Feeling Alien in Germany: Bureaucracy and the Thresholds of Belonging

The trash collectors in Berlin have an excellent sense of humor.

Nothing makes you feel quite as alien and precarious as waiting in an immigration office, especially as you wait for a Beamter/in (clerk, officer) to make a decision about your future in Germany—based, it seems, primarily on their current mood and digestive health. And yet, one of my interviewees once claimed that she never felt more at home in Berlin than when she was at the Ausländerbehörde (immigration office), the Bürgeramt (citizen’s registration office), or the Finanzamt (finance and revenue office). And she has a point: when the process is successful, there is a sense of satisfaction and membership that you can get from interfacing with the behemoth that is German bureaucracy. But, as a foreigner in a foreign land, you remain at the mercy of this bureaucracy and the many people that work in it, and that sometimes means that your experience is far more alienating than welcoming.

Much of my research here on so-called “techno tourism” and music-related migration to Berlin has revealed the ways in which recently-arrived people manage to feel at home here, even before they have spent enough time to “integrate” culturally. But my recent experiences with Germany’s Ausländerbehörde has reminded me of how fragile this sense of being “at home” can be

Checking in from Berlin

I think that's my name as a graffiti tag, on some sort of electrical box on Sonnenallee in Neukölln.

K, OK. I know that it’s been a while since I’ve checked in on here (since Grenada!) but here’s what I’ve been up to in the past month or so:

• Travel to and from Grenada
• Attempt to sell off most of my furniture and my car
• Get my !@#$ing PhD diploma and attend Convocation with my parents
• Pack my entire life into boxes, load it into a U-Haul truck while some guy yells at us about blocking the alleyway, and then drive it 8 hours to Canada
• Store most of my crap at my parents’ place and try to shove the remaining articles into 3 pieces of luggage
• Remind Canada’s bureaucracy of my continuing existence
• Spend a week in Toronto seeing friends, visiting old haunts, and having meetings at my alma mater
• Spend about 20 hours in 3 flights taking me from my hometown to Berlin-town. Screaming babies were a bonus feature
• Eat roasted chicken from City Chicken (Neukölln) and get plastered on wine and Sekt before finally crashing on my friend’s floor
• Make a deposit at my Hauptmieterin’s (sublessor) bank account and retrieve the keys to my apartment
• Schlep my numerous bags to my new apartment and settle in
• Begin the long process of announcing my presence to the German bureaucracy
• Struggle endlessly to unlock my iPhone 4 so I can use a reasonably-priced German SIM card
• Re-stock the kitchen
• Oversee repairs to the bathroom of my new apartment, which seems to involve plaster and sweaty men (not the sexy kind)
• Orchestrate and attend reunions with overlapping circles of friends (and attempt not to alienate anyone in the process)
• Sleep, eventually.

And now I’m in Berlin.