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Welcome to the 2022 microcensus!
Photo: Getty Images
Do you belong to the select one percent of the population who have the right to help the state better understand its citizens?
yes congratulations
And welcome to the 2022 microcensus. This year, around 810,000 people were randomly asked to reveal themselves to the authorities.
My husband is one of them.
A while ago he was sent a long questionnaire intended to depict “the economic and social situation of households in Germany”.
In the days that followed, he picked it up from time to time, moaned audibly and put it down again.
I started to joke when I realized what we were dealing with: 260 questions on 84 pages.
Curiosity grabbed me.
The first time I stopped at question 10: "How many children did you have in total?"
How might a woman who has just lost a child feel and has to answer such questions?
Point 36 asks whether I have taken out a loan or mortgage on a house.
Then follow rental costs, additional costs, operating costs.
Don't forget: water!
Am I perhaps showering too often and possibly too long?
So sorry, Mr. Habeck.
And it goes on merrily: Who looks after my children?
An au pair?
The neighbor?
Is German spoken in the household?
Have I ever been abroad for a long time?
Does my father have German citizenship?
From question 90, the hat cord slowly bursts: Do you have an officially confirmed disability?
If you didn't work during the reference week, why not?
Illness for example, even rehab?
Full time, part time, if so why?
And as a self-employed person – how many clients?
Have you ever resigned - why?
Tick or pay
The questions for everyone who is unemployed are even more presumptuous: What did you do in the reporting week to stop being so?
Of course, I should also disclose my net income.
And finally a goodie: How is your health?
How limited are you?
This is information for which health insurers and employers would certainly like to make a few euros.
more on the subject
Low family income: Every fifth child in Germany is at risk of poverty
Baby boom in the pandemic: the birth rate in Germany has risen for the first time since 2017
Demographic change: How Germany has changedBy Marcel Pauly
"Make something up," I say to my husband.
My urge to lie has grown immeasurably in the face of the insolence of the authorities.
Alone: If the good citizen writes untruths about the most intimate details of his life, he can be fined or penalized according to §13 of the Microcensus Act and §15 of the Federal Statistics Act.
This also applies if he disposes of the questionnaire in the oven and refuses to fill it out.
Where is the protest?
We can't get out of the number, that alone is cheeky.
It is all the more astonishing that there is no noticeable resistance to the microcensus anywhere.
The Germans have evidently gotten used to questioning, the statistical benefit of which for adequate economic and socio-political planning is at least questionable.
Is the topic simply no longer relevant in times of war, energy crisis and political radicalization?
Long ago were the days when we protested the census.
At the beginning of the 1980s, critics went to the Federal Constitutional Court, which in 1983 made a groundbreaking decision for »informational self-determination« of the individual.
Citizens should know "who knows what about them, when and on what occasion," it was said at the time.
In principle, everyone would decide for themselves about the disclosure and use of personal data.
That was before the rise of the internet and social media.
Long before the responsible citizen began to leave his data to the world and the corporations without hesitation.
Compromising photos, audio recordings or videos, information about sexual preferences, shopping habits, hobbies.
Long before the majority surrendered to the algorithm, laid down their guns, at best worked on funny aliases for their accounts so as not to fail the application because of embarrassing party excesses.
track me, hack me
It has long been normal for young people to reveal a lot.
They can be tracked at will – corona apps, mobile phone location, all standard.
My daughter recently suggested to me that we could use a new application to locate each other, it would be useful if you lose your cell phone.
I was irritated to say the least.
There are worlds between their rather lax and my rather paranoid handling of personal data.
Perhaps she actually believes that the Federal Statistical Office "takes the legal data protection provisions very seriously" in the microcensus, as it claims.
That everything is finely anonymized and conclusions about individual persons are impossible.
That hacks and cyber attacks are the exception.
A lack of skepticism and a certain feeling of being at the mercy of not understanding technically complex relationships may have contributed to the fact that certain reports in connection with the "small" but also "large" census, the census, hardly cause any excitement.
Experts reported that anyone who filled out their questionnaire on the zensus2022.de website temporarily ran the risk of the integrated US service Cloudflare storing retrieval IP addresses.
The Federal Statistical Office apparently improved.
Such reports do not ensure increased trust in state-guaranteed anonymity.
However, the eagerness of the clerks at our responsible state statistical office is astounding.
That is, my husband wrote a letter just two days after he submitted the questionnaire.
In it, a Ms. Schürmann complains that he "did not answer individual questions completely or unequivocally."
There is a lack of "plausibility".
Now Frau Schürmann wants to talk to my husband.
On the phone.
Next, she might stop by for a coffee.
To say thank you for the "cooperative contribution".
Because it's not done all at once.
A household can be surveyed up to four times in five years as part of the microcensus.
That's many hours of precious lifetime, not counting the hassle.
If you can afford it, you should rather pay a fine than spend valuable time and nerves answering impertinent questions.
Or take legal action.
Everyone else has only one thing to do: move quickly.
