We’re right at the cusp of what I’m calling my “silly season,” a two-week whirlwind tour of a series of European cities¹ bookended by larps on either end. Like most things, this was a series of perfectly reasonable decisions that evolved until it reached the current point of saturation.²

This is fine, a little stressful but nothing I’m unprepared to deal with. The key is getting in the right headspace, which is why I was planning on just relaxing in Berlin this week, seeing some movies, grabbing some comfort food, and in general not doing a lot.

And then all shipping hell broke loose, and I got into massive arguments about it on the internet, so I’m actually incredibly stressed out. C’est la guerre.

It’s weird. I like Berlin a lot, but I can’t really tell if I love it. It seems easy to me; I’ve visited enough to basically have the public transportation sorted, I know enough German to puzzle out most any untranslated menus here, and everyone is polite enough to switch to English³ without seeming put upon. The city seems orderly and tidy in a way that, say, London doesn’t.

And maybe that’s why I can’t tell how I feel about it. It’s comfortable. Flying in, this time, I just felt like things got a lot simpler. I’ve visited enough that I know my way around without putting nearly the effort into figuring out the way everything works.

Berlin is one of the cities I was considering moving to. Still is, once I stop moving around so much. But I know well you can live plenty of places without really wanting to be there — I suspect there are lots of people living in the suburbs that think “Eh, good enough” — and I’ve never been one to be happy with good enough. So for the moment I’ll keep passing through, a weekend at a time.

It’s good that Berlin is so comfortable, because I had a couple shipping disasters which had me incredibly stressed out.

The first was Amazon, which promised to deliver a package and failed three times.⁴ I had to give up. The second was Germany, which assessed a 50€ charge on a different package for — well, it’s not entirely clear what for. The shipping company claims this is a standard charge Germany slaps on most shipments. Some of the Germans I know think it’s just a mistake, that the charge doesn’t apply. But the notification doesn’t actually have any explanation of what it’s for, or why it was assessed, or how to dispute the charge.

I posted something snippy about it on Facebook, which quickly devolved into an argument over whether this was a reasonable charge or not. Which I realized pretty quickly goes back to some fundamental ideas about the relation of a government to the people.⁵

Germans love bureaucracy. I don’t mean that as an insult; bureaucracy is the cornerstone of a modern government. It’s a system of interlocking structures which clarify how and when things happen in an organization, what expectations the people interacting with it should have and the procedures for making requests of it. A good bureaucracy makes it easy and efficient to register to vote, or update your driver’s license, or pay your taxes, or any of the hundred other things being a citizen in a modern nation-state entails.

In modern countries, the opposite of a bureaucracy isn’t anarchy, it’s a different kind of bureaucracy. One where it’s not obvious who to talk to, or when forms are required to accomplish certain things. Where the structures in place serve to slow routine functions down to a crawl, and forms can be rejected for nonsensical, opaque reasons.⁶

Americans hate bureaucracy. There’s the (likely apocryphal) comment from a Soviet officer that “A serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.” Or take Reagan’s quote: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”⁷ The founding myth of the United States is that of the rugged individualist raging against a tyrannical government.

All governments exist in tension between these two ideas. It’s in the nature of organizations to grow, to assume more power and more functions over time. This eventually becomes a threat to freedom. But the solution isn’t doing away with it. There are critical, important functions that the government carries out. For every three-hour-long wait to update your car registration there’s likely several other programs that work quickly and effectively to make sure some critical function gets done.⁸

So half of the debate fell along these lines, whether a 50€ fee fell into the good part of running a modern administrative state or a bad one. I suppose that’s just fundamentally a difference of opinion, and ultimately depends on where it comes from and why it’s in place. Which, as I’ve said, I can’t even tell. And that brings us to an even more fundamental question underlying this argument.

All governments are coercive. They have to be. You don’t get to opt-out of the laws you disagree with. There’s a huge power imbalance between the government and those subject to its power — whether that’s its citizens, or tourists, or refugees. The government can have you arrested. It can throw you in prison, levy fines against you, even authorize deadly force against you.

