Hello, Lenin? Berlin, 1997
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“Gibt’s doch gar nicht” is usually meant ironically. If you loose your coat-check ticket, you're supposed to describe where your stuff is and maybe what's in one of the pockets, so they are sure you don't steal it. But to be fair, even little kids in Germany learn they have to store there stuff at a place where it should be impossible to loose. Even more when it is important like your passport.
There is also a system in place where you can throw stuff you found (like wallets, id cards, etc) in the yellow Post boxes and it will be sorted in Bonn and mailed to the right people.
Gosh, that sounds very uncomfortable.
People who are desperate, e.g. drug addicts, but feel bad about it? Might also just be that the theif threw the wallet away after emptying it for money, and someone else found it.
West Germany also has its fair share of Neo-Nazis and closet racists, the biggest difference being that West Germans had a couple of decades more time to "tone it down" compared to East Germans.
In West Germany many people, to this day, have very negative sentiments towards Eastern Europeans, Eastern Germans included. They are just more careful about how and when they voice them, something the East Germans haven't quite mastered to the same level yet.
Mostly due to an element of curiosity because "darker skinned people" simply had not been that common in the Soviet states, so they are rather blunt on such topics in comparison to West Germans who have learned to "hide" it a little bit better.
I ran into similar things living in Germany. I went to the Allkauf store just to look around, only to discover there was no way to leave other than the checkout lines, which were very long.
So, I (discreetly, I thought) jumped the turnstyle that lets people in so I could exit. There was immediate pandemonium, with security people coming my way, disapproving looks from shoppers, and so on.
I'm curious where the German propensity for strict organization, rule following, etc, comes from, and how far back it goes. The posted story seems to suggest it comes directly from WWII, since the East Germans don't seem to have the same attitude.
> There was immediate pandemonium,
Try to sit in the front seat of a cab in the US, which would be typical in Germany - in the US the cab driver will yell at you, or show his weapon.
Traffic control by the police. Try to reach into your pocket. Immediate pandemonium. In the US, not Germany.
Each country/region has its rules. You have learned yours. In a different country there are other rules.
Surprise: Germany has other rules than the US.
Drinking alcohol in public places? In the US? Not really. In Bavaria you would drink beer at work.
Driving speed limits? Strict in the US. Welcome to the German autobahn. To make it possible that you can drive without speed limit in parts of the autobahn, you have to follow other rules - like using a car that actually is safe at higher speeds.
> I'm curious where the German propensity for strict organization,
That this is specially German is a myth. It's also a widespread myth that this is everywhere in German society. Take for example childhood: much less strict organized than in many other countries. Children walk alone to school, take the bus, the train. They are much less drilled than in some other countries.
> rule following, etc, comes from, and how far back it goes. The posted story seems to suggest it comes directly from WWII,
Order comes from the Kaiserreich. Local order came before the Reich.
Every country has its order system, you have to detect it. In the UK you see the people neatly line up at the bus stop. There is a lot of order in public transport. Even more so in Japan. In the US the access to public underground transport is through gates. Something you would not find in Germany - access is open. As a German I find it very depressing to go through steel gates into the public transport system in the US.
>since the East Germans don't seem to have the same attitude.
They have. But it shows in slightly different things.
But I invite you to spend any amount of time in any Indian-subcontinent country and emerge with the conclusion that it's just as orderly as Germany only in a different manner (and for less extreme examples try Turkey, (southern) Italy or Israel).
Visit the Krishna temple in Bengaluru sometime. Nice long queues. People wait hours without any problem. There is a another, more expensive, but faster queue. Nobody complains. Huge crowds there. Nicely organized they move through the temple.
India also has a powerful bureaucracy, it's just not that efficient and people don't seem to expect efficiency. You either follow the rules or pay around it. In Germany you have bureaucracy, but one would expect at least some efficiency - though the recent large scale projects like the Berlin airport or the Stuttgart train station show the opposite. At least in Hamburg the Elbphilharmonie concert hall has been finished recently - after years of delay - with rising costs of ten times the original estimate. So much for order and efficiency in Germany.
One thing you should know about Germans: they complain. A lot. About everything. Sometimes it even helps.
I spent a couple months in northern India (Delhi and some nearby regions) about a decade ago, chaos was everywhere, all the time. Just need to step outside to experience it.
Total chaos. 15 years planning. More than ten years of construction. Maybe open 2018. Maybe. 7 years late. 7 billion Euro and rising.
Not the German orderly execution you would expect. Not in time, budget and quality. Lots of corruption and incompetence. It's chaos, it just looks different.
