Oh, the humanity!
When the process protects the system, there is rarely a Plan B.
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It comes as very little surprise that a day or so after returning from the international Petri dish better known as the Munich Security Conference, I came down with COVID-19. It was my second run through, about one year apart, and as went the first, so went the second: some cold symptoms, a cloudy head, and feeling hungover without the fun part the night before. Even after several shots, I still needed at least seven days to test negative.
To get my sick pay, I needed a sick note. In Germany, the Krankschreibung is basically why GPs exist. They’re not much more than a factory assembly line for printing out and stamping the official document required to prove to your employer and health insurer that you belong in bed. For anything else, like actual medical care, a GP is more likely to look at you, head cocked and eyebrow raised, and say, “Your toe hurts? Go to a podiatrist,” and then shoo you away, as you are getting in the way of the more important task of writing sick notes.1
The Krankschreibung is holy. It is your Golden Ticket to rest and recovery without anyone at work wondering why you weren’t on the Teams meeting or pestering you to answer your messages. It is more decisive than the sickness itself, for it matters less from when you were — and until when you are — actually sick, than from when the sick note says you were sick. And how long you will remain so.
German public administration, not your immune system, determines the length and outcome of your recovery.
As a long-time freelancer and American indoctrinated with a capitalist-protestant work ethic in a society that deifies career and preaches the sanctity of the bottom line, getting money to not work and take care of yourself is a completely foreign, totally nuts and wondrously extraordinary concept. It can be difficult not to feel like you are stealing something, even though you have already paid a good deal for the pleasure of being sick.
Fortunately, I have overcome this particular cultural pathology enough by now to pause when the doctor asks, “How many days would you like?” as I resist the temptation to respond: “How long until retirement?”2
As in many countries in many ways, the pandemic accelerated certain social, economic and technological developments, and it forced some amount of flexibility into the system. Even in cash-loving, money-laundering prone, digital-skeptical Germany, card and contactless payment options went up (they have since receded somewhat), and bureaucracy accepted a little more of the trust without so much of the verify. As such, no longer is your only option for getting a sick note dragging your sick self out of bed just for a doctor to say, “Yep, you’re sick.” Now you can also get yourself written out with a phone call or video appointment. There is an array of shady-seeming, but apparently legit options online.
Still, because I am rarely sick and for aforementioned reasons relatively new at this, I went the old-school route. The practice I go to has always been friendly and competent and, most importantly, literally my next-door neighbor. So this should be easy.
Spoiler alert: It was not.
I woke up the morning after I tested positive, in no condition to spar with the system, and rang up the office. This is roughly how the conversation went:
Me: I have covid.
Practice: You need a sick note?
Me: Yes.
Practice: OK. Go to our website and book an appointment.
Me, to myself: But I am talking to you right now.
Me, out loud: OK.
Though this struck me as stupidly circuitous — not to mention ironic that, having zigged against my digital urges by calling the practice precisely because of German administration’s fax-loving, technology-phobic disposition, only for that administration to zag by telling me to go online — I figured the easiest thing would be to play along.
After all, how hard could booking an appointment online be?
Spoiler alert: Very.
In the last few years, a couple of third-party appointment platforms have come to life in Germany to plug that digital hole left by a hamstrung public sector. They’ve done a pretty good job making medical appointments easy to book and manage, for those doctors willing to take the leap into cyberspace.
That included mine. But when I got off the phone and navigated to the practice’s website, I discovered that what was once a user-friendly portal that made medical appointments about as simple as ordering food had, since Jan. 1, been replaced by a centralized and quasi-public one.
If your doctor’s website has to include a lengthy list of complex instructions before clicking the link to the booking website, you know you are in for trouble. And when you click through to the booking website and it asks for a code that you do not have, you know you are doomed.
There was a way around the code, those lengthy instructions noted, but that mattered little. It quickly became apparent that this was a futile exercise, not least of which due to the mismatch between the objective and the tool provided to accomplish it.
Facing me on the screen was a “patient service” designed to connect you with any number of doctors practicing any number of medical specialities in any number of places around Berlin. All well and good, except what I needed was a connection to a specific doctor doing a specific thing in a specific place.
More to the point, it just didn’t work — not on the first attempt, nor on the fifth. So I called the practice back. It went something like this:
Me: Hi. It’s me again.
Practice: Yes?
Me: The platform doesn’t work.
Practice: That’s not possible.
Me: Well, it doesn’t. Says, ‘booking not possible.’
Practice: But it has to work.
Me: Um.
Practice: Then you have to try again.
Me: I already did. A few times.
Practice: And you are doing it right? Postal code, email address …
Me: Yes. I know how to enter text fields.
Practice: Well. Shut down your computer and wait 30 minutes.
Me: Um.
