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"Please note the timetable notice": It's good that there are electronic displays in Berlin for this information
Photo: Sascha Lobo
In the hyper-controversial 21st century there are not many topics that promise the greatest unity in Germany, but the Berlin city abuse is one of them.
Because the city doesn't work, still not, not always.
“Failed State Berlin” has even become its own political and media genre, with the iconic airport debacle as its mascot.
There are no civil registration appointments, broken things are not repaired, road construction sites are progressing at the speed of continental drift, nobody is responsible for anything, the city's most important means of transport, the S-Bahn, has been running irregularly or not at all for years, birth certificates take two months with luck There is no child benefit beforehand if the maternity hospital is in a different district than the residential district, because, no joke, the districts are not networked with each other. My favorite photo of dysfunctional Berlin is a digital real-time display for tram stops. Everywhere on the planet it says when which train is coming next, which has finally done away with the printed timetable. In Berlin, the advertisement regularly reads: »Please note the timetable notice«.
Most of the time, the "Red Berlin" is shot from a conservative direction, an easy target.
But the question of why exactly Berlin is the way it is is irritatingly seldom asked and answered even more rarely.
For that you have to drill deeper.
The election of the Berlin state parliament offers itself as a starting point, the latest evidence of the spectacular ruin.
The »Tagesspiegel« tried in its brilliant newsletter Checkpoint to sort the various election fiasco.
It's not easy because there are literally hundreds of points of failure, here is a selection:
In an electoral district in Reinickendorf, 2,146 votes were cast in the referendum that was taking place at the same time.
With 1,382 eligible voters there, this results in a voter turnout of 150 percent.
In 17 electoral districts the turnout was over 100 percent, in one postal voting district in Tempelhof-Schöneberg even 159 percent - a world record!
In Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, all 22 electoral districts reported the exact same, preliminary official final result.
The reasoning is even more grotesque than the fact itself: the figures were estimated because those responsible "could not be reached".
In individual polling stations, the number of invalid votes was up to 70 percent - because the wrong ballot papers were displayed.
And wrong ballot papers must be counted as invalid.
This last point traces the reasons for Berlin as an administrative failure that has become urban. Wrong ballot papers were on display because the boxes with the ballot papers had been labeled incorrectly, as the »Tagesspiegel« found out. Namely from the printer or the service provider that the printer had commissioned to pack the ballot papers. The wrong labeling was already noticed in August, but by then a large part of the ballot papers had already been delivered to the electoral districts. The regional return office reacted immediately - haha, of course not. She just sent an official supplementary sheet afterwards. With the request to check the ballot papers. What could have worked at most on a random basis with pallets and non-pallets, if at all. There were five ballot papers per person in Berlin. With 2,470,693 eligible voters and the practice,Printing around 130 percent of the maximum number of ballot papers required in all cases resulted in a rough estimate of fifteen million papers.
Why can't a bug noticed in mid-August not be corrected until the end of September?
A Berlin legend is the next step in the search for traces of the origins, because there is an organizational peculiarity in Berlin: no-man's responsibility, the bureaucratic equivalent of no-man's land.
Nobody is responsible for a surprising number of things in Berlin.
But what doesn’t prevent anyone from passing the responsibility or blame on.
Just a functional skeleton around an organizational vacuum
A sentence from an insider report on the election debacle in the postal voting documents (yes, that didn't work either) concretizes the trace: »The postal voting documents are packed manually by temporary workers and then handed over to PIN AG. With almost a million requested documents, errors occur in piecework. In 30 years the state of Berlin has not been able to replace this work with a reliable machine. «Incidentally, there were already problems with PIN AG in elections in 2016, 2017 and 2019. But the state of Berlin stipulates the service provider because of a framework agreement, so the administration is not allowed to hire anyone else.
Temporary workers, PIN AG, 30 years of no progress, constant failure - slowly the core is peeling off. No-man's responsibility in administration, like the many other dysfunctionalities, must be viewed as a symptom. This is how people react who are overwhelmed, poorly trained or feel left alone. Most of the administrative grotesques in the city of Berlin have arisen or been favored by the overburdening of employees and unrealistic over-bureaucracy.
Berlin was saved to pieces or, better still, saved to pieces. It didn't work too much before. Nothing has been invested for years. Not in digitization, not in further education, not in competent personnel, not in anything. So many positions have not been filled for decades, in some cases, that it is often only possible to maintain a functional framework around an organizational vacuum. The judiciary is therefore in ruins. The Berlin Supreme Court was largely out of action for months because of a Trojan. Some of its software was over 20 years old. Fifteen years ago, the Berlin public prosecutor's office had 22 economic officers, i.e. people who could recognize and understand the complex financial structures of organized crime. Today there are still 8 economic consultants,three of which are permanently on sick leave.
