...
I freaking hate the energy of this city!
Someone needs to tell Germans that yelling is not a good communication skill. I will refuse to engage with anyone who yells, just walk away. These people are bullies and emotionally disturbed
"It is as It is" mentality kills me in this country. Negotiation does not happen here.
If the first advice people give you is " hire a lawyer " or " send letter " when there is a problem, It is not good indicator for society. They don't know how to communicate effectively and agree on a common point.
Rags to riches stories don’t happen in Germany.
The German Dream: My father was a doctor so I'll become one too. My father was a plumber so I'll do exactly the same. Note: It's always 'father' and 'son' because apparently women are not supposed to have careers or do any skilled jobs here (especially those over 35!).
I hardly see any women over 40 in office jobs. There are some exceptions, but I see way more middle-aged men in office jobs than women. Women over 40 seem to exclusively work as cashiers or do reduced hours work. Employers seem to be so paranoid about hiring women, always thinking the latter could get pregnant or will have an ill child at home or something of that sort. People here still live in the 1950s (minus the manners and public safety).
If you ever get too private with your coworkers, they will manipulate and exploit you, so better keep for yourself. No idea about the rest of Germany but a lot of jobs in Berlin are sold to employees as favors. The salary is a bad joke, you're supposed to go for work for free coffee, "fresh" fruit and the bright office in XBerg. With your chef you are supposed to be best buddies and work unpaid overtime. Your salary? 2000. Before taxes. They act like this is a lot. If you even manage to score a fulltime job, that is. They also try to sell promotions without the rise in salary to you, say you should be happy about more responsibility. It's like everybody with a 2000-€-job is so happy not to be the lowest scum here that they will gladly do any shenanigans their "best buddy boss" will come up with. It's all just brainwash and slavery.
People seem to not want normal closeness, but what they actually do is cross your boundaries all the time. It's hard to put into words. There is something seriously wrong with surprising moments. Be it a clerk saying hello too early for example. You just go in a gas station and they start saying hello a few moments later. Not right away and especially when it would fit. It's such a mindfuck to get confused by their stuff. Did you ever have the feel that it came across that you just wanted to buy one thing and then the person - out of rhythm- chimes in with Alles?, meaning after you felt at this point they clearly got it or they had asked earlier. I found myself so often being stunned by this nonsense. I found I reply to it, yet not react to it, I might pause as it feels. Because literally it just represses you so it feels to say Ja! to it, not think inside what that was about. Recently I bought a few things in one of these Spätkaufs and wanted to get some cigarettes too. I recall the guy working there and I feel he feels I want to get cigarettes aswell. There was another guy with whom I arrived at the checkout simultaneously while I was a little bit ealier there. It distracted me and the next thing I hear is the guy says the price and I'm feeling something is off. So I just pay for now, go with my feel. That seemed to surprise him. Then I added I forgot, and got the cigarettes. Or I am sure others must run into this aswell. You say pack and they ask you Tabak? Irritating shi.t. I felt I reply to it: No, cigarettes and then in theory he should get those but if he was doing irritating stuff (probably also because people need their role so they try to shift it their way, so they can act all as they think of themselves to be) then he would be surprised by that, to which you can repeat it: cigarettes, and then one more time cigarettes! This could also be something light. Many people conclude that light is a weak thing when it is actually very powerful. Depends how you feel you know...
But I actually don't mean that light is powerful. Because it is not such a thing. It took me a while to remember the above situation with something light, non of this overly serious mad stuff. There was another situation that turned out pretty hilarious, while it can feel like real shi.t when such low stuff affects one. I was in a supermarket and also wanted to get cigarettes which were though not at this particular checkout. And the woman working there critically says that I would have to come with her to the other checkout. And I'm just feeling like wtf and I replied: Ja is ja kein Problem :) /Well, that's not a problem (rough translation, not really capturing it). Or I had a job talk, Idk how you say. And I am heading directly into the office where I was told to come back tomorrow. And that guy snaps at me. There is noone there! And I - I felt really angry - snapped back. Well how should I know! And he didn't have anything to say to that. We strangely got sort of along then. Then, you know I just share it, I was in a gasstation and got cigarettes and the clerk says: Feuer ham Sie?(Light you got?) in this certain way as in it's none of her business. And I fell for it and replied Yes to it. I felt really dumb when I walked out. I stood before the gas station and I didn't want to leave like that. I went back in and "smashed" about 10 lights on the counter and angrily said That many!! A few experiences I felt to throw in.