Now I am not an internet expert, but I know enough to know that shutting down your computer does not affect it. I did, however, just to humor them, try again. No dice.
So I took another knowingly hopeless step — the German constitution mandates exhausting every inane effort before proceeding with the obvious solution that you knew from the beginning would be the right one — and called the patient service hotline, as the error message instructs.
To my mild surprise, I did not have to wait too long on hold until someone picked up. The conversation went something like this:
Me: Hi. I have covid. I need a sick note. I am trying to book an appointment with my doctor and they want me to use your platform. It does not work.
Patient service: Well, I don’t know why it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t matter. That is not what the platform is for.
Me: Your appointment booking platform is not for booking appointments?
Patient service: No. It helps you find doctors based on location. You can’t book an appointment specifically with your doctor.
Me: Um.
Patient service: You have to call your doctor and make an appointment directly with them.
Me: Um.
Patient service: You said you have covid?
Me: Yes.
Patient service: (Goes off on long tangent about the existence of covid-only practices around the city, and how covid treatment works. All interesting information and utterly irrelevant to me at that moment, not to mention new only to those who perhaps missed a three-year pandemic of biblical proportions.)
Me: Great, thanks for that. I just need to go to my doctor, who is right next door to me.
Patient service: Then you have to call them. We are not for urgent appointments. (Goes off on long, technical tangent about what the platform is for, and how my practice is misusing it either because it is itself confused about its true purpose or it’s trying to make money off it — how exactly I couldn’t possibly tell you because the explanation was long and technical and did I mention I have covid.)
So, where are we? The doctor says use the platform. The platform says call the doctor. The platform says they are not for urgent care. The doctor literally says …
We are now going on an hour to arrange a task that takes less than ten minutes to complete at an doctor’s office 45 seconds from where I was sitting.
Also, just FYI: I still have covid.
I called my practice for a third time. Here is how it went:
Me: Me again. So, I still can’t book online. I also called them, and they said they are not for what you say they are for.
Practice: That’s not possible.
Me: What is happening here? Why don’t you believe me? (I am getting angry now, which is always a bad move when dealing with German Officialdom. Total system shutdown.)
Practice: Of course I believe you, Herr Glucroft! (Ed. This is clearly a lie.)
Me: Well, here we are. What can we do? I literally live next door to you. I am literally calling you from one wall over. Why can’t I just, you know, come in?
Practice: (Sighs.) Na, gut. Let’s see. (Sound of fingers on keyboard.) Today at 2:50. Bring your insurance card, FFP2 mask and (blah blah blah …).
Now, was that so hard? Yes, it was!
I entered the practice at 2:50 (because being early is just as sinful as being late), waited to be called, and approached the desk. The brief exchange went like this:
Me: Hi. I have covid. I have an appointment. (Hands insurance card over.)
Practice: (Sticks insurance card into reader and stares at computer screen.) I don’t see you here. Did you make an appointment on the platform?
Me: I couldn’t. The platform didn’t work.
Practice: Then you don’t have an appointment.
Me: (Faceplant.) Yes, I do. You made me one.
Practice: Oh, right. (Pause for eye roll.) My colleague took care of you on the phone, didn’t she.
Me: Right.
Practice: Well, OK. I’ll make a note in your file that you couldn’t get the platform to work.
By 3 p.m., I walked out of the practice with a sick note for seven days. I went home and took a bath.
And, scene.
What we have here is a small, everyday example of the consequences of the worldview of German Officialdom, which when taken to its logical, albeit extreme conclusions, has had disastrous consequences throughout history.
Yes, bureaucracy sucks everywhere. It is tedious, inefficient and often intentionally so, and tangled in a web of paperwork. But what we are dealing with here is not just filling out Form A961c, skipping lines 17 through 42, then adding to line 46 on the second page the subtracted subtotal from lines 1 through 12 on the third page that you haven’t gotten to yet, then mailing two certified copies of Form A961c so an office can misfile it and make you repeat the process.
What we are dealing with here is all that plus a German pedantry for process. In the Teutonic Imaginary, the process always works. It has to. If it does not, it suggests that the system itself does not work, and the system cannot fail. If the system fails, there is nothing standing between civilized society and the madness of German history. Absolute trust in the German system is a reflection of absolute wariness of the German self.
The sanctity of the system is to be defended at all costs. It comes before you and your needs as a human being. Even in a human-facing sector like healthcare and when dealing with your local GP — what should be the opposite of a big, distant, faceless bureaucracy — the sum must be correct. If it is not, it can only mean that you, a part of that sum, must be wrong.
Here, a brief rundown of the guiding principles of German Officialdom:
Trust the system completely.
Deny that the thing not working is not working.
Accept no responsibility for the thing not working or finding another way to reach the desired outcome.
Avoid initiative, and block all efforts to find a workaround.
