How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

- The requirements are arbitrary, undocumented, and largely depend on how the case worker feels on a given day. Common wisdom is to bring far more documents than asked for, just in case.

- Everything is paper-based. You are expected to act as a transport layer between offices that won't talk to each other. Everything is mailed, because digital communications are distrusted and digitalisation lagging far behind.

- Everything takes far longer than it should, partly due to the above, and due to chronic understaffing of government offices.

This is a problem in all major cities, and many of the smaller ones. In this case, n is a pretty big number backed by the many relocation consultants I work with. You got lucky, and I envy you.

My favorite Berlin anecdote is when my wife (then girlfriend) and I first arrived in Germany, she was unemployed for the better part of a year as no-one would give her a chance. She actually got quite depressed about it, and reached out about state sponsored integration courses as the language lessons she was taking were expensive and she wanted to do something more holistic. The authorities told her in no uncertain terms that they didn't care and that there were no places available.

My biggest bugbear with Germany is that the state intrudes extensively in your affairs, most of the time they are being benevolent but that intrusion brings in a tremendous amount a bureaucratic baggage. And that baggage is slow, paper based, and becomes a significant barrier for doing anything. In many countries the kind of paperwork you have to slave over here just doesn't exist in the first place.

FWIW my wife and I got married in Denmark. It was impossible for my wife to provide an up-to-date (less than six months old) translated copy of her Chinese birth certificate. Theoretically she could have traveled back to china (in the middle of the pandemic) and begged her backwaters local police authority to print a new copy but they weren't obliged to issue her one. Denmark was happy with her passport and some declarations from the local authorities in Germany.

Some days I really wonder why I continue to put up with the hassle, probably just sunk cost at this point and stubbornness. Wouldn't recommend Germany for anyone with a low frustration tolerance.

    > Eastern Europe is harder

Japanese bureaucracy has a bad rap, but it isn't that bad. There's still paperwork (not much has moved online) but the public servant staff are super helpful and guide you through things and are helpful when there is some blocker. Especially in the past 3-5 years there have big improvements with a lot of paperwork and stuff that required your personal seal has been removed, and the MyNumber card makes doing anything online very easy. I've never ever had to fax anything as people joke about (and a friend in Germany actually had to do)

In my experience, ZA bureaucracy is simpler than e.g. Germany or Greece, but general operational incompetence and corruption makes it just as slow. It's a tradeoff of more easily understanding what you have to do, but you'll have to sit in a queue for 6 hours and hope they don't tell you "the system is offline".

The closest thing to legal bribery is to go through specialist firms that deal with the bureaucracy for you, for a fee. This is also much faster as they know who's who within each department to get things done faster.

I've had friends request old documents only to learn 8 months later that the archival facility burnt down a few years ago so they don't know what documents they do or don't have. Ask a firm to do it, pay a couple thousand Rand, and they'll get it done within 3 weeks.

Since then Germany is trending down and Eastern Europe is trending up - and bureaucracy along with it. Digitization, customer friendliness, you name.

Even some random office in Serbia seems more pleasant than dealing with Germany.

Germany is trending towards becoming a has-been, like the UK (with the difference that in the current geopolitical context it's even proving to be an obstacle).

1. German companies are equally as bureaucratic because the people and society in general are culturally so into it.

2. German government is formed by German people voted by other German people, they aren't ruled by some aliens that came from of the sky, therefore are representative for them.

Highly optimized for the happy path, which of course does cover 99% of cases, but you better not be in the 1% :) That's what I liked about France: nobody expects you to be normal, so everybody is used to working around systems. For the Dutch (and Germans), systems are sacred, and if they don't work, it must be you!

Edit:spelling and clarification on intake

_I am tired of the pretentious western europe politics/administration point of view that immediately ranks everything (including good ideas) coming from Asia/global South as "not transposable to Europe" or just "not as good as our ways"._

Did you live in China as an immigrant, did you settle down there for several years, did you have to go through their immigration process ?

