Berlin-22

I moved to Berlin with my wife three months ago.  And I guess that to be married here is sort of not cool, even to live with your girlfriend is not cool here. And yes Berlin is pretty cool, so cool that the coolest people abroad come in hordes to Berlin.  I hate to generalize but... everyone that feels cool either comes to Berlin or thinks that he (or she of course) should come here. So there’s tons of cool people. They of course were the coolest ones in their hometowns. The cool guy was the only food-performance-tattoo artist in his town in Australia, or the only one able to produce guttural techno music from his throat in Scotland. Maybe he even appeared in some magazines and of course in several blogs. The cool guy felt so cool that his level of coolness forced him to settle in Berlin, at least temporarily. He should cool internationally, he thought. The catch is that every new cool guy here gets depressed because he isn’t nearly as cool as he was in his hometown. 

However, it’s not so easy to settle here. You have to dance with German bureaucracy, and dance well. For everything, no matter how cool you are, you must fill a large form in German, take an online number for a queue, you have all sorts of requirements that have an indisputable catch-twenty-two nature,  and in most cases you're at fault so you’re at the mercy of the bureaucrat...

I wanted to rent an apartment, so I needed a report of my credit history in Germany because every landlord wants that, independently of if you have or don’t credit history in Germany. Anyway, I needed a bank account to pay the rent and to produce my null credit history.  The thing is I couldn’t open a bank account without being registered in Berlin. And of course you can’t register in Berlin without a fix residence that I didn’t have because I didn’t have an apartment. But I wanted to rent an apartment, but for that I needed to open a bank account, but to open a bank account I needed to be registered...

This sums it up.

So I had a fake contract made by my friend Anne, as if she rents the place to me. I went to the registration office to break the vicious bureaucratic circle from that angle, I filled the form and I ignored the part that says that I need the name and a signature of the landlord even if I’m subletting. Anne is obviously not the landlord of the apartment; I don’t have the sightliest idea of who is the landlord. I take the number 298, and I’m not sure but I think that also there the numbers appear randomly. I mean, in many places where you have to wait, and believe me, there are a lot, you see a random sequence of numbers in the screen: 787, then 012, then 961, then 123, 124, 125, 941... Anyway, I waited with my fake contract, the form and my passport. When my turn comes I enter to the room of the bureaucrat, she takes the passport and the form, and ignores the contract. Five minutes later, I get the registration form!



Full of bliss and happiness I went to a big bank near there. I made an appointment with the only English speaker employee they had and four hours later I had an interview.
The employee asks my passport, I lend it to him with my registration form.
--But you aren’t a resident! Anyone can have this registration form! What happens if you leave the country!?
--But there’s a two-month queue for the residence permit!”
--You have to understand, no one can open you a bank account if you don’t have a residence permit. Imagine if I go to Beer Sheva--yes, he said Beer Sheva--they won’t open a bank account for me if I’m not a resident...



Anyway, I opened an account in the next bank, without any problems, only with my passport and my registration form. 

One week later my wife arrived at the same registration office and her bureaucrat did ask to see the fake contract of the apartment. And this time the bureaucrat also felt to ask for a certified translation of our marriage certificate (which wasn’t even required anyway). But she made it, she had to go twice but she got her registration form.

And things started to sort out. By that time, I also needed to register as a student, but I needed a residence permit for that. And for the residence permit I needed to show that I was a student...