When denials and lecturing have failed, sigh and declare that the very simple solution that was always there is only an “exception” to the way things should be. Keyword: Ausnahmsweise.
Be sure to invoke a deep and lasting sense of guilt and gratitude for making said exception to the rules.
Wer Recht hat, ist wichtiger als, was gerecht ist.
Who is right is more important than what is right.
This is a turn of phrase I came up with years ago to explain repeated encounters with the complete absence of independent and critical thinking, and a basic sense of humanity, in very human affairs in Germany. While bureaucracy and its annoyances are everywhere, the refusal to believe that sometimes stuff just doesn’t work and exceptions are as common as the rule is a uniquely German experience.
It is this outlook that justifies a driver to threaten to run you down if the light turns red while you are still in the crosswalk, because why are you in the crosswalk when the light is red. And should you, Martin Luther forbid, apply 100,000 years of human evolution and brain development to assess that it is safe to cross a street, despite the particular color of the light at that moment, it is OK for the person next to you to scold, if not physically assault, you in a disproportional struggle to right this wronging of the system.3
It may be 40 degrees out in the summer, but a restaurant is unlikely to offer you tap water because it is under no obligation to do so. If it’s a small enough place, it might not even give you a bathroom to use. Because it doesn’t have to. Whether it’s the considerate thing to do, especially when you are in the business of serving people, is irrelevant: Only do as much as the system compels you to do, but dearest customer, do feel free to use the public toilet in the park across the street for 50 cents.4
Go from a bar to the Bahn in that heat, and you might not have air conditioning. It is not unusual in the summer to find entire wagons of a high-speed ICE train out of service because the cooling system isn’t working. Why? Because for years Deutsche Bahn’s own technical regulations have refused to accept that temperatures in Germany might rise above a certain point, beyond which things stop working.
Sadly, even German obstinance is no match for climate change.
And while you are riding a train, good luck if you are caught with the wrong kind of ticket — or no ticket at all. It makes no difference if you have been in country for ten years or ten days, there are rules and you should know them. Mistakes are borderline criminal behavior. No exceptions.
Germany is not a particularly solutions-oriented society. When things break or fail, you find yourself trapped in a feedback loop of complaint that stays stuck looking back at what went wrong and in disbelief that it did rather than looking forward to how to fix it.
Perhaps this helps explain why Germany is very good at repeating the same thing it’s done for two centuries (machine parts, cars, chemicals) and struggles to do anything new (digital payments, efficient trains, integration).
To err is human, to lecture is Germanic.
Several years ago, I was cycling up to a friend’s exhibit at a gallery in the Wedding area of Berlin. Along the way I witnessed a devastating car accident on the other side of the street: An oncoming car careened straight into another one turning onto the road. Right then, I happened to spot a police station, so I figured the least and easiest thing I could do is take two minutes to go in to report it.
The exchange went something like this:
Me: Hi. Just wanted to let you know a pretty bad-looking accident happened right on the corner here.
Cop 1: Uh, OK. Go see … (gives unclear instructions and points dismissively in a general direction I should go in).
Me: (Wanders around station for a minute or two, finding nothing and no one. Returns to reception area.)
… Pause for administrative dithering …
Cop 2: You were told to come to me (impatient and scolding).
Me: I was looking. … Anyway, just wanted to let you know there’s a car accident. Right here. Right now.
Cop 2: Were you involved?
Me: No.
Cop 2: Are you injured?
Me: No.
Cop 2: Then go away. We’re not responsible. The unit that is will take care of it.
… were people bleeding out on the street just steps away? Maybe! Did it matter? Not as much as following protocol to the letter!
More recently, during a particularly cold stretch of winter, I was running errands in Alexanderplatz when I spotted a homeless person so cold his body was convulsing as if gripped by seizure. Who knows — maybe he was having a seizure.
I realize you can’t save everyone, and Berlin’s homeless problem has metastasized over the years, but I figured watching someone literally freezing to death before your eyes might be cause to say something. And thanks to Alexanderplatz being a trashy, tourist hotspot rife with petty crime, there are always plenty of cops around.
I approached two of them sitting in a van and pointed out the man, who was slumped against a building not far away.
“Unless he’s not breathing, we can’t do anything,” the one in the driver’s seat replied, and had nothing more to say.
If it’s any consolation, the non-responsiveness and inability to adapt transcend class and status. Even a former ambassador to the United States and the founder of the Munich Security Conference don’t get no respect:
Then there was the time I went to a corner bakery owned by the German grocery giant, Edeka — not because it is any good, but because there was little choice at that time and in that part of Berlin, and I wanted a break from my desk. On my way out of the store, a tall, slender employee with blond hair tied back in a bun was struggling to trap with a cardboard box a pigeon that had flown into the store. Finding this scene rather amusing, I took out my phone and started recording it.
