Wirklich? Really?: Wer ist der Letzte?

The Berlin Immigration Office: obviously more advanced than Stuttgart.

A couple of months ago one of my German teachers had some anecdotal story about Germans being so patient because they are used to waiting in lines for everything.  While the internet may not bear this theory out, it's pretty clear to me that Germans respect order, and waiting patiently in line for a service is perfectly compatible with that attitude.  And there are so many people here in Germany that there are always lineups - at the post office, at the grocery store, and, of course, at government offices.

The story I heard at my language school was about an advanced system of lining up without even standing in line, an endeavour that requires faith in the system and the honest of your fellow line-standers.  When entering a bank or a ticket counter, you ask who the last person in line is.  Then, having identified the last person, you keep your eye on them in order to know when you are up.  

I hadn't seen this system in action, having waited in establishments that rely on numbered tickets rather than good old fashioned honesty, until last week when I was at the immigration office here in Stuttgart.  There are two ways of seeing someone at the immigration office: either you phone in several times until someone picks up the phone, tell them your issue, and hope that it is deemed relevant enough to have an appointment scheduled, at which time you show up in a hallway full of people and waiting front of a heavy red door equipped with a loudspeaker.  When your name is called, you can go in.  The other option, for non-urgent or generally confusing cases, is sitting in an adjacent room that has a door leading to the same office, only which is equipped with a traffic light instead of a speaker.  When it flashes green, the next person is welcome.  Mostly it just stays discouragingly red.

As you may have guessed from my description of the surroundings - red and brown doors, disembodied voices, built-in chairs - the immigration office is a seriously brutalist building from the 1960s with little in the way of modern amenities.  There are no digital signs and no number-printing machines.  Instead, as I discovered, there is the system of asking, upon entering the room, "Wer ist der Letzte?"

My brief experience with this system pointed out the reasons it doesn't work in modern Germany.  First of all, everybody in the line needs to understand what the question means.  At the immigration office, this was understandably not the case.  Whenever a newcomer asked who the last person was, there was shuffling of feet and some serious glares until finally someone else pointed out who had been the last to enter the room.  While such complete non-responsiveness may have demonstrated an average language competency well below the level required to get most visas, I was surprised by the angry muttering among the askers, who, presumably likewise at the immigration office to immigrate, really didn't have much to get up on their high horse about.  I suppose they could have been part of a secret pre-interview test: if you clam up, you've just signed yourself up for a 6-week integration course, courtesy of the German government. Boo hoo.

And to be fair, it wasn't all a question of language.  Immigrants are nothing if not willing to cash in on the opportunity created by Germans' stubborn faith in their systems. That's why you can get kebab on a Sunday! Sure enough, each time the chime sounded to switch the light from red to green, there was a group ready to jump to their feet should the next person in line momentarily forget their place in the order of things.  

Whether times are a-changing or the system never worked that well after all, the "Wer ist der Letzte?" system doesn't make much sense. Most of us can do numbers - German vocab is a different kettle of fish. And while I realize that a municipal building that caters to foreigners probably sits pretty low on the priority list for taxpayer-funded renovations, we are the ones who need our office to meet the standards of a grocery store meat counter the most.  

image via spiegel.de

Wirklich? Really?: Keine Information, Danke

As seen in the Berlin U-Bahn at a concession stand.  The sign means "No Information - thanks," and it basically sums up the German attitude towards strangers: keep out.   At least they are mostly polite about it.

Der Weihnachtsmarkt

After an impromptu visit to the Munich Marienplatz Christmas market, or Weihnachtsmarkt, I think I can definitively say that the Weihnachtsmarkt in Stuttgart is really the best in southern Germany.  The market spreads out along the downtown core of the city centre, takes up three big squares, is filled with folksily decorated stalls heavy on the fir branches, and has made drinking alcohol at 10 in the morning not only socially acceptable, but seasonally appropriate for women, children, and grandpas of all ages.  As I have visited the Weihnachtsmarkt at 10 in the morning three times this week, I can confirm that thanks to the abundance of Glühwein, a mulled wine Christmas drink served in hideous collectible mugs, the crowd is almost as boisterous on a Monday morning as on a weekend afternoon.  And unlike the Munich Weihnachtsmarkt, which has more than its fair share of plastic Weihnachtmänner (that's Santa to you) and snowmen, the decorating team at Stuttgart really dug deep into their Martha Stewart back catalogue to pull out some fairy tale scenes, including toy trains that chug along the roofs, a giant Three Wise Men Weihnachtspyramide, a carved nativity scene or two, and enough pine cones, berries, and boughs to fill a forest or two.

