#415: Fewer tourists, big bonuses, the Wall memorial is wrong

The citizenship drama enters its final chapter

Aug 15, 2025

Morning y’all!

I’m back on the German citizenship express. I got stuck on whether to have my accountant audit my … accounts because I thought maybe I could feign having a real, actual job for the application but I’ve decided to just go above-board.

I’m sure he’ll bill me a ridiculous amount because that’s what all the service providers in my life seem to do best. But in return I get to vote and complain incessantly about the heat.

The Prüfungsbericht is the only thing standing in my way. I even got a note from the Finanzamt that I don’t owe them anything — I ordered it online (well, Elster) and it appeared within days. What Germany is this?

It’s almost like they want me to be German.

I’ll keep y’all up-to-date.

Have a good, hot weekend.

Andrew

PS: Apologies to podcast listeners and our guests at our live recording in July — we had some technical issues that led to a very poor quality recording that is … unlistenable. We’ll get it right next time. We also had some technical issues with out latest non-live recording, but AI saved us and it’s now available here: Podcast #17.

Less (or is it fewer?) tourists

Fewer foreign tourists came to Berlin in the first half of the year — 4.7% fewer, or a total of 2.1 million, after we attracted throngs in the same period last year with the European soccer championships, according to the Berlin-Brandenburg statistics office. Hopefully that also means fewer will decide to move here too. The figure is well below the 2.9 million partygoers that explored the Hauptstadt in the first half of 2019 before that pesky corona virus. While 2.1% more Americans visited Berlin in the first half, 22.8% fewer Dutch people came here and 6.1% fewer Brits. Soccer fans, innit. However, 3.9 million Germans visited their capital in the first six months, just 0.3% fewer.

No Recyclinghof for you!

You were thinking about putting that old mattress out on the street with a “Zu Verschenken” sign anyway. BSR, the state agency that collects our trash, has closed its recycling yards during the heatwave because they offer workers and visitors no protection from the blinding sun, according to Tagesspiegel. BSR has 14 yards throughout Berlin where you’re supposed to take bulky items and old electronics rather than setting them out on the street to rot (electronics don’t rot). They’re just large paved lots with trash containers and no shade.

Free money for cops

Do you get bonuses from your company? Berlin cops do. Our city-state last year doled about €15 million in performance bonuses to 15,000 of its 136,000 employees, according to Tagesspiegel. The bonuses are to “acknowledge exceptional efforts.” The lion’s share, or €5 million of the bonuses, went to Berlin police officers. By comparison, firefighters got just a total of €180,000.

🍺 🥨 Germany-wide news 🥨 🍺

👴 The Guardian is going after Merz

💩 … and the AfD is now the most popular party

🚄 Deutsche Bahn CEO ousted

🛫 1,300 Syrians have left Germany post-Assad

Factoid

The signs are lying to you. Photo: Yukiko Matsuoka via CC2.0

Those cobblestones marking the location of the Berlin Wall through Mauerpark are basically wrong, according to taz. Weird in a country so obsessed with precision. The cobbles show where the Wall was when it fell but it had only been there since August 1, 1988 after East and West Germany did a little land swap. The Wall had traditionally run along Schwedter Strasse (the cobblestone street that bisects eastern Berlin’s best park). In true Berlin fashion, the new anti-fascism barrier wasn’t even complete by the time it became obsolete — the construction equipment was then used to dismantle it. West Berlin got a chunk of Potsdamer Platz in exchange — what a lousy deal.

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