A public infrastructure project going late (even decades late) or not happing at all due to bad planning and over-budget is an everyday occurence in almost every country, from the US to China, and from Spain to Brazil.
To give that one as an example of "total chaos" really makes the parent's point about Germany being particularly orderly.
The BER is ridiculous, though. The specification, organization, execution and communication are all amazingly bad.
You mean the country with the least perceived corruption?
[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-07-15/indian-meal-service-s...
[2] http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/publications/data/2005-09-01ravic...
That's funny because the first time I took a cab in Europe (being from Europe) I thought I was supposed to sit in the backseat because I had seen it so many times on TV before.
I am still somehow annoyed by this because I prefer to sit alone in my thoughts and enjoy the ride than having small talks with the driver.
In Europe the cab is also a communication hub. You expect that he/she knows the town and lots of stories...
I'm not complaining. I'm just showing you that stereotypes and myths exist everywhere.
> no cab driver in the US would pull a gun on you
I tried that in Boston (not New York, as I thought to remember). The driver was EXTREMELY nervous then and didn't let me sit in the front. The cab was shitty and there was a thick transparent shield between the backseat and the front. Something you would never see in Germany.
Ok, I'm complaining, cause they're bad :)
The driver was EXTREMELY nervous
Sure, but he didn't pull a gun on you. I've had more guns pointed at me in Europe than in my (undoubtedly sheltered) subsequent life in the US.
Try doing that in certain neighborhoods and not looking very white and trustworthy. If the driver even stops for you, that is.
You can sit in the back just as well, there's no rule you need to sit on the front. Most sit in the back.
Yeah, but the things you mentioned (hysteria about public alcohol, trigger happy police, etc.) are things people find abhorrent/silly about the US too.
Inside a culture, people can find all kind of bizarro things normal (e.g. the caste system in India).
edit: what do you think is the intended function of the turnstile?
That said, if I had spent any significant time in the store without getting anything, I'd probably leave by the self serve checkouts.
Which is not obvious. And is not the case in most other places in the world I've known.
I would ask those people.
Obviously.
Trying to find some other exit in a shop will mean trouble. I would expect that in most places of the world.
Because those lines are obviously filled with people with stuff on their hands or carts, blocking easy access?
And because in 99% of the world the purpose of such lines are just to pay, and you can just walk out as you came in if you didn't buy anything...
The entry is clearly marked though and it is obvious that it doesn't double as an exit. So arguing that it's different in 99% of the world doesn't score a point.
Doesn't look like we use the same definition of "wide enough":
http://c8.alamy.com/comp/CRCY5X/people-at-the-checkout-in-a-...
But even so, why "pass the line"? That's what's usually frowned upon in the rest of the world, not getting out without passing through the cashier line if you haven't bought anything.
>The entry is clearly marked though and it is obvious that it doesn't double as an exit. So arguing that it's different in 99% of the world doesn't score a point.
It's probably more about "you're doing it wrong", get on with the rest of the world.
http://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/gallery/media/156/4733-de...
Is it? It's a line that's not relevant to you (it's for paying, not for getting out), so I don't see why one shouldn't just pass it?
For example: http://www.supermarketnews.com/sites/supermarketnews.com/fil...
Note the width of the cart vs the width of the aisle. Imagine a longer line where everyone has a cart. This happens to be an Aldi, a German owned chain that operates in the US.
Usually, there's some alternate exit, this time there wasn't.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hkXxvHAFttQ/maxresdefault.jpg
And looking at your picture, the space becomes more narrow at the checkout. I have no idea why they would need that much space - there is a lot of room between her and the barcode scanner.
The lanes were not much wider than the carts. If they were wider, I would have left that way.
I certainly don't doubt that some supermarkets are built in the way you are describing (with the checkout being like that) but I personally haven't seen one yet.
But hey, at least your solution worked. Too bad about the disapproving looks though (depending on your age, maybe they thought you were some kind of delinquent).
Only children and people accustomed to how stores in most of the world work.
"Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
You might be surprised at the number of people that will bypass intentional barriers when the overall layout is stupid. The internal dialogue is something like "me doing this is less stupid than whoever decided this setup made sense".
Supposedly a lot of that dates back to the Kingdom of Prussia and it's "Preußische Tugenden" coined by King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_virtues
The Teutonic Order (Deutscher Orden) had very similar virtues and predate the Kingdom of Prussia by another couple of centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teutonic_Order
As such it's an attitude that's not exclusive to any part of Germany neither East nor West.
It didn't start with Hitler. There are descriptions of such attitudes all the way back to the 19th century (that I'm aware of) and possible further back.