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Programmer in Berlin: Culture

This is part 4 of a 5-part series detailing what I wish I had known as an American programmer moving to Berlin. This page details cultural differences and things I wasn’t aware of until I stumbled on them. Politics One thing about Germany, and Europe in general, is that it’s relatively left-wing when compared to the US. This is a place where universal healthcare is so commonly accepted that no party – not even the super-racist party! – is talking about removing it. The aforementioned super-racist party has effectively the same political platform as the mainstream Republican party in the US (minus the healthcare thing). Politics in Europe certainly has its own problems, but at least in Germany there is a flourishing multi-party system that allows for people to have some kind of choice when voting. There is even a fun website called the “Wahl-o-Mat” (“Vote-o-Matic”) that tells you which party to vote for after answering a series of questions. There’s also none of the Electoral College silliness, which I won’t get into here.

Brexit made this pretty clear from the right-wing side, but some on the left view the EU as some kind of banker’s club where Germany and France get to tell smaller countries what to do. In addition, you also have people who buzz past you at especially dangerous times (intersections when the light just turns green, right when a huge truck is passing centimeters away instead of just waiting a few seconds, the insanely narrow bike “lane” on the bridge at Warschauer Straße), and otherwise general weird behavior. I struggled for a while to remember which was which – 110 or 112 – until I saw a cheesy poster for a fire brigade’s recreational rowing team: “We give 112 percent!” It took me a second, like “oh god, 110% isn’t good enough?” followed by “oohhhhhh.”

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