It cannot be stressed enough how important the ritual of moving is among elite German circles. Moving house is a tried and tested way to socialize with German people and stay in the center of their attention for a considerable span of time. From the announcement of your plan to move, the well publicized, crowd-sourced search for the “perfect” apartment, to the actual day of moving, a simple move of house can give you up to a full year of boosted interestingness if you play your hand cleverly. And that doesn’t even include the month-long aftermath of complaining about your stingy ex-landlord and the renovation nightmares that caught you, like, totally offhanded.

To dispel all concerns you might be a mainstream, career-driven person with more money than them, make sure to plan your move with the lowest possible budget. The biggest gaffe would be to hire professional movers to do the job for you. What’s that? You’d rather spend some money on the move than micro-manage every little aspect of it yourself, using two weeks of paid company holidays, just to return to work totally exhausted and ready for a proper vacation? What are you, some kind of silver-spoon-fed aristocrat? Doing your own move is beyond you, yeah? Well, here’s the problem: If you have your move done by professionals, chances are it will be an eventless, even pleasing experience that saves your sanity, or in short, an extreme fail. Still puzzled where the problem lies? Let’s spell it out for you: There will be nothing to talk about next time you meet your German acquaintances at that infamous new dive bar, and another person will quickly sashay into the center of their attention. What you want to do is aim for the maximum possible dramatic and error-prone course of events.

If you currently see no apparent reason for moving house, it is perfectly fine to invent one. You could purposely split up with your love interest, so the need to move out “and think things over for a while” arises. Better yet, you could move inside your existing apartment and shoot an artsy documentary about the process which you’ll then show at a guerilla art gallery in Wedding. Don’t bother with an explanation for the move. It is understood without saying to be a regular necessity in any elite German person’s life. As a rule of thumb, you can move house up to six times a year, but absolutely be prepared to move at least twice a year, just to appear normal.

So how do you cut down on budget? German people consider an expenditure on a service they could do themselves as an awful waste of money which could be invested towards owning property or recreational drug use. As most elite German people are self-employed with no imminent deadlines in the way, the resource they have easiest access to is free time, while the scarcest one is cash. The result is a blind understanding among elite Germans that nobody should ever be forced to spend money on hiring movers, hence the average elite German person will be very frank to invite everyone on his Facebook account to join his moving “partaay” featuring “cold beer, snacks, and live deejaying”. Take notice how the invitation to such a party always closes with a phrase like “if at least 5 people show up, which won’t be a problem, we’ll be done in 2 hours tops”.

Once the day of moving has arrived, on the way there, make sure to stop by a cash machine and take out at least 300 Euros - you’ll need them later. As a rookie Auslander, you probably feel obliged to show up at the exact given time. Oh well. You’ll likely be the very first person to arrive. The guy who’s moving will open the door still in his pajamas, and say, “Wow, you’re early. Thanks for coming, by the way. I kinda just got up because we had some artist friends over, so I’m in the middle of having breakfast and going through today’s feuilleton. Make yourself at home, if you can find a seat between all those boxes”. Once you sit down, glance over the scenery to find out the ratio of readily packed stuff to stuff that still needs to be put into boxes is less than 50%, meaning there’s no way the move will be done in the advertised two hours. If you have any further appointments that day, cancel them now.

Chances are the German person has repeatedly claimed to possess great taste in interior and product design. When a German person claims to “be into design,” it means they love to clutter their apartments with design classics which they source from eBay or flea markets. More often than not, the stuff is half broken or severely yellowed, which, as its new owner begs to differ, “only serves to give it that special charm which you don’t get from just buying it in a store like an ignorant yuppie would do.” Elite German people consider buying half-broken, nicotine-stained gadgets from the 60s or 70s to be an irresistible bargain up to 150% of the original price. The more times a German person stresses their individuality, the more likely you will find one of the following items in their apartment:

