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

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

“What the heck is that?” I retorted.

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

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

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

“What happens if I fall over?”

“Do I have insurance that covers me?”

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

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

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

• Public liability insurance (Haftpflicht)

• Car insurance

• Roadside cover

• Home insurance

• Travel insurance

• Sickness insurance

• Legal cover insurance (Rechtschutz)

• Bicycle theft

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

• Life insurance

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. All types of insurances have different premiums, which include or exclude a myriad of additional services. I’ve read through all of them and I can tell you that some of them border on the absurd. A good example is car insurance: if you inspect the cheaper premiums, you’ll notice that — aside from the obvious things like a higher excess, third party coverage and no claims protection in case of an accident — they also exclude things like ‘being bitten by an animal’, collision with a wild animal, hail and hurricane damage, quote protection, and the 24hour accident hotline. To me, personally, the extra addons are not something I’m going to lose any sleep over, but rest assured — the Germans certainly will. For a nation that hates surprises and constantly asks itself what if questions, I suppose I can understand the constant worrying. I’m not liking them any more for it, however.

Below is a screenshot from a well-known comparison website in Germany — Check24.

It contains no fewer than eight main insurance headings and a whopping total of thirty-one different types of insurance available. For those readers who do not speak a word of German, I’ve taken the liberty in translating them into English. I have to admit, even after my nineteen years in this country, I still struggled to identify some of the types of insurance on offer and had to look them up first. For example; death benefit insurance covers your funeral costs, and a Heilpraktiker und Brille insurance will cover the costs of your homeopathy therapist and your optometrist, which are not covered by your normal health insurance.

Fig. 1 shows different Insurances available from the Check 24 website.