German Joys

What Are You, Sign Man?

Yesterday, I'm sitting in my office, minding someone else's business, when someone knocks.  A guy in blue overalls, with a large mustache, asks me if I requested that the sign outside my office door be changed.  Nope, I say.  He checks the address, and sees that it's the person next door who needs a new sign.  But that person's not there, and the sign can't be changed without that person's permission.  So Sign Man gives me a business card, and tells me to have my neighbor call him to have his sign changed.

Of course, Sign Man's office is located in another building halfway across campus. In Germany, most official activities are split up into many tiny component parts, each of which is then made the sole responsibility of functionaries located in completely different institutions. These people may never communicate with each other.

This makes it difficult to determine why matters have come to a standstill inside the bureaucracy, which they so often do. The real reason is that the functionary responsible for Step 3 went on vacation or is ill, but, of course, Step 2 and Step 4 functionary do not know this, since neither knows where Step 3 Functionary's office is and may well not even know his telephone number. Assuming, of course, that they actually know who Step 3 Functionary is, which is not often the case.

But what's even more interesting is Sign Man's title. It is, in the original German: Dezernat Gebaeudemanagement -- Veranstaltungsbetreuer.  Which I would translate as "Building Management Department -- Facility Caretaker" But Veranstaltung usually means "event," which doesn't really make much sense in this context.  There's no particular "event" that I know of going on -- the man appears to be a perfectly normal building super.  But why would somebody who takes care of buildings be listed as an "event caretaker"? Can someone enlighten me?

TV Fee Terror Part 5!

In light of the discussion that recently broke out about German investigators who come to your door and pose questions to you about televisions and radios you own (to get you to admit you own them, and then sign you up for the German media tax), I just thought I'd link you to this story (G) about the intrusive and aggressive tactics of some of the freelance enforcers of this tax (which is collected by a German agency called the GEZ).

This story is number five in an ongoing series, and that the newspaper (the FAZ) reports that the problem of aggressive fee collectors is an "unending story," judging from the amount of mail they have gotten from readers during the course of the series.  In this episode, a German/Canadian citizen who was accosted by a GEZ agent registered a television he had borrowed from his brother during a stay in a German vacation home. The GEZ begins booking money from his account, and takes months to stop, even after he's informed them many times that he does not reside in Germany. Also, if you become homeless, but forget to officially de-register (abmelden) yourself from the rolls of television owners, and then later get your own apartment again, you will be billed for all the years you were technically, officially still "registered," but were actually living on the street.

We all agree that technically, you don't have to tell the GEZ people anything, and that they are not allowed to enter your home. But after reading all of these stories, you cannot seriously argue that the the conduct of GEZ investigators doesn't represent a serious intrusion by the state into the private autonomy of citizens. The moral of the story, which is the moral of all stories about all bureaucracies, is that once they get their hooks into you, you're done for. Either comply immediately, or live 'off the grid.'

By the way, I don't watch very much television, but I'm generally satisfied with German TV and more than satisfied with German public radio stations, so I happy pay my GEZ fee.

So I Guess You'd Prefer Anarchy?

From an email forum for expats in Germany, a cry for help from a non-German (guess which nationality) married to a German:

Last night my husband informed me offhand he needed to pay his bi-yearly car tax again. Since he recently joined a new firm which provides their employees a company car I inquired which car he meant... He said no, he was paying the taxes on a car he hasn't owned for the past nine and a half years. !!!

After my initial shock I inquired further and the story unfolded as follows. In mid 1998 (before I joined him) he owned a used Volkswagen Polo. He was a career Army guy back then and while on the way to work one day the car began to smoke, got too hot apparently, and the motor locked up on him on the autobahn. After having it inspected he learned that to fix the car would take more than what it was worth, so he contacted a junkyard in Bonn and arranged to have it towed away and junked. No money changed hands so there was no receipt.

...My husband informed me there are (at least) two sets of papers required to own a vehicle. One set are for ownership and the other are something to do with the allowance to drive it on the public roads. I'll have to take his word for that. When the junking company showed up he was required to give them the ownership papers and the other papers he kept.