What offsets this, in many ways, is a level of transparency. You can require the government to explain what it does, the reasoning behind it, and to justify itself to the people. In a democratic system, this gives the people an opportunity to change those policies they disagree with.⁹

The fee, in a lot of ways, violates this principle. It’s not just that the bill is in German, as is what limited information I can find online about it.¹⁰ It’s that there’s no obvious way to talk to anybody who can explain what’s going on. There should be some place I can go¹¹ online that lays out the reasons for the charge, what triggered it, what I can do in the future to avoid it. This notice has none of that. You can spend some indeterminate amount of time trying to figure out what provision of German importation law I’ve fallen afoul of, or you can just pay the damn thing and move on. It’s been paid.

I find myself thinking a lot about the relationship between a government and the people governed while traveling around.¹² And as any glance at the details of Brexit negotiations will reveal, governments are almost immeasurably vast and unfathomable. That confers a correspondingly vast and unfathomable amount of power. That’s basically inevitable. But it also means we should constantly demand better.

Next: Leśna to Berlin
Prev: Kyiv (IEV) to Berlin (SFX)

Footnotes

¹ London to Dublin to Hamburg to Berlin.

² I had signed up for College of Wizardry. A few months later The Forbidden History was announced, running two week later. A friend also signed up for The Forbidden History, and having found out they hadn’t been to Europe I suggested visiting someplace they had always wanted to see before the larp (especially since by now I had determined I would be overseas). They picked Dublin.

In scheduling travel, it ended up being simple to fly into London, so we added a couple days there. My brother casually mentioned Miniature World in Hamburg, which sounded silly enough to make a day for it. So here we are.

³ Which is inevitably far better than my ability to muddle through in German.

⁴ Apparently, if you want a package shipped to an Amazon Locker, even if you spend hours on the phone impressing on Amazon the critical importance of delivering a package on time, they might discover all the lockers are taken and just … fail to deliver. Twice.

⁵ So, yes, I was able to use an acrimonious online flamewar to clarify and elaborate why I was particularly bothered about it. I’m as surprised as you are.

⁶ I’m reminded of an essay I read where the author’s naturalization form in the United States was rejected after a number of years crawling through the system because they had filed out the form for minors, not adults. It was rejected when they were 18. They filled it out when they were 16.

⁷ This is a President saying that. Not arguing that government needs reforms, but that government needs elimination. You can trace a lot of the sickness of the modern conservative movement to this attitude, I think.

⁸ If you’re a fan of The West Wing you should probably read The Fifth Risk, which felt a lot to me like the “good government” walk-and-talks of that show, minus the interpersonal drama. It’s kind of a love letter to the usually nameless bureaucrats in the United States government who administer the funds and grants and department. Ever wonder what the Department of Energy does? This will tell you.

I read a criticism of the book that claimed it was one of these “The Deep State will save us from this horrible presidency” books, but I didn’t really see that — notably, Lewis interviewed all these amazing people who had left or were pushed out by the current administration, so it’s not exactly reassuring.

⁹ Note that lots of places extend the right to vote to non-citizens, including a surprising number of United States jurisdictions, at least until the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (whose sympathies should be obvious by the title alone).

¹⁰ Although that’s a part of it. It’s not that I expected information about it to be available in English, but a lot of different localities put a lot of effort into making public information accessible to those who don’t speak the local language. The United States doesn’t even have an official language.

There’s a pretty strong “English-Only” movement in the United States, founded on the principle of making legal interactions for immigrant groups more difficult and fraught, I suppose. That’s some people’s concept of a more ideal society, of course, but some people are comfortable having deportation proceedings against refugees conducted without translation services or even legal representation, so YMMV.

That deportation thing is totally a thing, by the way. They’re considered civil proceedings, not criminal ones, so the government is under no obligation to supply any help.

¹¹ Or, at least, a fluent German speaker could go

¹² What moral obligations nations have to their non-citizens (mostly meaning refugees) being a rather outsized element of political debates these days.