• A Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair
• A few original GDR cafeteria chairs that were stolen from an abandoned factory, to give the apartment an air of workaday simplicity and prove their owner has an “eye for the beauty found in simple and cheap things”.
• A shelf system by Dieter Rams, “which was a bitch to install!”
• several rolls of vintage GDR wallpaper which your friend never got around to actually put up
• At least one pricey fixed-gear bike displayed in the living room on special, imported hinges.
• At the very least 2500 vinyl records neatly kept in one or more Ikea “Expedit” shelves. In each compartment, one of the vinyl records, if it has a design the apartment owner deems “worthy”, is put face forward in front of the other vinyl records, creating a “wonderful collage of inspiring graphics design”
• A DJ deck with two Technics 1210 turntables and a small mixer, on which, upon closer inspection, traces of “piece” or other recreational drugs can be found
• Some pieces of self-made art, often with “crass” symbology showing phalli in context with 9/11 inspired stencil art, courtesy of the owners’ current girlfriend who’s an aspiring fashion blogger-slash-journalist from Copenhagen and the “number one fan of Banksy”
• A lava lamp which your friend will quickly comment on by saying, “I know, it is so lame to own a lava lamp, but I heard it contains really bad chemicals so I can’t throw it away”. You are expected to like your friend a little more for saying this.

Over the next 1-2 hours, a few of the people who promised to help moving will arrive, and, with no exception, have a bad hangover, the reasons for which they’ll discuss in at least 45 minutes of allusive weekend chitchat. There will always be significant less people showing up than promised by the mover, who will proclaim “you can be sure I’ll really scold those non-showing morons,” which of course will never happen because the people who’re missing are always his best mates who he regularly does coke with.

The gathering will then, finally, move their attention to start the actual move and you’ll likely assume that things are finally picking up steam. Don’t laugh too soon, Auslander. The person assigned to box the vinyl will soon discover some kind of musical gem, like a super-rare “Moodymann” vinyl that was only available to buy for a single day back in 1992, and whoever plays this record at a club will be considered really interesting and in the know about the history of electronic dance music. This person will be so excited to tell everybody about his discovery that the other guys, who are of course all massively into electronic dance music, will stop whatever they are currently doing and join the guy responsible for the record collection, abandoning their tasks. For the next hour and a half, your German acquaintances are caught in a blissful trance, in which they make little stacks of records they plan to borrow for an important upcoming gig, totally ignoring the fact that the move was supposed to be almost done by this hour.

When, finally, everything is packed into boxes, the moving German person will admit that he didn’t have time to pick up the rented van. That’s right: Even though elite German people always seem to brag about who they know and how many interesting people they meet, they are usually blanking when it comes to knowing someone with a car, much less so, a van. That’s why they usually have to resort to rent one. Now’s your turn: Ask the moving German person to accompany them to the car rental company. Why? Arriving there, the elite German person will be caught in total surprise to discover that there is a 300 EUR deposit for renting a van, which, after much huffing and puffing, he will agree to pay, but as he already maxed out his EC-Karte at IKEA the day before and is now broke, it looks like the whole moving party must be postponed to another day. Now is your chance to gain respect and gratitude by helping him out with the cash you prepared earlier.

Back home, the actual move finally starts. Check your watch. If the time is now less than 5 hours over the originally planned start time, you can congratulate yourself on finding some really get-things-done, no-fuss German acquaintances. Never mention the concept of “being late” to an elite German person. You would be seen as a very pushy, stuck up person with zero talent for socializing, improvising, or dilettante art.

Arriving at the moving person’s new apartment, don’t be confused by the fact it looks almost exactly the same: Of course it will be in an art nouveau building, on the 6th floor, with no elevator. It is now time to gather all the strength you can muster and start carrying those awfully heavy boxes of rare electronic dance music vinyl up to the new apartment. Once you’re done, there will probably not much life left in you and you’ll be, for once, excused for leaving “early”.

A couple of days later, you’ll be contacted by the moving person to be told that, on the way to the car rental company, he managed to put a dent into the van, losing the deposit. Patiently listen to his wordy promises how he’ll pay you back as soon as possible. This means it will take another 6-8 weeks and numerous phone calls on your part until you finally get your friend to meet you and pay you back, but never without passive-aggressively joking about how he never would have thought you could be so “pushy with money”.

