationship with Germany, I moved here by choice because I loved the place. These things are still there, but since I'm working so close to Germany's problems, I let it get to me sometimes.

Doesn't that apply to many other countries as well?

The most beautiful cities at night, especially Dresden. You never need to own a car, amazing beer, awesome Turkish food, awesome dance clubs in old castles or rundown industrial parks; also life is 10 times better if you're a student :)

(I lived in Germany for about a year as an American college exchange student)

The hacker subculture there is incredible; closest thing to late-1990s bay area (before the flood of money killed everything) that's still alive today.

But yeah, there are a lot of negatives counterbalancing that.

Is Chaos Communication Congress worth a visit for an American who speaks crappy German?

Yes. Live translation services are provided for the minority of formal stuff that’s done in German. Drinking beer in the alternative track, everybody understands each other after a couple of drinks even if they didn’t before.

Erm.. You do realize that in almost all indexes that matter, Germany is in the top 5% e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_D...

You hear people complaining a lot since they like to and we live with crazy priorities like "time to launch a company in days" but in the real world if we had a choice of where you are born Germany will be high on the list.

The sausage

Not really, it's just the wurst.

Hey nicbou, a fantastic website thanks for your efforts. While reading your Bank article I noticed a potentially outdated information concerning ING as I am also an expat and was able open a bank account there.

"ING: You need German permanent residence or citizenship to open an account. Some students could open an account with a residence permit. Their customer support speaks English."

I'm rewriting it as we speak. It's my main focus this month.

Can you tell me more? When and where did you open an account? What residence title do you have and what is your nationality? Feel free to email me the answer if you prefer privacy.

Not the parent but I had similar experience: I could open an account by ING.

Opened end of 2022, fully online. I have italian citizenship; my residence title was just... resident? I had the Anmeldung for the apartment I was living in.

But it wasn't all easy. I needed:

- A german telephone number.

- A document (with a MRZ) with my german address in it.

- Not sure but maybe they also asked about my job?

The document was critical for me; I had to go to my embassy and apply for a new id that had my german address.

Also everything was fully in german, no english whatsoever.

Your website is very informative. Please build something equivalent for Munich.

To do a good job I need to be there and experience the pain firsthand. There are many subtle nuances that are really hard to spot from a distance.

This is why I never really covered studying or raising children.

German bureaucracy is hyperlocal. I rely on more and more on a local network of experts to do a good job. In Munich I'd be mostly starting from scratch.

However most of the website covers all of Germany. A smarter person would have started All About Germany, if only for SEO purposes.

Feel free to start this yourself if you have first hand pain.

As a German this never really happened to me. I even own a business here, not a GmBH though. Took one document to fill out about an hour of "work".

I really do not get these complaints at all. Even Taxes can be filled out easily with a pretty good online form. None of the bureaucracy ever happened to me, except it is annoying to book appointments. The only things that need addressing are the chronically understaffed government offices and the ridiculously high taxes which are constantly being wasted on utter nonsense.

I'm German and have a GmbH. Go found one; it's completely ridiculous. Not just founding it, but running it, too. Esp. when you know how easy it is in the US/UK/Sweden (the three other places I've lived).

Several people close to me own-operate GmbHs and it's probably the best vaccination against entrepreneurship there is.

I once saw a survey, possibly from the Annals of Improbable Research, asking how many people constitute a bureaucracy. My favorite response: One German.

See also: The Checkpoint Charlie scene from the 1985 movie Gotcha!

Another fun example: if you have a child, you won't automatically get Kindergeld (child benefits) even though you have to sign paperwork for the birth certificate. You have to apply for child benefits and parental leave and maternity compensation and you have to notify each relevant institution individually yourself.

There are good and important reasons certain public institutions aren't allowed to share data by default but instead of making that data sharing opt-in, it's completely offloaded to you personally.

Sometimes Kindergeld makes less sense than the income tax reduction. The best option can be calculated automatically, but the state still won't do it.

Kindergeld is a fantastic example of bureaucracy that could be abgeschafft.

Kindergeld is a fantastic example of something that should be a UBI. It's intended to go to the child and be spent by the parents on the child's behalf - legally, it's considered income of the child, not the parents. That's literally a basic income already and it's paid from birth until the child is 18-25 years old (depending on employment status or if the child is in education).