No money changed hands so there was no receipt to show any transaction had taken place. The company simply showed up with a wrecker, hauled the car away and that was that. He was supposed to receive some kind of documentation per mail (transferral of ownership?) regarding the car but very shortly after this happened he...was out of the country for approximately a year.

When he returned he found out he was still being billed for the taxes on the car. When he went to the tax office to straighten things out he was told he needed proof of the transferral of ownership in order to stop being taxed. He went to the junkyard and requested a copy of the paperwork they had, only to be told they didn't have a clue what he was talking about, didn't know which car he meant, and couldn't help him.

He went back to the tax office and they told him without those papers he has to pay the tax or they will prosecute him. He yo-yo'ed back and forth between the two offices for a while longer with no result before he gave up and paid the tax. After a few years of paying the tax and it being a hardship he decided to try again to resolve the problem, only to find the junkyard had gone out of business.

Now it seems we're stuck paying this tax (approximately 400,-Euros per year) forever on a vehicle that hasn't been in our possession for going on nine and a half years. I am highly frustrated about this and the fact he's been simply paying it year after year without getting it taken care of, but he says he's exhausted the known possibilities and it's at an end.

ROTFLMAO (G).

Funder on the Impossibility of Das Leben der Anderen

Anna Funder, author of the excellent Stasiland (which I reviewed here), writes in The Guardian that despite Das Leben der Anderen's appeal as a movie, the assumption it's based on -- that a Stasi spy might take pity on the subjects of his surveillance and shield them from persecution -- just could not have happened:

The ex-Stasi are vociferous in their claims of being "victims of democracy". But the truth is that, by and large, they are doing much better in the new Germany than the people they oppressed. They have the educations and solid work histories they denied their victims. Many of them were snapped up by security firms and private detective agencies eager for their considerable expertise, or they went into business, skilled as they are - to perhaps an unholy degree - in "managing" people. Surprisingly often, they sold property and insurance, occupations unknown in the Soviet bloc. (I think they had a head start here - after all, they were schooled in the art of convincing people to do things against their better judgment.)

[Dr. Hubertus] Knabe [director of the Hohenschoenhausen memorial (G)] is no doubt correct about the internal surveillance of the Stasi making it physically impossible for a Stasi man to try to save people. But in my experience, the more frightening thing is that they didn't want to. The institutional coercion made these men into true believers; it shrank their consciences and heightened their tolerance for injustice and cruelty "for the cause".

Von Donnersmarck spent four years researching the film, and knows as well as anyone that there is no case of a Stasi man trying to save victims. He has said: "I didn't want to tell a true story as much as explore how someone might have behaved. The film is more of a basic expression of belief in humanity than an account of what actually happened." The terrible truth is that the Stasi provide no material for a "basic expression of belief in humanity". For expressions of conscience and courage, one would need to look to the resisters.

Non-Entrepreneurial Europeans

Edmund S. Phelps, 2006 Nobel Prize Laureate in economics, takes a stab at explaining Europe's lagging economic performance in this editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

He has some interesting things to say, albeit in bone-dry prose. He doesn't blame European social transfer payments for the lackluster performance (let us leave to one side, for the moment, how this performance is measured, and whether it's really all that lackluster). Rather, it's the mentality:

The values that might impact dynamism are of special interest here. Relatively few in the Big Three [France, Germany, Italy] report that they want jobs offering opportunities for achievement (42% in France and 54% in Italy, versus an average of 73% in Canada and the U.S.); chances for initiative in the job (38% in France and 47% in Italy, as against an average of 53% in Canada and the U.S.), and even interesting work (59% in France and Italy, versus an average of 71.5% in Canada and the U.K). Relatively few are keen on taking responsibility, or freedom (57% in Germany and 58% in France as against 61% in the U.S. and 65% in Canada), and relatively few are happy about taking orders (Italy 1.03, of a possible 3.0, and Germany 1.13, as against 1.34 in Canada and 1.47 in the U.S.).

