Dhe shackles of tormented humanity are made of foolscap paper, wrote Franz Kafka. The bureaucracy, then, all the paperwork in the truest sense of the word that has to be done if you want to live, live, work, go to the doctor, exist. Every newborn child in Germany is given a tax identification number as a welcome gift. A lot of things may seem a bit bizarre. Yes, a tax return is not pretty.
However, the local bureaucracy only becomes particularly adventurous when you experience it as a refugee – and want to open a bank account, for example. That’s what happened to my uncle when he came to Germany from Syria in 2014 and the bank didn’t want to accept his papers because, as is common in Syria, they had a fingerprint instead of a signature. Or my father, whose date of birth, 00/00/1959, caused confusion for years, because in Germany it was absolutely impossible to imagine that a stateless child of stateless illiterates was born in a remote Kurdish village in north-eastern Syria and nobody noted his date of birth. Yes, life is sometimes more cumbersome than the columns and boxes on the forms of German authorities allow.