Of course because the FDP conveniently forgot that its "Bürgergeld" was supposed to be a form of UBI and decided to simply rebrand social welfare (aka Hartz IV) instead, we're now in a perverse situation where the thing that was supposed to be a universal basic income is instead very much not universal and even takes Kindergeld into account if the child is part of the household.

That said, turning the Kindergeld into a UBI would also mean abolishing the Kinderfreibetrag which acts regressive (i.e. in effect, higher income families receive more benefits per child than lower income families). It would also make it easier to justify closing the loophole of migrant workers collecting child benefits for children in their home country given that a UBI could reasonably be restricted to national residents rather than all EU residents (which is the concern with limiting child benefits the same way).

Thank you for your website. It has helped me immensely.

Come to Italy, it can't be any worse than here. Here bureaucracy is a huge and very lucrative business. Getting a driving licence privately here is the epitome of stupidity. Honestly I can't understand how so many basic common-sense things in life are self-over-complicated just to favor bureocrats and state-maintained employees.

> the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark

True. And not only for Germany

(The Netherlands might be a good second choice as well)

I refuse to believe it is worse than France. I trust the Germans to at least be somewhat efficient.

I've worked in both, plus the Netherlands. France has one forgiving element: usually some room for the human element. Germans civil servants seem happy to apply rules and procedures, even if they are clearly suboptimal. French civil servants would agree it's ridiculous and are more inclined to help you get unstuck if you can show them that you are.

France also seemed further along digitizing things.

Total duration is probably still a tie: it's all over the map but things can take ages in either country.

The Netherlands is great, except when it isn't. If you ever get stuck there, you have no chance convincing anyone. Their believe they have the best (civil) service doesn't help, but it turns out its all highly optimized for 'normal' Dutch citizens. As soon as your deviations from that norm start to add up, you're going to run into unhandled edge cases, which people won't handle (no protocol, and they are not used to using their own brain). "Computer says no" is Dutch (civil) service in a nutshell.

The digitization in france in making things worse on the edge though, the system are buggy and now you no longer have that human you can talk to fix things.

I remember not being able to create an account because the website password validation regex was buggy, I wrote an email about it and it's probably still not fixed. I've had to read the "compiled" js of the website to understand what was wrong to begin with.

I've had administrative processes slightly deviate from the happy path and getting stuck. When you talk to a human now. it's sorry can't do anything it's all online even when you explain that yes you tried other possible contact channels phone,email,in person, etc (email seems to go to /dev/null or get a canned response that clearly didn't read your message).

"Computer says no" is more and more of a thing now here in france. it's faster when you on the common happy path but if you aren't you better pray. Also the different services still seem unable to talk to each other even when they are in the same building / same administration but different department. Hopefully they'll improve that in 20 years.

My family and I are Irish citizens and while the Netherlands has been good to us, it is surprising to me that when we go to the hospital you have to check in with a specifically Dutch ID. In the name of the person with the appointment. That seems OK since I have a Dutch driver's licence, but my 4 year old daughter does not, and they seemed to have no idea what to do with her. Usually we figure it out but there's not even a check in desk so I end up bumbling around asking random staff members.

>I trust the Germans to at least be somewhat efficient.

They're eficient at creating more bureaucracy as a universal solution to all problems.

Having dealt with Germany I have come to realize that excessive bureaucracy is basically a jobs program and a way for people to cover their ass whenever the shit hits the fan.

Something goes wrong and you're the big boss? Add more bureaucracy as your attempt to "fix" the problem and your justification to why your job is valuable to the company.

Something goes wrong on your watch? It's not your fault if you followed all the bureaucracy conjure by your bosses.

For some reason, _fear_ seems to be an important emotion in Germany that steers the collective.

Fear of the boss to be caught with a error on his (hence he adds more bureaucracy), fear of the general public to look racist (hence low policing in high crime area with many foreigners), fear of the case worker to get sued (hence applying the rules literally, to the detriment of the applicant),.etc

> They're [The Germans are] eficient at creating more bureaucracy as a universal solution to all problems.

Never ever confuse Germans with the German government (except if you are looking for trouble :-) ). It is well-known that what are "lawyer jokes" in the USA are "politicians jokes" in Germany.

> Something goes wrong and you're the big boss? Add more bureaucracy as your attempt to "fix" the problem and your justification to why your job is valuable to the company.

This literally applies to big orgs as well with red tape, etc

I know Germany has this reputation and Germany can be very efficient at times. But the vast majority of the time Germany is anything but efficient.