When you say "Sprite" they reply with "Schpreit", when you say "Schpreit" they say "Sprite"... when you say (China) Schina they say Kina... "mit handy zahlen" (pay with applepay) they say "oh mit Karte" but when you say "mit karte zahlen" they say "oh mit handy"... Know this? All the time... is it cos I am a foreigner? They just have to correct... yet both ways are perfectly correct... they just have this burning need to correct the foreigner or each other.
And as for original post...Don't do that really any other way but normally. People also lack confidence and sometimes only hear what they wanna hear. Especially if they are going unsurely to Tabak, it means they are not listening to their feel which literally brakes them. Sometimes people also lie because they feel not confident. But yeah sometimes they are really rude or feel superior, ignore and overgo one.
And yet at the same time it can still feel angry, some are so habitual. I replied into the mentioned silence with a feel of wanting to shut up any further question which literally just expressed in saying it again while later it turned out I was giving confidence to a situation. So this would be "another" perspective while some people really are just rude to effectively emotionally abusive.
I’m just curious if anyone bought berlinhater merch and wore it in Berlin and if any fellow berlinhater recognized them
Go into an overpriced organic shop Cos it’s local, have to queue all day even though I have three items. Other til closed and the receipt paper runs out On the queue I’m in. The teenage immigrant background boy working there is so trampled on by this society that when I ask in German to pay applepay corrects me to „Karte“. As in tutting and as if saying ‘you mean with card’ When you tell them „mit Karte“ they say „handy“. He just had to tell me off. He looked like he’d had a bad day and wanted to take it out on me Cos I was polite. Which makes me conclude two things. Everyone here needs to take out their rage on the next person as it’s all about victim and aggressor. This is why this place is associated with S&M. If you aren’t snapping at someone and being dominant or dominating you are the weak and being taken advantage of. Being that he is an immigrant and my need to mention this is this highlights how this culture has spoilt him. He is trampled Daily by those German self-righteous, dominant, bigots. The sneering middle class milieu. So he spoke to me in the same tone he hears all day from them. Living here for several years I learnt to keep it direct and reduce the manners because... the moment you let the guard down and show some sweetness/politeness or grace ... you will be trampled on, locked and scoffed at or talked down or snapped at rudely. That’s berlin.
So true. Berlin made me like them... I tried out Tinder in the hope of meeting new cool people. If you message the people on there politely with respect without the intention to have sex you get a rude, aggressive overly arrogant and hateful respond.. The people here are sick in their heads. The only way to survive here and get through without much hassle is by being like them, telling them to fornicate off never say hello to the cashier be rude af and always have a serious hateful facial expression to keep these vultures at a safe distance
I remember staying on a farm once and doing some voluntary work for the person who ran it. He was a german and I was often stunned by his behaviour. By this point he had been out of Germany more than 30 years, but it didn't seem to have mattered. Temper tantrums and random fits of rage over seemingly trivial things. They're like naughty children in adults bodies.
The bank told
Me (via post obviously haha) they couldn’t cancel my account because the signature was different on the card than the account. This culture has OCD. Same person idiot.
Once I had to do some idiot post ident thing and the old jobsworth behind the counter refused to confirm it because my signature didn't match the one on my passport (at the time my passport was 9 years old and had been issued when I was 15!). Then not much later the German Post completely decided to refuse to accept US passports at all and offered zero alternatives. Horseshit country.
Germans are totally un self aware and oblivious
Except when they are being opportunistic. They plough their way onto the trains, bulldozing anything in their path to make it to a seat... pathetic and rude. The audacity is shameless. I give them a look of contempt every time... but it’s lost on them Cos yeah you are right... no self awareness.
Germans are so pretentious and stuck up. Get over yourselves fools
One of my German friend asked me If I am gay because I don’t approach to women when we hang out together in clubs / bar.
I said I am not, I just don’t like hookups in clubs.
The reality is, I find German women very unattractive, not feminine and well behaved. I almost hate them completely.
