A supposedly efficient system I’ll never navigate again

The German language intensiv Deutschkurs that your correspondent has been enrolled in for almost two months 0830–1345 is a real multikulti salad, and emboldened by the unself-conscious describe-the-toilet-fixtures idiosyncracy of a certain deceased late-twentieth-century postmodern essayist, I am going to attempted an exhaustive and -ing account of my morning ritual in his (the author’s) style. The Mitte Volkshochschule or Central People’s High School is really just what you’d expect of a risque globalization can’t-we-all-just-get-along synechdoche drama location. The VHS looks like your typical inner-city school at lunchtime, but with all the self-consciously smoking students replaced by middle-aged, disaffected Arabic men. Blue-collar New Zealand men smoking on break, i.e. construction workers seemingly always, are slow and outward facing, with only the odd glib, careless comment stringing them together. The guys outside the VHS are always arguing urgently in little knots. You think something’s wrong, but then you realize that proximity and emotion only signify imminent punch-ups in our little island nation.

To understand the workings of the VHS one must first understand the ethos of all German government institutions, from the Finanzamt to the Bundesamt to the Jobcenter to the Bezirksamt to the Rentensversikerungsbildung to the Ausländerbehörde to the U-Bahn: at once heavy-handed and hands-off. They lay down frictionless-vacuum style, immoveable systems, then step back to let everyone get on with it. The rationale, superficially appealing, is that freedom is maximized for those most willing to learn the system; the result is a baroque complexity that I would call Kafka-esque if it weren’t for the relative paucity, I shit you not, of lackeys/forms that K. needed to negotiate to get sympathy/appointments in The Trial. To learn that one is not eligible for jobseeker support, one must visit three different offices across Berlin a total of five times, and fill out forms UH3, SV, VÄM, EK, VM, AH, K, and one VH for each flatmate. For each VH that states one is not in a relationship with the stated flatmate, one must provide a reason why one is not in a relationship with said flatmate. My German friend Peter recommended ‘we are not friendly(wir sind nicht befreundet)’ as an acceptable explanation.

From this p/o/v, registering for the VHS was an absolute breeze: a large sign in the foyer explicated when WAS and when ABSOLUTELY WAS NOT an appropriate day/time to inquire about German courses, and a series of thick red dashes flowed upwards to the first floor landing; another large explicit sign informed the stairway-landing-queue, of which I was the rump, not to enter until beckoned by the receptionist through the rectagular, plate glass wire mesh of the door. The door was guarded by a beer-bellied Aryan man still adjusting to his new minority status. Every frustrating and involved query, consisting of perfunctory German, then broken English, and finally bitter mutterings of Arabic, earned a numbered ticket and entry into another waiting room, this time in a corridor, the existence of which carried the implicit threat of a third transitory waiting room, perhaps in an elevator, just out of sight. Having gained my ticket to the hallway, I wandered down the long single row of Syrians to find my seat. These people were evidently, after everything, expert at waiting. Stock waiting room expressions: harried, sheepish, sulky; were utterly absent. Everyone, from women whispering into their toddlers’ ears, to young men gesticulating into cell phones, to old ones conducting their pseudo-urgent meetings together, now sans cigarette, had just accepted that waiting was going to be a pretty big part of life these days, so why not file it under ‘leisure?’ These were my kind of people: I love nothing more than to recline in a waiting room, reading my book, while the muggles flick their bloodshots eyes between watch, clock, and low-quality magazine.

But so anyway, and here’s another cliché of German civic life, when I finally saw my number on the scoreboard and got through to a real god-darn meeting, the guy was totally cool and relaxed and friendly; he even spoke English to me, instead of bitchily pretending he didn’t understand it like all the FOH civil service schmucks. I submit that the German Bureaucratic Overlords (GBO) intentionally insulate their Professional Humans from the hellish muck of waiting rooms and numbered tickets to keep them peachy keen for the final stage of our bureaucratic experience in order fully to take advantage of the peak-end-rule, thus fabricating the impression that our whole visit was as acceptable as those last few moments of humanity.

But anyway so he goes right ahead and enrolls me in a Deutschkurs that starts the next day, efficiently testing me on my German proficiency so I get the right level course, and saying all sorts of re-assuring things along the way like ‘take as long as you need’ and ‘no problem’ and all that jazz.

0830hrs the next day in Raum 208 and I am absolutely pumped, ready to learn it all, the whole goddamn language, beaming with that mellow approachable gaze I’m famous for all around the aforementioned human salad. Gazing all around the aforementioned human salad. I must say, the shapes, sizes and colours of humanity are even more variegated than those of the dog kingdom. There’s Sofia, with the luminously pale and square-jawed little face of a Velasquez doll, her clothing and hair blending sanguine and matte-black, a hipster echo of that mysterious Spanish palette: such deep eyes; such stark eyebrows. But wait! Do not take any of that to be emblematic of our species, for thither sits Dylan, aus Irland, whose fiery foliage springs in all directions away from his bony, austere face, like the elaborate gilt frame within which you barely notice El Greco’s Christ. His lithe limbs confound utterly the idea you just gathered from Anna regarding homo sapiens proportions. And there is [alias]Ludwig” aus Syrien, grumbling- but wait! Before I can betray utterly the terms of my pastiche¹, meine Lehrerin informs me that that bit of paper Cool Guy gave me doesn’t mean anything beyond ‘here’s a course this fellow maybe feels like doing,’ and signifies nothing about the possibility thereof. The possibility of signing up to the course.Which has been booked out, overbooked, bursting for months. The temerity of my assuming etcetera. I must re-enter negotiations, re-assume my mellow gaze, and leave the taxonomy of our species for another day.


  1. Mind you, I suspect Foster-Wallace occasionally does jam on George Elliot. Example given: “He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see (Infinite Jest, p.482).” Remove “spinal” and switch to past tense and you’ve got a sentence that wouldn’t look out of place describing like, Caleb Garth in Middlemarch.
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