***

The weakness of these values on the Continent is not the only impediment to a revival of dynamism there. There is the solidarist aim of protecting the "social partners"--communities and regions, business owners, organized labor and the professions--from disruptive market forces. There is also the consensualist aim of blocking business initiatives that lack the consent of the "stakeholders"--those, such as employees, customers and rival companies, thought to have a stake besides the owners. There is an intellectual current elevating community and society over individual engagement and personal growth, which springs from antimaterialist and egalitarian strains in Western culture. There is also the "scientism" that holds that state-directed research is the key to higher productivity. Equally, there is the tradition of hierarchical organization in Continental countries. Lastly, there a strain of anti-commercialism. "A German would rather say he had inherited his fortune than say he made it himself," the economist Hans-Werner Sinn once remarked to me.

***

It may be that the Continentals finding, over the 19th and early 20th century, that there was little opportunity or reward to exercise freedom and responsibility, learned not to care much about those values. Similarly, it may be that Americans, having assimilated large doses of freedom and initiative for generations, take those things for granted. That appears to be what Tocqueville thought: "The greater involvement of Americans in governing themselves, their relatively broad education and their wider equality of opportunity all encourage the emergence of the 'man of action' with the 'skill' to 'grasp the chance of the moment.'"

I don't know where Phelps is coming from ideologically, but -- as you can see by his prose -- he is an academic economist, not a polemicist. Therefore, I wouldn't call this Europe-bashing, despite the categorization.

Petty, Reliable Petty Officials

Otto Hinze drops a Wilhelmine truth bomb:

"The discipline of the military, with its habituation to order and punctuality, in promptness in obeying orders and precision in appearance, is an outstanding school for the lower grades of officialdom, among whom reliability is more important than intelligence."

Otto Hinze (historian), 1911, as quoted in Reihnhard Kühnl, Die Weimarer Republik (2d. ed. 1993).

Brussels vs. the Tophats

So I'm waiting for a doctor's appointment this morning paging through Spiegel and see this article (G) about chimney sweeps in Germany. Germany still has Schornsteinfeger, those quaint figures in black tophats (good-luck symbols!) who make sure your coal-burning stoves and tile-ovens are in order and clean your chimneys of all the dust, dead pigeons, urchin residue, and unexploded bombs.

But wait, nobody has basement boilers or coal-burning stoves anymore; and the number of apartments with actual working chimneys is pretty tiny. So the chimney sweep must be a thing of the past, right? Wrong! There are most definitely still chimney sweeps in Germany. They not only offer their services to you, they force their services upon you. When they come by to inspect your building, you must let them in (they can even call the police and force entry), and you must pay them a fee determined by the local board.

The article profiles Joachim Datko, a 55-year-old engineer from Regensburg who tried to reject the chimney-sweeper's services, pointing out that he had installed an ultra-modern gas heating system that didn't produce a single particle of dust or smoke. He lost, and the chimney sweeper was permitted to barge his way into Datko's house to conduct pointless measurements.

Who gave them these secure, life-long jobs? The Nazis, of course. In a job-creation boondoogle that's more reminiscent of 1435 than 1935, they they divided all of Germany up into small "sweep districts," and created a tiny chimney-sweep monopoly in each one. Chimney-sweeps in training have to wait 12 years to be assigned a district. When they get one, they have to live there and volunteer for the fire department. In return, though, they have a monopoly on inspecting and cleaning chimneys and heating devices in that district. In their defense, they point out that they're much more than chimney sweeps and are, like, totally modern now, and know how to check your home for all sorts of harmful vapors and gases. But however useful their services may be, they still have a monopoly.

Who will save us? The EU, of course. Monopolies violate EU guidelines, so Brussels is soon going to force the chimney sweepers to compete for their services. Yes, that's right -- Brussels will be intervening to reduce bureaucracy. The battle-lines are drawn. On the one side, chimney-sweeps, with their official website glorifying themselves as "experts on security, energy, and the environment" The website's mascot is the charming young thing picture above, who can sweep my chimney anytime. [was that really necessary? -- ed.]. In the other corner, Joachim Datko -- yes, that Datko -- who's got his own anti-chinmey-sweep website (G)!

