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.
- 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.
Oh for sure it could be much better in Germany, and I hope that rapidly becomes the case. Definitely digitization needs to come faster.
My complaint is simply people imagining it is perfect elsewhere. Really that is not the case, no where is perfect. All the people chiming in about the US being so easy, yes, wonderful. Now let's talk about healthcare and how your health insurance is tied to your employer. Everyone who is extolling how simple the UK is, that's lovely. What a shame about brexit though.
The point is there are major pains absolutely everywhere.
> My complaint is simply people imagining it is perfect elsewhere. Really that is not the case, no where is perfect.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
In Finland I can't remember the last time I filled a paper form for anything. And I've gotten new debit and credit cards, opened bank and stock holding accounts for me and my family, renewed _very_ expired passports, applied for multiple loans (200k€+), started a company and worked with medical services (recipes, doctor appointments)
The only things that required physical presence were getting my kid's first debit card and fetching the passports, everything else was fully digital and remote.
Yeah, same in Norway. I think the last time I dealt with paper was in 2012, when I had to sign a document to get a .no-domain (before they changed to digital signing). I just signed it with Photoshop instead, since I didn't bother printing and then scanning it.
Everything is digital/easy here and has been it for a long time. Old people can still get a waiver to get government snailmail instead of secure digital mail though.
You're missing the point here. It's bad, and it affects people's lives. It also fuels populist sentiment because people blame immigrants for problems not entirely related to them.
Worse still, if a german says fuck it and wants to run his business in Estonia, the org still has to pay taxes in germany
The only silver lining to all this are Spaniards, Greeks, etc say the system here is better than in their country, but I think you should strive to benchmark up and not down
Within Europe: Austria, Switzerland, UK, NL are better than Germany for bureaucracy. Brexit may be an issue for Europeans, but the system is now more fair for non Europeans who want to go to UK.
Outside Europe: Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore is better than Germany.
> Everyone who is extolling how simple the UK is, that's lovely. What a shame about brexit though.
A part of the argument for Brexit was to enable simplifications of bureaucracy (obviously not for the specific case of someone in the EU migrating there, but for everything else). So that's not necessarily a great argument.
It hasn't been capitalized on to any great extent yet because the current government is weak and spent most of the time distracted by COVID. But the potential for simplification is actually there now, whereas previously it was often blocked by EU law.
The UK's big opportunity was: to be the "best" EU country by having the most reasonable (informal, common-sense based) interpretation of EU rules permissible, and to benefit from intra-EU trade and freedom of movement.
This opportunity was sadly squandered due to populism (and Steve Bannon's Cambridge Analytica financed by Rob Mercer), with the result that now tons of migration from India and other Asian places is arranged to fill the gaps that the European workers that left created.
So let's see how life will be at the front doorstop of the EU of which it isn't a member anymore, say, in 10 year's time, compared to how it was 2016. From what my journalist friends are telling me, for once food theft has skyrocketed, because many cannot pay their grocery bills.
To your counterexamples: if you move to the US or the UK for a job, you don't really suffer directly from Brexit or healthcare being tied to your unemployment. Sure, these could make things worse in certain cases (let's say you get laid off while in the US and end up having to get your own healthcare for a while).
The thing with bureaucracy is that it's part of normal life, there's no way around it. You can assume there's a 20% chance you'd get laid off in the US and that it would be bad, but there's a 100% chance you'll have to get a work or residence permit or something else in Germany, and it seems that the default is a painful process (reading the comments here).
> The point is there are major pains absolutely everywhere.
There are still places such as Switzerland where things are better though.
I’m a full time software developer, the lead programmer actually, but I don’t have health care. I have important unfilled prescriptions because of lack of money. So how exactly does a lack of health care not affect people?
>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.
Years of derision of Greece and its processes and bureaucracy, vindicated... by having the same problems!
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.
> It was impossible for my wife to provide an up-to-date (less than six months old) translated copy of her Chinese birth certificate
I find this hilarious. It's the same in France, you need an up to date "original" of your birth certificate. But why? It's just saying you (full names) were born in XXX on a specific date. There's nothing about it that could change, really. In the country I'm from, your parents get one original on birth, and you can ask for copies from the town hall. But in France multiple administrations were extremely bothered that they weren't "original" (because they say DUPLICATA on them, and in French you get a shitty A4 with a stamped signature one can print at home, but they insist on an original) and weren't in French.
I actually looked into this, apparently its popular across western Europe (not just Germany) and a relic of historical times when the states didn't have centralized birth and death registries. I believe the limited validity and Apostille requirement is a medieval method to combat fraud.
As a new world Australian, the fact this remains in force is completely insane. In Australia the authorities can trivially query the birth and deaths register to verify the validity of certificates.
In Germanys defense, centralized registries were used by the Nazi regime to facilitate the Holocaust.
Anyway Biometric passports/ids pretty much completely supersede this use-case and can be as equally decentralized.
> Anyway Biometric passports/ids pretty much completely supersede this use-case and can be as equally decentralized.
Those are already in place in France, but some administrations still ask for a paper original (or scan of original) of your birth certificate. However some others have implemented some government-backed scheme where it automatically fetches your birth records from a government source (idk how it works behind the scenes) and it just works.
It was the same with a proof of where you live, it had to a be a bill in your name for electricity or something similar, but now it can just query popular sources such as the main electricity provider and just work.
> 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.
Honestly, as a native German this anecdote rather sounds like your girlfriend saw the good side of the German bureacracy (and life) (you likely haven't seen the bad side ... ;-) ): the girlfriend asked for something and got a direct honest answer. This is German directness, which I would rather consider a German virtue, but often confuses people from other countries where answers tend to be more sugar-coated.
Lol no. German directness like most other things is a myth. It only shows itself often enough because people who "show" that directness are just rude and can get away with it. I have now had multiple people in power being extremely indirect about things that would make their position weak.
In rest of the world, the behavior of being "direct" only when there's no negative consequence is just called being a jerk.
We're talking about an interaction with the authorities here. In all developed western nations I am aware of (there's maybe 4-5 countries I've interacted with personally) public authorities will communicate in clear and direct language.
No the point is my wife was struggling, and she asked for help integrating, and the state refused to help her integrate. Even as a hardcore capitalist you should be in favor of getting immigrants into the labor market ASAP.
The irony is that fifteen years ago when she was a new immigrant to Australia, the state sponsored TAFE system was amazing for her, taught her English, and totally turned her life around.
If that was the good side, I certainly don't want to see the bad side. Maybe they gave her an honest answer, but the better answer would have been to help her learn the language.
Interesting, so this means you can go to another country just to get married there? There's no requirement that one of you have some kind of tie to the country (working, or resident, etc.)?
Yep the Danes are an entrepreneurial bunch, strict cash for marriage document type deal (but all done very professionally, not some vegas chapel pony show).
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.
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).
If you've experienced anything like a modern bureaucracy, Germany is infuriatingly backwards. The article is painfully accurate down to the minute detail.