I was told more than once by very knowledgeable people that if you anger a case worker, they can and will make your life hard by nitpicking every little detail and asking for as many documents as they can.

This happens for example if you get angry at their incompetence, or if you sue them for inaction (although in Berlin they see it as normal business by now).

corruption is spreading like a plague with no consequence in sight for anyone involved.

It varies form city to city, I live in one that I'd say is an exception on the positive side: Most clerks in the various offices are actually helpful and even giving you hints. I had to renew my passport in January and got an appointment the next day. I got the appointment online(!) in Germany(!!). Passport could be collected 4 weeks later. Meanwhile an ex-colleague who lives in Berlin had to wrestle with his nearest office to even get an appointment for a passport renewal, then gave up and made an appointment with the office in the neighboring district, where it was still a 4 weeks wait. He told me there are districts where it takes up to 6 months.

I guess if you want pain and suffering, move to Berlin. :o)

In comparison I also had to renew my Japanese foreign card and later my ID card, and both procedures were a royal PITA, and in both cases I had to wait a month to get the new card.

Practically, not anymore: there are block posts on main roads into Germany and they check passports.

But as a white guy from middle American (in that I lived there for 40 years) who has voted Republican and Democrat and has enough conservative ideas that people are often confused about my political leanings, I can tell you there is some truth to this.

I’ve been in the room more than several hundred times when people who were working in the American bureaucracy openly "decried the horrors of the Mexican invasion ". I will admit the majority of that was my ex’s father but it wasn’t only him. I’m certain he did not make things easier on his Mexican applicants (dmv in his case).

I’ve also heard racial slurs used hundreds of thousands of times, very few people engaging in this voted democrat.

I’m sure there are endless stupid conspiracy theories in progressive echo chambers, I hear them from time to time they are just as silly as republican ones and I would love nothing more the above comment to be correct.

In the end, their experience definitely does not match up with mine and we should all be sad.

Add to that the fact that the Republicans now have a second reason not to fix immigration: they can’t run on it if it’s not broken.

If Trump gets in again he will do a lot of anti immigration theater for his base but nothing will really change. Democrats won’t fix it either. Someone has to pick berries and trim hedges.

If your first reaction to this is “well you don’t need anything!” you must be one of the people that was astonished at how the 2016 election went.

No I didn’t vote for the guy and I hope he loses this time.

Because sometimes you don't have a say, or you don't expect to use it. No politician ever campaigned on making the lines at the DMV move faster. But we (mostly) all agree you should be required to get a license before you drive. Most Americans drive, and few have chose to route this "major part of their life" away from the DMV.

Immigration process (as this thread illustrates) sucks. It's also not a process used by voters.

The process to apply for welfare in most parts of the US sucks, but the actual welfare is valuable. People think by making it harder, it will instead result in people who are less reliant upon it. Welfare recipients are a huge political target constantly. They're the individuals who are "actively hated" in this example, and they're entirely dependent on the system in that moment, because thats how misfortune works.

Many cities making construction permits hard to get, because local residents don't want their neighborhood changing, so they petition local politicians to make the process slower/harder/more-expensive. In this example they "hate" the new construction.

If you're not a high schooler and you're applying to a state-funded university, the process to prove you're a local resident can be surprisingly complicated. This is because it's designed for high school students and all the edge cases are optimized to avoid accidentally providing tax-subsidized "in-state" tuition to an out-of-state resident. For example, I wanted to take a for-fun class at a local university and because I didn't have a local high school to vouch for my residency, I needed to provide (among other things) 50+ pages of tax documents. It took 2 semesters (1y) to prove I lived in the state, and the minimum amount of time you need to live in-state is 1 year.

People who live their life in the "happy-path" case often don't deal with the government, and don't understand the struggle of these edge cases. Plenty of activities require the government. No way around it. Sometimes, people who think "small government" is the solution end up making those processes terrible by making it understaffed or convoluted to "avoid waste".

My father has only a certificate and no degree or anything like that.

