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Chapter 1 At Home & In Your Living Quarters

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

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

1.1 Getting an apartment

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.2 Making German friends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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