I don't know where I stand on this issue. On the one hand, it does seem awfully old-fashioned to preserve a monopoly, especially a Nazi monopoly (Nazopoly?). On the other hand, they wear tophats!

Water-Mills and Boring Jobs

I subscribe to a German-language mailing list for the humanities called H-Soz-U-Kult. It sounds ugly but is harmless. It delivers to my inbox conference reports, calls for papers, book reviews, and announcements of upcoming conferences. That's how I became aware of this upcoming important conference (G): "Symposium on Water-Power Use in the Cologne/Bonn Region." Among the presentations: "Historical Development of So-called Industrial Mills"; "Mills and Hammers as Formative Elements of the Cultural Landscape."

However, I'm sure the presentation that will provoke the most controversy -- even more controversy than the explanation of why "Industrial Mills" should really be thought of as "So-called Industrial Mills" -- will occur at 3:20, when the Director of the Rhine-Erft Mill Society presents her "Conceptual Outline for a Documentation Center Concerning Rhenish Mill Culture."

What kind of person would even try to capture the juicy majesty of watermills in a dry, bloodless "outline"? I'm tempted to engage in the favorite pastime of a many marginally-employed Germans. That is, travel to a conference, sit impatiently in the audience until questions are allowed, run up to the microphone, and deliver a 5-minute long, rambling, question-free tirade in which I accuse the speaker of unconscionably ignoring the 'philosophical aspects' or 'social consequences' of the question under discussion.

Hands off my Christmas Money

The new Grand Coalition running Germany plans, according to this article (German), to cut the Christmas money (Weihnachtsgeld) given to federal government bureaucrats and officials. Everyone's gotta tighten their belt, so the politicians say, and you (we) are no exception. We're not asking of you anything state-level officials and private-sector employees haven't already had to do.

If you're not German, you may be wondering what Christmas money is. It's a question I asked last year, when my December paycheck last year was a lot higher than usual.  "It's Christmas money!" my German colleagues told me.  "Why did I get it?"  "Because it's Christmas!"  "You mean," I asked, my eyes moistening slightly in gratitude, "the government is giving little old me free money as a Christmas present?"  "Of course!  We all get some." It seemed all cuddly and warmly paternalistic and 1950s. Next thing you know we'll be getting government-issue whisky to offer to business visitors, and silk stockings to bring home for the wife.

A German Joys Contest: Pick My Religion!

I will shortly depart for a vacation to fabulous Slovenia and mysterious Hungary, but directly afterward, I'll be stopping by the Citizen Registration Office to renew my visa here in Germany.  I have little doubt that, as usual, I will be asked to write my religion on an official government form.  This always strikes me as rather dodgy.  I don't particularly think the government has any business knowing what religion I practice.

So I take an irresponsible American approach, defined by the motto: "Ask a silly question, get a silly answer."  At first I was an atheist, which seemed the safest way to avoid church taxes.  Then I found out I could name any religion I wanted without getting taxed, as long as it wasn't Catholic or "Evangelisch" (Protestant).  So the next time I renewed my visa I became a Buddhist, since I've always had a thing for the Noble Eightfold Path.

But why should my next answer be limited by my own creativity?  There's a whole world of possibilities out there I might not have thought of.  Although I have thought of a lot, including the Yazidi.  They worship a blue peacock and can't eat butter beans.  So far so good, but they're also prohibited from wearing dark blue, which is one of my favorite colors.  So no Yazidi-ism for me.  I've also thought about putting down "Worship of the Flying Spaghetti Monster," but that won't fit on the form.

So, dear readers, get to those comment boxes and give me a religion!  Whoever has the most creative suggestion will dominate my spiritual development for the next year, at least in the eyes of the German state.  What more precious reward could I offer?

More on How Not to Deregulate

Many of the commenters to my post about the rail network have made valuable points about the German rail system -- notably, the fact that it is been partially de-regulated, and that the availability of trains even to somewhat remote places varies from Bundesland to Bundesland.  Of course, I happily defer to the commenters, who seem highly knowledgeable. 