It took him 20 years to get citizenship. We came 3 years after he come here and we all became citizens together.

My friends whose parents were doctors or had masters degree would get their GC and citizenships in like 5 years.

Eg. Republicans hate taxes, so they defund the IRS (tax collectors), to make it harder for the government to audit tax evasion.

Providing updates to everyone waiting simply wastes time and resources; again, you know roughly how long it's going to take as the estimated times are provided. Hassling the agent on your case is unnecessary.

Regarding leaving and returning Australia - Bridging Visa class Bs are made available if you have good reasons to be leaving and coming back.

I can see this from two sides - my (now ex) wife went through getting temporary then permanent residency in Australia; yes, it was a pain and expensive, but Australia has high standards of living etc, which is why lots of people want to come here. The other side is this - immigration is one of the reasons why there are not enough houses to buy or places to rent, making life difficult for citizens or people who have PR or TR. So if the process of having more immigrants who also require housing is expensive or difficult, I think you'll find a lot of people are not particular sympathetic.

People complain but its generally predictable save for applications for a 3 year visa can lead to a 1 year visa or a 3 year visa or a 5 year visa

However, I did not have any issues with the bridging visa. It gave me full rights to employment, medicare, and fair taxation (unlike the Work and Holiday Visa I started with, which drastically limited my ability to work, had me paying all medical expenses out-of-pocket, and taxed all my income at the highest tax bracket), and I traveled overseas a few times on it without any issues.

The application fees were expensive, but the bridging visa more than made up for it. I made much more money on the bridging visa than it cost me to apply, so even if my application had been rejected, I would have come out far ahead financially and had a lovely 2-year working holiday in Australia — far better than what the Work and Holiday Visa offers.

On your experience, it really feels like a PITA. It won't help, but Japan and France are basically the same. You'll see procedures listed as typically taking 2~3 months, check back every now and then, and low and behold a year and half later you have absolutely no idea of what's going on, if your submission has been forgotten or is contentious. There's no recourse as long as you haven't been refused, so it's limbo until something happens.

People are right to bitch about these lengthy and utterly frustrating procedures, I just don't see a way out of it short of being rich, famous or finding a loophole that lets you force a government agency do something in a timely manner without getting a target on your back.

To note, France had much progress in the last decades, in that bullshit requirements were made illegal a few years ago. At least you can check everything needed on an official site and not be subjected to petty additional requirements when dealing with the local entity (yes, that was a thing, probably to make it extra hard for specific portions of the population to properly file procedures)

Do you have any examples for this? Genuinely curious.

From where I stand most EU countries right now are talking steps backwards on this as they've become overloaded with migration waves, housing shortages, stagnating wages, which increased the far right support, so the hot topic now is how to discourage ALL immigration, not how to make life better and easier for SOME immigrants to attract them.

Sure, you obviously want to encourage the useful skilled immigration, but like I said, from where I stand it seems countries don't distinguish and are trying to make life hell for all immigrants just to plase the right wing voters since those would be frothing at the mouth if they heard their government is rolling out the red carped to attract SOME immigrants, so then for simplicity the political issue is binary, IMMIGRANTS or NO IMMIGRANTS.

The official website says the wait time for permanent residency is "up to 10 months", and searching Reddit suggests 3-6 months is more normal.

Denmark is not particularly welcoming to immigrants, but they do with rules rather than inefficient paperwork.

My observation was that by simply changing the view on what is happening and extrapolating how to act based on that one can achieve quite a lot.

I told people the following:

1. The person dealing with you is not there to help you, they are simply executing an act of governance. Rather than wanting them to help you, try to help them close their tickt.

2. You are the type of immigrant people actually want. These popele see lots of drama, lies, heartbreak and hopelessness. If you are pleasant and well prepared they will probably like working on your case since it will not make them feel bad.

3. Things take time. Be as early as possible with everything and realize that there early is a way to speed things up.

Keeping those three things to heart worked very well. That does not make things faster, but it takes a lot of frustration out of the process.