Don’t let that keep you from helping your German acquaintances move in the future, though. It is one of the highest rewarded favors of the whole German friendship point system, and once it is your turn to move, you can be sure that at least a small percentage of the people you helped moving will show up to browse your vinyl collection.

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Introduction: An often repeated opinion you'll hear from German people is that it is extremely hard for a man to understand "the women". When you're with a group of German men, you can score some easy empathy points by saying: "Women - can't be with them, can't be without them!" Your German friends will respond by nodding contemplatively and think of you as a weathered veteran of complicated (meaning: interesting) relationships.

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Ask them for the reason why they moved to Berlin, the usual explanation given by Auslanders and elite German people alike is that they felt a strong urge to break free from the confinement of their original surroundings to live the unconventional life of an artist in what they believe to be a more laid-back, non-conformist, and artistically inspiring place.

The tried and tested way for anyone who strives to live like an unconventional, creative part of the Boheme is to adjust their lifestyle, looks, and attitudes to exactly match those of the people who moved to the place earlier. The mission objective is to be different in the same way everybody else is. As soon as you set foot on the stomping grounds of your adolescent dreams, you are automatically an avant-garde Bohemian, and you must act the part without any self-doubt. Getting a neon-colored leotard at American Apparel and growing a messy beard will buy you some time. But as German people take great pride in acting authentic, being an artist is not just a style thing. Well, on second thought, it is mainly just a style thing, yet elite German people like to think of themselves as non-conformist intellectuals who never even once stoop down to the shallow levels of pure aestheticism, so they constantly feel a certain peer pressure to have a true interest in intellectual matters.

That’s where they usually run into obstacles. Even the most progressive, city-slicking, counter-culturally versed, avant-garde, nonconformist German people are at heart country bumpkins with the very same unsophisticated cravings they constantly ridicule normal people for. Regardless of how much time they appear to spend on creating improbably brilliant music, design, fashion, art, or literature, for some reason they always seem to have a lot of free time for “networking” in cafes, dive bars, or the Berghain toilet.

The chasm gaping between their struggle to meet the stiff demands of bohemian Germany and the worldly desires their regrettably conventional upbringing irreversibly etched into their genes, inevitably leads to cognitive dissonances. It is fair to say that elite German people’s social interactions are driven by nothing but them. The behavior, attitudes, fashions, and ideologies that constitute Berlin-Mitte are nothing but manifestations of the raging inner conflict to resolve these very cognitive dissonances.

Unaware of the German way to tackle this problem, your approach would probably be to start working really hard to actually become the artist you claim to be. You know, put some old-fashioned effort into something, become an expert, then dedicate your life to it, try to reach beyond what others have reached for, fail at it, and fail at it over and over again, driving you into a severe alcoholism, then a drug habit that almost kills you, then outright madness that makes you obey the voices in your head telling you to cut off an ear, wrap it into tissue to give it to a prostitute, and finally taking you to the edge of suicide, because the very matter you dedicated your life to, has betrayed you, until finally, one day, in a time of greatest possible desperation, something else, something that has been hidden deep inside you, takes over, and suddenly every step you need to take is clearly laid out in front of your inner eye, and you walk the walk, ascending to a higher level of knowledge, forever shedding your limited comprehension of the world, leaving behind your entanglement in pretentious and shallow counter-culture kitsch, engrossing you with nothing but amused alienation from the activities and values that once mattered, because finally, life has turned you into a true artist.

Or, if that sounds too hard, attend a Tatort party. Elite German people at one point found out that they can gain the same amount of respect and interestingness that a true artist receives without putting in any effort. You simply have to redefine whatever painfully normal things you crave to do as being totally edgy, artistic, and non-conformist. Take some guidance from the masters: Attend a Tatort party. It’s the perfect blueprint of how elite German people take a mainstream thing they secretly crave, witlessly yet homogeneously change their attitude towards it, and call it the edgiest and most avant-garde thing ever. Attending a Tatort-Party means learning about the inner workings of the elite German mind.