I was merely reporting my personal experience of die Bahn, not attempting a formal assessment of its performance.  I travel mostly in Nordrhein-Westfalen, where the rail network is very dense.  I have often ridden trains in which I was one of perhaps 5-6 paying passengers on the whole train.  Although there may be different service providers, the experience as a passenger is of one uniform entity.  When I book an ICE train from Duesseldorf to Hannover, for example, I know exactly what that train will look like.  It will be sleek and white.  It will be filled with comfortable seats, helpful blue displays, and doors that open and close automatically, just like the doors on the U.S.S. Enterprise.

The key point I was trying to make is that whatever de-regulation has happened in Germany, it hasn't wrecked the entire rail network.  In Britain, it is now a settled consensus among all political parties that the deregulation of the rail industry is a catastrophic failure.  Costs have skyrocketed and service suffered.  Here is a conclusion from page 14 of a recent parliamentary report:

Regulation Done Right; or, a Hymn to the Deutsche Bahn

Over in The Independent, former British press secretary Alastair Campbell, first slags the triviality of British newspapers, "which seem to be full of irritating articles by contributors anxious to tell us all about their summer holidays."  He then proceeds to do just the same, telling us all about his holiday in France.  He's got sturdy Anglo-Saxon opinions about that country: lovely place to visit, but the people are depressed and cynical, and seem to be trapped in a strait-jacket of unnecessary regulation they don't know how to get out of:

[I]f you talk to the same kind of French people we have been talking to, you could hardly underestimate their sense of depression and decline.

...I can report that virtually every one of the French businesspeople we have met this year has expressed strong opposition to the 35-hour week. Perhaps more surprisingly, the opposition seems to be shared by virtually every one of the French tourists we have talked to. Their complaint is not that they work less than they did — that bit seems to please them. It is that they now have more time for leisure and holidays, yet severely reduced spending power. Restaurants report the French to be eating and drinking less. Hotels report that Belgian and Dutch families tend to be the ones taking the de luxe bedrooms and expensive set menus.

The French, Campbell says, have just plain regulated themseves into oblivion.  For a contrary view, though, read this piece by Paul Krugman, who cautions Anglo-American observers not to assume that French policies have "failed" simply because their economy is weak.  If you value time over money, you might just be content with a slow-growing, highly-regulated economy that guaratees you 2 months of effective or real vacation a year.

Further, Alastair might want to stop crowing about how, in his words, "no sane Brit" would accept the level of regulation one sees in France.  Sometimes, regulation is a good thing.  God knows, here at German Joys there have been some outbursts against the many-tentacled German regulatory state.  But anyone who's tried to travel by train in Britain lately knows just what a nightmare the wrong kind of deregulation can unleash.  British train service is now provided by a variety of different semi-private companies, who appear to have some obscure quasi-competitive relationship to each other that I was never able to figure out. 

Private and Public Freedoms (but no cannibalism)

The author is back!  First of all, many thanks to Ed Philp for his contributions over the weekend.  [I have put them in a different font color, not to single Mr. Edward Philp out for discrimination, but just because that's good blogging practice.]  Now you have the perspective of two (2) "Anglo-Saxons" on life in Germany, and this blog is the richer for it.  I hope Ed continues to contribute from time to time. 

His next-to-last post had me chuckling mordantly.  Ed's contrasting of the many "private" freedoms Germany offers (to drink beer and smoke wherever you want, or visit a prostitute) with the restrictive approach to more "public" ones (to get hired, start new businesses, accomplish bureacratic tasks) was especially apt. 

A visitor from the English-speaking world cannot help but be impressed by the amount of time Europeans spend structuring (often with much grace and generosity) their private affairs.  After a while the visitor wonders why Europeans seem to spend so much time in "private" life.  The first explanation, of course, is that they work a lot less.  Don't take my work for it, take the word of Axel Boldt's marvelous "subjective [but quite fair] comparison" of the U.S. and Germany: "The common stereotype of the diligent hard working German and the laid back TV watching American is rather wrong. It is my experience that Americans are generally much more hard working than Germans." 