Waiting times are annoying, but that is because of an overloaded system, everything else was pretty painless.

Isn't this just German culture, though? I had that experience just buying groceries and going through the checkout line!

It does not really help to have separate queues if those are served by the same worker.

In practice, German schools are pretty decent, but they obsess about PISA scores and so neglect to ever notice what the schools are doing well. The train networks are fairly extensive, can be quite cheap depending on how you travel, and consistent across the country, but a lot of Germans would much rather complain about how late they are than recognise anything positive about the system. The general public transport networks (i.e. transport inside towns and cities) are amazing, and one of the things that I would most miss if I went anywhere else.

I think part of it is just that if you're German, you rarely see these systems from an outside perspective, so you only see the points that chafe regularly. But another part of it really is just that German tendency to criticise first rather than to view things holistically.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/tax-burden-on-labo... [2] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/tax-burden-labor-europ...

Of course if you are a civil servant or part of some mega union, but for the rest of the private plebs it is often 9h daily(because lunch break is not part of contract) and most do a long commute(because of eternal housing crisis) which may raise it to 12-14h easily.

"The data are published with the following health warning: The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of the level of average annual hours of work for a given year, because of differences in their sources and method of calculation."

Yes, in Germany are many part-time workers but overall mostly they are not working 6 hours the day . Normal is - afaik - 8 hours per day on approx. 220 days in a year.

[1] Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freiwillige_Feuerwehr#Deutschl... (in German)

Russia (with the exception of its ethnic minorities) is one of the most atomized societies in Europe, actually. The Russian dream is a house in the exurbs with a three-meter-tall impenetrable fence around the lot where you can do anything you want inside and no one will bother you.

Wait, isn't that what's happening already? I'm pretty sure the temporary worker from the Czech Republic is there, as is the second generation Turk voting for Erdogan. Not fully sure about the Nigerian immigrant though.

They liked Spain a lot, but the first comment they made when we went for a walk was how clean the streets and the surroundings where.

Your cleanliness mileage may vary per Land, I guess.

The biggest issue was that we needed one of my documents (the birth certificate) to have a seal of authenticity from my home country, which then all needed to be translated officially. That took longer than it needed to because we didn't realise it needed to be authenticated and so we got it returned at one point and needed to resubmit it. But apart from that, it was mostly a case of waiting for the formalities to go through - that took a couple of months in total, but it required relatively little work overall. I suspect in total, getting married in another country would have taken more work to organise and arrange, although it would probably have been quicker with the right combination of country and pre-existing documents.

I think most immigrants who get married in Germany are doing it for legal reasons primarily.

And in actual emergencies, these processes can be accelerated, like every other buerocratic process in Germany

Most pregnancies take a while, two weeks is plenty of time. Don't even get me started on how long immigration bureaucracy takes -- two weeks is a drop in the bucket.

If one doesn't respect German laws, best to go to a country which works differently and stay there.

If /r/berlin is anything like /r/japanlife, the problem IS the moderator.

But those records aren't really fit for the purpose of certifying that someone is not currently married, because (a) they do not include people who don't need to file taxes; and (b) they are only updated once a year.

For pretty much every other administrative purpose, it doesn't matter whether you're married or not, so I don't really see why you'd want the tax records updated more often.

However, this is understandable given German history.

Lots of decision's, made no sense in software development.

> Now you can email them, pay, and they mail you the certificate via snail mail.

> How it should be: Use an online token, log into your account, request a birth certificate and just print it. It should have a URL that can be used to verify that it is valid. This would be faster and the risk of forgery would be much lower. A seal - and Germans love seals, they wank of to seals - can be forged much easier.

That's an unreasonably high (or weird) standard. What country has a process like that? Switzerland certainly doesn't.

Honestly, the whole funding debate for public services is often so facile and ideologically entrenched. Both sides are right: Public services _are_ invariably inefficient, and cutting funding _does_ invariably do little to increase efficiency. But neither side will accept the validity of the other's argument and so we end up with this cycle of alternating governments imposing austerity and generosity.