So where do these elitists meet? Just walk around your trendy neighborhood on a Sunday evening. Tatort-Parties are usually held at “young” bars and cafes. Once you find a flock of German people wearing black, thick-rimmed glasses and T-Shirts with somewhat witty slogans, who are hanging out in a demonstratively relaxed “Sunday pose,” clutching on to bottles of ironic beer or Club Mate, while staring at a small, makeshift cinema screen, then congrats, you found a Tatort-Party. Enter and find a seat, then wait until the creepy, blatant staring at the new guy (you) ceases, then prepare yourself for the things to come by ordering the strongest coffee available. You’re just about to experience the longest 90 minutes of your life.

A new episode of Tatort is aired every Sunday. It is Germany’s longest running crime drama, a bit like a teutonic version of “Law & Order,” just a lot slower and less exciting. That’s the reason Tatort didn’t have a huge following among young Germans until about 10 years ago. 

In fact, Tatort is so slow, tedious, and deliberately low-key that one 1.5 hour episode feels like a whole day going by. Halfway into it, you’ll want to inject caffeine into your eyeballs just to make it through the next minute. In good German film-making tradition, everything about it feels painfully over-endeavored and every single character is stock beyond the worst stereotype. But that’s, like, sooo not the point, Auslander. German people love Tatort for its realism and dedication to pick up controversial topics and social developments to base its stilted plots on in a really contrived way.

Example: If someday, somewhere in Germany a guy who works at a bakery and whose day job is to make spongecake would kill another guy who makes, for example, danish pastry, then the producers of Tatort would waste no time to come up with an episode of Tatort which took a pretentious shot at „unmasking“ the immoral aspects of the spongecake business and „illuminating“ its „hidden dark side“. The spongecake chef would be borderline psychotic and overweight, and there would be long-winded shots of him in a white spongecake chef’s apron, wielding a palette knife in a sleazy, dark bakery back room, with the cameras slowly panning up from his palette knife-wielding hands, up and up, past his meaty chin, to finally reveal, to much “ooh” and “ahh”-ing on part of the Tatort party’s members, he wasn’t really making spongecake, but staring into nothingness with his totally crazy, murderous, psycho spongecake chef eyes, but the scene doesn’t stop, and we can hear, but never get to see, him stabbing at the cutting board in an increasingly aggressive way, all mounting in a wild crescendo of staring and stabbing, staring and stabbing, staring and…you get the idea, it’s an extremely powerful scene because of the things we don’t get to see.

Don’t blame that poor spongecake chef though. Because Tatort is at heart a very German show, each episode takes plenty of time exploring the „social conflicts“ and „circumstances“ that lead to a crime. Mirroring the German society, in Tatort, everybody is a victim. Even the detectives. That’s because German people love to come up with far-flung excuses for any wrongdoing that wasn’t committed by a well-off person, and go to great lengths to construct a theory which serves to blame all the usual things they fear or disapprove of: Capitalism, environmental pollution, and being identified as Germans when traveling.

In the above example, the spongecake chef’s murder would be explained by the brutal, dog-eat-dog world the spongecake making business has evolved into. There would be a huge, faceless, spongecake-making corporation that aims to rule the spongecake marketplace with cheaply made, but bland products, rendering life for the loveably privately kept, romantically small spongecake-shops extremely competitive and impersonal. The murderer’s deed would be explained by the unbearable fear of the future those evil capitalists brought to this simple, down-to-earth spongecake chef, yet, and this is very important, Tatort wouldn’t take all the guilt off him, leaving the audience at your Tatort-Party in an ambivalent state, resulting in statements like “I’m not exactly sure who’s to blame here, and I think nobody should jump to conclusions. All we can say is, capitalism brings out the worst in people, right? Right??”

When the Tatort is finally over, the Germans around you feel obliged to start an orderly debate discussing the “important questions asked„ by this Sunday’s Tatort. The majority of German people will agree that the evil, faceless pastry company should take 100% of the guilt. It is highly recommended for you to always join the anti-capitalist side of the argument and actively take part in this discussion to secure your role as a knowledgeable media commentator. Discussing a substantially boring, run-of-the-mill crime drama gives your German acquaintances the warm, fuzzy feeling of being critical, self-determined people who are aware of the dangers of blind media consumption, because they are way too intellectual to just watch TV for its entertainment value, which, in the case of Tatort, is close to zero.

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