The Administration is particularly bad. Most of the time, they're understaffed and digital infrastructure is completely lacking most of the places. Then, in many cases, there is also a ping-pong in terms of responsibilities. Sometimes your stuff is bouncing between different levels of administration (thank you federalism) and sometimes its between different departments. Its not unheard of that you have to provide the same data in different forms for the different departments working for the same agency.

The amount of time I have spend waiting in line to do something as simple as renewing my Perso (national ID) or requesting a passport. When I moved two years ago, I spent 4 hours waiting in line to sign a form stating that I moved here. Waiting for the passport was a similar waiting game (and that is as a German-born citizen, I can't begin to imagine how bad it is when you're also concerned with residency and visa stuff).

German companies love to complain about the bureaucracy of the government, but are effectively replicating that same bureaucracy without any need.

So no, most interactions aren't efficient unfortunately

Germans are anything but efficient. At best, they're methodical. Speaking from experience, that is also a lie.

They’re not know for efficiency or being methodical, but for gründlichkeit - being meticulous.

Then again, anything like this is a stereotype.

> Germans are anything but efficient.

Germans are (rather) efficient. The German bureacracy isn't. :-)

I lived in France, in China and now in Germany. I would say that somehow, France and Germany are quite similar, it's just that one suck more than another on specific areas and vice-versa. The net salary is somehow higher in Germany but the amount of subsidies you can get from the state is lower also so it's pretty much the same. I prefer the decentralized aspect of Germany (unlike France where everything is just centralized in Paris and the rest is just Silent Hill) and also the fact that you can just live without a car. From France I prefer the more liberal views on "What the state consider to be a family" which is light years ahead of Germany. This said, if you are a married couple with children, you'll get more money from the state in Germany I believe. I believe that Germany is more suitable for mid-40's traditional family, younger/wilder that that, it can be quite boring.

But all of this is just child play compared to how easy things are in China in terms of settle down (based on the experience of someone who has a job with a local company). I am tired of the pretentious western europe politics/administration point of view that immediately ranks everything (including good ideas) coming from Asia/global South as "not transposable to Europe" or just "not as good as our ways".

China has 0.07%, France 10.3%, and Germany 18% immigrants. It's obvious how this explains the difference and why no lessons can be learned from Chinese bureaucracy about how to deal with immigrants.

Exactly what I was referring to in my previous post:

_I am tired of the pretentious western europe politics/administration point of view that immediately ranks everything (including good ideas) coming from Asia/global South as "not transposable to Europe" or just "not as good as our ways"._

Did you live in China as an immigrant, did you settle down there for several years, did you have to go through their immigration process ?

You should see Spain... basically the same but impossible even to get an appointment. There are dodgy third-party people that sell them on Facebook (I guess they use bots to get them), that's how bad it is.

Might depend on where you are in Spain. Having lived in both, I'd take Spain over Germany any day of the week.

Having immigrated to Spain, it's not so bad. Everything is done digitally. There is a unique personal identifier. Something like filing tax returns is genuinely very easy.

Just wanted to say "hey", when reading the topic and you nickname I thought is was you. The link in you commented confirmed it. We met at verkstedt (Mario)

Why govt is not doing anything about it? bureaucracy is well known problem in Germany.

FWIW, I got married in Germany (as a German to another German) and it was surprisingly straightforward compared to other acts of bureaucracy that I've seen.

I got married in Denmark for this reason. Super easy. Costs plenty. Smart economic strategy.

Amazing, I’ve moved to Hamburg and the system is horrifyingly fascinating.

Now try Portugal. It will make Germany look like a walk in the park.

Are you kidding? Specially with the article in the topic referring to creating a company. Search for "Criar uma empresa na hora".

Moved in 2018, looking forward for leaving soon!

Oh hey there! I've just moved to Germany from the US (not Berlin but hey, easy enough to apply the general knowledge elsewhere) and your site has been fantastic. Obviously I did not move because I valued bureaucracy, but I'm willing to put up with it partly for a fantastic job, and partly to escape the horror that is modern America. Thank you so much!

I am curious: what specific horror of modern America are you escaping?

I'm European because of US healthcare, insecurity, inequality, bad food culture, urban planning, and danger from natural and man made disasters, quality and cost of education.

Every single one of those things is better in my new European home.

A very good summary. There's also more Nazis in America than in Germany, and more far-right hatred in general.

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