Then there is the war in Ukraine. Normally, Russia is one of the most important trading partners of Finland. But when it doesn't know how to behave, a large part of foreign trade is missing, and the economy suffers.

The was a first overheating boom in the end of the 1980s, until a heavy recession took over in the 1990s. The next boom was Nokia driven in the 2000s until the global banking crisis. Since Nokia has fallen (well, it still exists but with a different business and more modest success) there has been little to no growth and heavy deindustrialization.

So basically Finland is back to the previous state of being a poor country with weak industry (I am exaggerating a bit). But the spending has continued to grow like the Nokia boom years had never ended.

Edit: Finland has one of the least favorite population pyramids in Europe. People getting older and no children. Very little immigration until maybe the last decade. And now a far right government with a strong anti-immigration agenda.

Perhaps that's fundamentally barking up the wrong tree. West-European governments in the post WW2 era have had higher relative spendings then that, without every financial expert and their dog declaiming that doomsday is near and services need to be cut.

We've been able to finance better healthcare before, we've able to finance better education before, we've been able to finance better infrastructure before, etc. So which costs have risen out of proportion to the point that none of that is possible today.

The better metric would be how many employees work (directly or indirectly) for the government and then compare those numbers.

This is really the crux of it. Same incompetence and inefficiency, we see in tech industry. Are there any serious studies on the disease that comes with scale, and possibly its cure?

(opinion) Human society large rewards narcissism. Diligence is usually rewarded with exploitation. There's actually academic supporting the 2nd. Therefore, most politicians are largely selfish and mostly interested in being on TV, being the center of attention, and holding sway over other citizens. (Not all, just the majority). The only metric is "what gets elected." However, like "green" anything, the optimization is usually "do nothing, and color the corporate logo green."

Causes further issues. The optimization becomes, "focus on highly incendiary minutia, while avoiding anything risky, and maximizing viewer attention and anxiety." Issues that will allow them to say they're valiant, while exposing nothing especially damaging for the next election.

The American fiscal funding fiasco this / last year is typical. 6 months, and America finally has a budget. All the while, it's mostly arguments about minutia like "Homeland Security impeachment", who the speaker is, where Military can get abortions, whether a base will get funding, migrants on buses, and weekly CR shutdown "thwarting". It literally became weekly federal budgets around Feb-Mar in America... Meanwhile, a lot of enlisted in those abortion / base (yes/no?) states are wondering whether they're going to get paychecks. People on boats complain about having no ammunition to shoot with...

London's sewers are another excellent example. Dithering and dithering about repairs, about maintenance, about public toilets. Except the Thames is bright yellow, people won't go swimming, and when somebody asks, they're response is "well, btw, we're actually £18,000,000,000 in debt. Make -£2,000,000,000 per year. Have for years. Nobody even noticed. lolz." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Water Obvious optimization, nationalize while decrying the evils of the private sector. Quietly also nationalize the debt to the public in a line item somewhere that nobody writes about. Squander resources for years. Sell back to industry claiming the salvation of capitalism.

I've never actually looked at the German budget (quasi B1 deutschkenntnisse and no training in economics, what would I get from reading them?), what I can say is that it's very easy to fall into the trap described by Chesterton's fence and call for the removal of things because you don't understand them, not because they're actually bad.

For example, someone I used to know in the UK said much the same about his taxes paying for schools, just because he personally didn't have kids.

I'm currently also an expat living in the EU. The common sentiment from a lot of other South Africans here is to go back to SA for a 2 week holiday to get your passport. Apparently dealing with anything home-affairs related via your local embassy is a total shitshow. People have been waiting years for birth certificates for new babies and such.

It seems that the intersection between Home Affairs and International Relations (embassies) is in total shambles.

There are many still alive who remember the evils done by the Stasi, when I was a child, there were many who remembered the evils done by the Gestapo; when those are your core examples of a citizen database, such thing naturally seems "big brother".