I would rather die than having affairs with German women
If you despise, loathe and hate Berlin's moronic lefties even ten percent of what I do, which is 100%, you will love Jordan Peterson ripping this embarrassing, smug, vapid, feminist cvnt's 'arguments' to shreds.
www.youtube.com/watch
And then watch him annihilate this pompous lefty pr1ck into vacuum cleaner dust, then blow it all away. Fvck lefties they are boring, emotional manipulators who have a collective IQ of 100. Perfect example = AntiFa thugs and bigoted, sexist Feminazis. This myopic, pathetic weasel, bullying cvnt never answers Peterson's questions and he doesn't actually listen to anything Peterson says, like all lefty cvnts.
www.youtube.com/watch
And for dessert, you will love the way he makes this Feminist, lefty-lightweight, look like the fatuous, birdbrained weisenheimer, brainwashed-commie-marxist she is.
www.youtube.com/watch
I've passively listened to probably about half of his content on youtube thanks to autoplay and a boring job. But one thing that caught my attention was that in one of his lectures he talks about how some people consider small talk to be pointless and shallow and how he feels that is a sign of a malformed personality. It's a social game you play that both sides agree to and it's used to slowly expand the borders of your relationship in safe, easy terms. Germans don't and will never understand that. This is the most literal society I have ever seen. German porn is probably just grids of clinical pictures of genitals with harsh lighting. This is a society of people with no imagination, no souls and nothing attractive about them at all.
www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/ai-weiwei-kritisiert-cina-politik-der-bundesregierung-deutschland-hat-seine-seele-verloren-a-82502793-366d-47b0-a7b0-d0d80cc56cf8
Ai Weiwei again with some hard truths for Germany:
"Germany has lost its soul"
and even more astute:
"I learned that overall you can't take criticism that well here, I didn't know that at the time, otherwise I might have been more careful. Perhaps one should be a little more self-critical here and not be so fragile. Germany is so strong it should be able to take a few blows."
Unfortunately he only touches on Germany for a minute in the interview (the Germans, I am guessing, fished out that headline because they know Germans simply cannot take criticism and that it will drive their clicks through the roof). I would love to see an interview with him where he just complains about Germany for an hour. It seems like he managed to see through this place immediately, whereas lesser minds (like myself) took years to realize that this society is toxic at its core.
Germans HATE their past more than anything. They've completely neutered themselves on an individual level to repent for the sins of their forefathers. For WWII they passed draconian anti-speech laws, which is the only way to keep a German from publicly reminiscing about the "good old days". Nothing of the sort was done after the wall fell, so you still have millions of Germans living in delusional "ostalgie". Without all the anti-speech laws, it's easy to imagine how the public discourse would be now (and occasionally a rip appears in German Reality through which we can see what people think in private -- see the police Whatsapp leaks). Germans are convinced that their state-mandated conservation efforts, high taxes and constant self-censorship make them morally superior. When someone points out obvious flaws in their system they become angry. Ai Weiwei is perhaps one of the best people do do this right now. In the end I don't see it mattering though. I don't see Germany ever fixing any of its huge problems. They can't even rename of train station without inadvertently picking a known anti-Semite's name.
Soon it won't be of any concern to me at all anymore.
Here's one German freaking out about Ai Weiwei:
www.theglobalist.com/ai-weiwei-germany-fascism-racism-china-uk-hong-kong-protests/
I am not a huge fan of Weiwei but I would also conclude that the author in the link is no gentlemen.
For my part I was very frustrated with Germans and am disappointed with where Germany is going. I suspected, after only two months here, that something wasn't right about this country and I was having very mixed feelings. I denied this and persisted with the thinking that things would improve and that I would adjust. I was dead wrong.
Thank you for you comment, op! Absolutely agree with Ai Weiwei except for one thing as I am of the opinion that Germany never even had a “soul”. Personally, I ended here because of my non-German partner, but I will get out soon. For me, this is a negative place.
"Ai Weiwei engages in the very same racial stereotyping about Germany that he complains, with very thin, if not contrived proof the Germans exhibited toward him."
Can't even get past the lede of that Globalist article without laughing my butt off. Last time I checked German wasn't considered a race. In fact, I think Hitler was one of the last prominent proponents who claimed that Germanness was somehow a genetic condition.
I don't know who this Stephan Richter guy is, but looking through his articles it's a smorgasbord of contradictions and German idiocy. What else could one expect from a charlatan who makes the majority of his money by milking the German taxpayer through state-sponsored television.
Berlin or London? Which is better and has a startup scene?
Amsterdam is prettier than Berlin but after the honeymoon period wears off, you'll see the reality.
Which is, for a foreigner, much the same as the Germans.
They don't really want you there.
You will be reminded of that on a daily basis.
So only go for a year or so. If you actually want a life, go to London.