The breakdown - in which the red-red Senate played a significant part from the beginning of the millennium with a finance senator named Thilo Sarrazin - was always justified by the city's gigantic debts: around 60 billion euros. Per capita that is less than in Hamburg. But in Berlin over 50 percent of the population live wholly or partially on state payments such as Hartz IV, unemployment benefit I, pension, BAföG or other subsidies and support. Berlin's social weakness goes hand in hand with its economic weakness. It is beginning to change due to the start-up boom and the effects of the capital city, the city smells of new beginnings - but the economic saturation that has grown over decades is still having an effect. For 2017, the German Institute for Economics calculatedhow the per capita economic output changes in different countries if you take the capital out of the equation. Greece without Athens fell by almost 20 percent per capita, France without Paris by almost 16 percent and Austria without Vienna still by around 5 percent. Germany seems to be the only country in the world whose economic strength per capita increases when you factor out the capital. Therefore, Berlin could not economize itself out of debt for years - and should save radically.if you take the capital out of the equation. Therefore, Berlin could not economize itself out of debt for years - and should save radically.if you take the capital out of the equation. Therefore, Berlin could not economize itself out of debt for years - and should save radically.
The black zero, i.e. the savings dictate of the debt brake, decreed by the Federal Government of Merkel, bears a considerable share of responsibility for the broken saving. The fact that the draconian austerity regime became so effective was mainly due to the city's high debt compared to its income. And the main reason for this debt, in turn, can be traced back to the 1990s. In 1991 Berlin had only a little more than 11 billion euros in debt; in 2002 the number had risen to over 47.5 billion euros. Various federal governments suggested that Berlin would have managed poorly. That is right and wrong at the same time, but a little more wrong than right and outrageous at the same time. The Berlin mountain of debt was provoked by the federal government.
As a front-line city during the Cold War, West Berlin had an important symbolic effect. Which is why the city was more than kept alive, despite its isolation. In a sense, they were showered with money. There was the so-called Berlin allowance for people who had to work in West Berlin (there weren't that many even then), there were ludicrous subsidies and an additional budget on top of that. In 1989 West Berlin was financed 24.1 percent from taxes - and 55.6 percent from federal funds. In East Berlin it looked similar in a completely different way, because East Berlin was an unproductive bureaucratic city with hundreds of thousands of administrative and official employees and, in a broader sense, state employees.
Then came Helmut Kohl.
He and his federal governments at the time laid the foundation for the gigantic debt.
Presumably he wanted to teach the city a lesson, there is hardly any other explanation for the fact that all grants for Berlin were dismantled at a breathtaking pace.
But when money flows automatically over decades, structures develop that cannot be dismantled overnight.
The gigantic debts can be seen as a result of Kohl's condescension towards Berlin, but at least as a result of an unmanageable radical diet immediately after German reunification.
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Sascha Lobo
Reality shock: ten lessons from the present
Published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Number of pages: 400 pages
Published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch
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But why do so many other cities also have large debts - and still work, at least better than Berlin? The answer, surprisingly, lies in Berlin's greatest strength. Without a doubt, the city is home to the avant-garde, creativity and contemporary bohemian. And that in turn is primarily due to a human and creatively fantastic quality of this city: Nowhere is it easier and less bad to lose, to spoil, to become boggy. Berlin forgives any failure, which is why people here dare to undertake more absurd, fun, megalomaniac projects. Even with maximum failure in Berlin you are just one bang-bang out of hundreds of thousands, which alleviates the pain of failure.
John Steinbeck said poor Americans see themselves not as exploited proletariat but as temporarily prevented millionaires.
In Berlin you are not unsuccessful, but have been on the verge of a breakthrough for a long time.
This is great for art, culture, entertainment, the digital sphere and society.
But the attitude that it's not that bad if you screw something up, that somehow it doesn't matter a lot more than you think in the rest of the country - that kind of rubs off.
It wafts through the streets and penetrates through the cracks of the administrative buildings in need of renovation into the heads of those responsible and those responsible for nobody.
State political non-swimmer pool
Klaus Wowereit has just claimed that the Berlin administration is so bad because the districts have so much power and the Senate does not. This is little more than a self-exemption from the man who ruled this city from 2001 to 2014. And its short-sightedness and government ineptitude can be well measured in the incredible BER airport story - written down here in 2017 by SPIEGEL in a really terrific way. It is precisely this Berlin polithybris that arises when the mania for savings, administrative sausage and artist attitude collide. If one believes or hopes that the laws of glam have any meaning in setting up a functioning administration. Or organize an election.
Therefore, across all parties, Berlin state politics has for decades been more provincial, ludicrous and meaningless than the state politics of all other federal states.
Despite great competition.
That is why Berlin’s Franziska Giffey have forgiven their misconduct, or rather ignored them - because as a national politician who is close to the population and capable of talk shows, she seems like the only adult in the state's political non-swimmer pool in Berlin.
Most would rather be ruled by promotional cheating professionals than not be ruled.
The Berlin Senate has simply been too often and too long an NGO, a non-governmental organization, in the last few decades.
But with the new, old red-red-green Senate, everything will be all right.
Certainly.