The irony is the mirror image: America seems almost* totally willing to have private databases while disliking government ones, Europe seems almost* totally willing to have government databases while disliking private ones.

* to anyone about to reply "not I": don't be blind to the "almost", I know many here will be exceptions

But for what do a drivers license database, social security numbers exist? And why should a country/state know your bank account number(s)?

Etatism is cancer.

There are probably all kinds of tricks you could pull by being married for a bit, then declaring the marriage false all along, but not going through the official divorce process.

The laws are there for people who may feel like they don’t have much choice in the matter. And yes lying to officials that you did in fact have a choice and are totally doing this of your own free will and yes of course you understand the document you’re signing is a big part of it.

This is similar to how some pregnancy related health clinics have things like “Sign the sample cup with blue pen if all good, use the red pen if you’re being forced to be here”

In any case it say that since 2021 Germany will accept a sworn oath from US residents to declare their eligibility.

Some states can give you a statement saying "This person never has gotten married in our state", but they cannot pull the records of every state. In fact, the state that I was living in could not even do that -- only individual counties could pull records saying "This person did not have a wedding within this county". There are no central records.

When I tried to use that as a record of non-marriage, it was not accepted for the above reasons. My fiancee and I needed to give a signed oath to a notary that we were not married, and take that document to the state's office to be apostilled.

https://oberlandesgericht-stuttgart.justiz-bw.de/pb/,Lde/Sta...

- Countries without a link they have no info

- Countries with a link, but are cursive, generally provide the certificate in most cases (this seems to be broken, I see no cursive ones, but the UK is among this group, which one can see when opening the link; but that seems to be the minority).

- All others they seem to suggest need to go through the exemption process.

https://www.osborneclarke.com/insights/dutch-covid-19-tempor...

Oh, it does exist :)

That is... how bankruptcy works? He literally didn't owe you money anymore. Obviously you shouldn't extend his new company credit, but extinguishing old debts is the exact purpose of bankruptcy.

Is the notary able to model creditworthiness (i.e. they’re acting as a rating agency), or do they just sniff out “undesirables” by some ad hoc, unregulated process involving their personal judgement, or is it something else entirely?

Depends. This can be illegal and he is personally liable for the amount. That being said, he might have done things by the book and his previous venture is bankrupted.

Was this in Sweden? In that case, I have heard of cases where a condo that someone bought had an unknown bank loan taken out against it.

The bank loan is still attached to the condo even if it changes owners. The bank can force you to sell the condo to pay the loan back to the bank.

You can then turn around and sue the previous owner who took out the loan. Good luck with that.

I don't think this happens very often and usually the condo association knows which loans are taken out against which condos.

We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.

The downside of this is the split brain problem that you have with distributed systems: a state knows something about you that another state maybe doesn't, which leads to "interesting" things like illegal people having multiple identities in several states, etc. Weird s**.

[0] https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.stuttgart-album-zu...

In particular, I was staying in Nordhausen for work for a couple weeks. The hotel I stayed at tried to refuse to accept that I paid by card online in advance. Every small restaurant I went to refused to accept either a credit or debit card, and only a couple chain (read:overpriced) restaurants would accept Mastercard. When I tried to buy an Ethernet cable at a general store they refused to accept anything other than cash once they realized I was a foreigner.

Maybe it’s a myth in large population centres, but definitely not overall. I had roughly the same experience throughout most of Thuringia, with even gas stations in certain areas only accepting cash.

Not yet. There still exist plenty of cash-only places. In my neighborhood (P-Berg, Berlin) both nearest restaurant and nearest coffee shop are cash-only.

I am generally suspicious of rhetoric like "you're a little well off, so we can heap arbitrary amounts of bullshit on you and you shouldn't complain".

When my wife started her current business as a consultant, she was living off her savings from teaching high school. If you think every entrepreneur has €25k of capital, you need to reevaluate what your country thinks of entrepreneurship.