And, although the amount of Glühwein guzzling that is going on might lead you to believe otherwise, it's not even cold.  There is nary a snow bank in the dioramas of typical German winter scenes that perch atop the stalls.  No snowflakes, plastic or otherwise, dangle from Christmas trees or lampposts.  The middle school kids bringing their recently acquired clarinet skills to the outdoor market in the form of repeated squeaky renditions of O, Christmas Tree steer clear of songs that even mention the word snow, let alone ask for it.  The only place I've seen any representation of snow is on the Weihnachtmarkt's website, where some over-zealous web designer has animated some snow onto an image of Stuttgart's city hall square.  (They've also included the only two standing pre-19th century buildings in the downtown core in their composite image, so the idea that the image represents Stuttgart's reality should be taken with a grain of rock salt.)  It's actually all quite autumnal, if it weren't for the (artificially frozen) outdoor skating rink and the crowds, maniacally intent on purchasing wooden Christmas ornaments.

Aside from the Christmas ornament stalls, at the market you can buy literally everything in the arts-and-crafts gamut of Christmas giving. Knitted booties? Check.  Beeswax candles?  Check.  Aprons embroidered with "Kiss the Cook" in Swabian dialect?  Oh, yeah.  There's even a whole aisle devoted to the kind of gadgets that you might recognize from late night infomercials.  You can also get almost any kind of Swabian food here hot off the grill and straight from the hands of somebody's Oma - from Swabian ravioli, aka Maultaschen, to Alsatian pizza, or Flammkuchen.  Last but not least, for those who really want to know what they're getting for Christmas, the Stuttgarter Weihnachtsmarkt has its own not-so-live webcam in the biggest of the squares.  See for yourself exactly how not snowy it is here.

image via stuttgarter-weihnachtsmarkt.de

Wirklich? Really?: Royalty

Who knew that Europe still was ruled by kings and queens?  And there's not just Kate and William, but who could forget Silvia and Carl Gustaf, Letizia and Filippe, and, last but not least, Mette-Marit and Haakon?  There is a steady stream of royal weddings ready to fill out half the pages of every European-based gossip magazine before they even get around to documenting Christina Aguilera's bad hair days.

And it's not only the affairs of those choice ruling royal houses who somehow escaped the "off-with-their-heads" portion of European history that make the news.   The deposed and otherwise long-forgotten descendants of the royals of Europe have been quietly filing their comings and goings with rag-trade papers as well. According to Frau magazine, the family of the ex-King of Romania gathered to celebrate his 90th birthday last month, among whose guests were the Princesses of Liechtenstein, the crown prince of Yugoslavia, and both the Prince and the Markgraf of Baden.  (That's Baden as in Baden-Württemberg, the modern left-leaning German state of which Stuttgart is the manufacturing centre.)  Whyever did the Emperor of Mexico fail to grace them with his presence?

While I thought that the only remaining socialites were the drug-addict great-grandchildren of oil barons and coal magnates, and that the septuagenarian descendants of deposed monarchs were only kept in funny hats by their British cousins in order to be trotted out at ceremonial gatherings, it turns out that the ruling classes of Europe are very much alive and socializing.  Take, for example, the Tiffany ball profiled in the back of Instyle Germany, which boasted a Gräfin, a couple "zu Whatsits", and a "von Wherever".  Those little words mean they're royal, even if they're being coy about whether their great-grandfather was an Erzherzog or a Fürst.

By breaking free from monarchies into democratic rule, it looks like we really did the ruling houses of Europe a solid.  The ex-royals of Europe are still rich enough to do nothing for a living, and even upset that they are not richer.  And, while their officially royal ancestors may have had a country or two to look after in order to keep themselves in gold cutlery and velvet bedding, all today's royals need to manage is an annual charity luncheon. But, with centuries of practice, they know how to keep us pacified. As long as they can keep feeding us a heavy helping of fairytale romances, let them eat wedding cake.

image via novinite.com