I moved to Berlin. Turns out Germany is not all it’s cracked up to be

“I could definitely see myself living here.” This is the standard line of thinking from most Aussies who spend at least a week in Berlin during its dreamy summer months. I should know, as I actually did move here at the end of last year, after many prior visits to the German capital in which I fell absolutely head over heels for it.

There are plenty of reasons for this. Firstly, the city is full of lush, tall trees and you are never more than a five-minute walk from a park. The public transport system is such that at all hours of the morning, every day of the week, you will never wait longer than nine minutes for your next U-bahn. There’s the world-class nightclubs , the riverside beer gardens, the huge expanse of lakes and forest lands under an hour out of the city centre. What’s not to love?

This has been the line of thinking from many of my friends this year, as a steady drip-feed of Australians have passed through Berlin on their Euro summers. Their questions were surprisingly aligned: what clubs are good? How often do you go out? What shows have you seen? What countries have you visited?

The light goes out from their eyes when we tell them, well, we don’t really go out that much and we haven’t been on a holiday since we got here because the drinks here aren’t quite as cheap as you would imagine, and the days of a €50 ($80) flight to Milan are long gone thanks to soaring fuel prices. What my rose-tinted friends don’t seem to understand is the glaring distinction between living in Berlin and visiting Berlin.

A recent survey of expats ranked Germany as the second-worst country overall, from a list of 31 popular choices. It ranked dead last in the “expat essentials” category, which involves everything related to bureaucracy and digital services and, once you’ve lived here, the reasons for this become obvious.

Everything in Germany is paper-based – almost nothing digitised. That PIN code for your health insurance you got sent in the mail five months ago? Can’t find it? God help you: there is no digital back-up.

The economy is another factor that my city-hopping Aussie mates barely consider. Germany’s GDP has stagnated for the past seven years, which means unemployment is 6.4 per cent, compared with 4.5 per cent in Australia. That means there are 5.3 million unemployed Germans versus 1.2 million Aussies.

The lack of economic growth here means there just isn’t the economic buoyancy to create new roles for jobseekers. Trust me, it’s brutal. Especially as Berlin isn’t as cheap as it used to be.

Gone are the days of the indefinite lease on your €500/month charming, high-ceilinged Altbau apartment in Neukölln or some other trendy corner of the city – a fraction of what you’d pay in any other major capital. And you could probably stay there forever thanks to Germany’s secure rental contracts. Instead, rents have been soaring. In Berlin, they have jumped 77 per cent in the past decade, and by about 50 per cent across much of the country.

Yet, the biggest thing that will burst your I’d-love-to-live-here balloon is the lack of chit-chat. Germans are decidedly not up for it.