The youthful Mr. Man-Bun was less amused, and went from chasing the pigeon to chasing me, threatening me with a wooden broomstick. In the commotion, I slipped on a metal grate at the store entrance, very nearly falling as my leg went in a direction it is not meant to go.
I reported this aggressive and unnecessary reaction to the company, but this being Germany, their response was that the employee’s privacy was more important than the customer’s physical safety. He was right to do what he did, and in any case the company accepted no responsibility and would therefore take no further action.
Wir bitten um Verständnis.
If these anecdotes seem small, silly or one-off, bear in mind that the cultural conditions that allow for them are the same that brought us the Wirecard fraud — the “largest financial scandal in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
Not only did Germany’s digital darling have to finally acknowledge not having around €2 billion, but it was serving the dark-web deeds of pornography, organized crime, and Russian oligarchs tied to psuedo-state-sanctioned power projection while also supporting German federal police and intelligence operations. And that’s just what we know about.
When British journalists exposed Wirecard for the money-laundering juggernaut that it was5, German authorities didn’t investigate Wirecard, they went after the journalists. As one member of the Bundestag said, in retrospect:
It was at that moment that [the German government] sided with criminals.
In its declassified report, a special Bundestag committee investigating the debacle cited a number of causes for the system-wide inability to detect Wirecard’s malfeasance, and the subsequent denial to accept clear evidence of it:
collective supervisory failure
longing for a digital national champion
German mentality toward non-Germans
Those are worth re-reading and pausing to consider.
The post-mortem is an incredible acknowledgement and damnation of the inferiority-superiority symbiosis that consumes post-war Germany. At the collective and institutional levels, Germany feels so second-rate to its Western brethren that it will gladly stick its head in the sand if that’s what it takes to get a seat at the cool-kids table.
At the very same time, Germany is so convinced that its processes are beyond reproach, regardless of countless evidence to the contrary, that when they are called into question — especially from the outside — the official response is, as it was in the case of Wirecard, “reflexively defensive, as if the F.T.’s reporting were an attack on the country itself.”6
This also helps explain why it took not German, but foreign journalists to uncover the fraud. The sanctimonious performance is so widespread, and condescension of foreign ideas so ubiquitous, that almost everyone in Germany is playing for the same team. There may be disagreement on the path to consensus, but ultimately the goal is to circle the wagons and defend the sum everyone is a part of.7
The irony of a society predisposed to protecting the system and favoring consensus, at almost any cost, is clear: The lack of independent questioning and critical thinking are exactly what greased the wheels for a national-socialist takeover, which every process in Germany today is designed to prevent from happening again. So the solution to the problem is the problem itself.
There is in the German social fabric a deep distrust of itself due to that experience. The rules and regulations are there as guardrails to make sure Germany does not veer off the road of sanity. The result, however, sends us back to square one: Just follow orders. That this time the orders are getting issued from under new management is hardly comforting. Many of the fundamentals haven’t changed.
Don’t get me wrong: I love processes. Who doesn’t? They are why food is safe to eat, lights turn on, and planes don’t regularly fall out of the sky. Processes, and the systems they support, are what keep us from going back to the Stone Age.8
But when they fail, as they ultimately will, ingenuity is called for. Germany struggles with that, as the appeal, above, from then Chancellor Angela Merkel for more “German flexibility” and less “German thoroughness” attests. More often than not, there is no Plan B.
Germany has good systems that often work for most people most of the time. That is, in part, thanks to being large, rich and homogenous enough to cover its bases. An object in motion stays in motion, and Germany is an object that no amount of cataclysmic history has been able to stop. In both economic and geopolitical terms, it is too big to fail.
But it is not too big to fall short. Despite a long list of historical and contemporary evidence, Germans appear regularly befuddled that it does. Ill-equipped to improvise, they resign themselves to be held hostage to the mediocrity of ham-fisted Denkfehler. As such, society relinquishes the only effective bulwark against the darker impulses of human nature: freedom of thought and the impetus to resist stupid ideas.
Germany knows all-too well where those impulses lead.
Seriously, this is not that far off from my own experience.
In my case, sick pay is lower than my actual earnings, so all kidding aside, long-term inability to work would be financially painful.
Important caveat: These is a kind of anti-social behavior that is particularly pronounced in Berlin. Other parts of Germany are somewhat kinder.
Based on a true story.
Not unlike Germany as whole, which is the “money-laundering saloon of Europe,” a Handelsblatt journalist told the New Yorker.
Italics mine.
It is for this reason that the New York Times brought down the seemingly omnipotent Bild tabloid and its editor, Julian Reichelt, even though his serial sexual misconduct and a workplace norm of abuse of power were widely known.
Which may not have been so bad, depending how one judges “progress.”
Painfully accurate. Makes me both homesick for Berlin, and gives me the urge to stay far far away.