Deduction Number 30: "The Penetrator"

As the title implies, this post will actually discuss the issue of tax-deductible sex toys.  You might say that I'm about to fill the holes in your knowledge with my penetrating analysis.  But first I just want to make sure nobody misses the fascinating debate raging in the comments section concerning the fitness of dowdy schoolmarm pioneering woman scientist Christian Democratic Party Chairwoman Angela Merkel as a candidate to be Federal Chancellor of Germany.  One commentator, a German who voted for Schröder in 2002 only "for cultural considerations (the fear of being overrun by Bavarians)" faces off against a non-German who cogently defends her.  Were my huge ego not in the way, I'd just let these fabulous commentators take over.  Please join their ranks, if you feel the urge!

Guest Post: Taxing Aggressively To Fund Public-Interest Soft Porn

A surprise for all my loyal fan(s)!  German Joys just got a lot more joyful with a fresh contribution from prestigious Canadian-German cultural analyst Edward Philp, who tears the veil of secrecy away from the apparatus of repression known by the acronym that strikes fear into the heard of every Germam, GEZ.  The English translation of the full name of this agency probably does convey something of its hideous nature: "Central Fee Collection Agency."  Here is the expose:

Today’s submission was not composed by the original host of German Joys. Instead, Andrew has kindly invited me to throw out a post on the topic of my choice. I’m a Canadian law student living in Germany, and I have very much enjoyed Andrew’s more or less balanced take on the German university system. But first, one of my own observations from living in Germany (which does not represent the views of the owner of this blog)...

If you were to film a suspense movie in modern day Germany and wanted your principal antagonist to evoke feelings of persecution, loathing, dread and irrational behaviour, you would cast this antagonist as a representative of the „GEZ“.

The „GEZ“ (Gebühreneinzugszentrale) is a quasi-government agency which has the delegated authority to collect broadcasting fees. Broadcasting fees fund German public television and radio programming, some of which is truly outstanding, but much of which seems to be pseudo-educational nonsense, silly documentaries („In the footsteps of the Führer – shoemakers in the Third Reich“) and the economic-stimulus variety of soft porn set in underdeveloped parts of the country. But I can’t really judge. Read on.

Reforming German Universities Part I

A few weeks ago I delivered a few thoughts on German universities at a meeting in Lübeck. I was invited, I suppose, because I've taught and studied at U.S. universities, and have now taught at a German university for several years, and therefore have a base of comparison. The friendly folks at Lübeck suspected I might have some opinions about how German universities are structured and run.  They weren't wrong.  Instead of just letting these brilliant nuggets of enlightenment fade in the memory of the conference attendees, I'd put some flesh on my notes and share them with the world.

For you busy executives who need my comments in summary form, here they are: German universities, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, set themselves the admirable goal of providing a free higher education to all students who qualified, regardless of the students' race, gender, or economic or social class. That's right, I said 'free.' The student need never pay any tuition, and receives a subsidy from the State to cover basic needs. To anyone concerned with social stratification, this appears to be - and really is - a noble endeavor.

On the way from articulation of noble principles to actual real-world practice, though, a few things went wrong. The political and social necessity of opening up the universities (or at least the prospect of a university education) to ever-larger numbers of young people led to chronic overcrowding. Because there are essentially no private German universities, all these new students came streaming into the existing public institutions, which had to be expanded at breakneck pace. The student binge also led to a poorly-planned expansion of the existing universities' administrative apparatus. Now, universities are run like bloated bureaucracies. Finally, the over-admission has resulted in a "go-it-alone" atmosphere for students. Because the university must spread its resources over such a large cohort of students (including at least 25% who will never graduate), it sometimes fails to single out and nurture the best students.

Soda Beckstein? Nein, Danke.

The most popular male baby name in Germany is, for the second year in a row, Maximilian. Sounds vaguely ancient and dignified, plus it has a cuddly abbreviation.  But, to insert a gratuitous Seinfeld reference, what if you want to name your kid Seven or Soda?  Not so fast.