Meet the Germans | Rory's Berlin Blog | Goethe-Institut

    Why does the property business attract charlatans?  From America’s Wild West to London’s West End, from bargain basement apartments in New Orleans (with sea view) to Shanghai’s inflated penthouses, realtors are universally abhorred.



    Germans – especially those living in urban areas -- tend not to buy their homes.  Only 11% of Berliners are owner-occupiers.  In part this is a legacy of the last war, when Allied bombing reduced all large cities to rubble.  Housing was rebuilt – often by the state -- with rents subsidised and kept-below market value.  As tenants’ rights are protected by law, and German property prices have performed none of aerobatics experienced by Brits, Americans and Canadians, the rental market is extremely attractive to the majority of Germans.  But as Europe’s most populous country (after Russia), finding a home here can be an expensive and nerve-wracking challenge.

Makler are real estate agents.  They work for property owners, find appropriate tenants, check credit ratings and collect the Kaution or security deposit.  Their finder’s fee usually amounts to three months’ rent, paid by the tenant.  Less scrupulous agents often charge an additional ‘service’ fee, payable in cash, or demand more than three months’ rent.  The practice is illegal but, say no to the Makler, and the tenant risks losing the property.

    Two years ago when we moved to Germany, Mrs. Cat found our rental apartment through Immobilien Scout 24, an excellent website used by Makler and private landlords alike.  Luckily for us, our Makler and the owner were lovers, sharing more than an office, so negotiations between us were conducted in the rosy-tinted light of new love.
    ‘You take the agent’s 3.5% fee, my love,’ said he.
    ‘No, Liebling.  It’s yours,’ she replied with a beatific smile.  ‘I am so happy to have found you these lovely tenants.’



    But no love has been lost between us and the Hausverwaltung, or property manager.  On the day we took possession of the apartment, I was driving a van full of our possessions across Europe.  Mrs. Cat, with then-six-year-old Maus in tow, had flown ahead to Berlin to collect the keys.    The property manager met them at the apartment and asked Mrs. Cat to sign the Wohnungsübergabe-Protokoll, which loosely translates as An Agreement to Surrender Your Deposit without Recourse to Legal Defence.  In essence the three page document confirmed that on a certain date at a certain time everything in the apartment was in Ordnung.

    Unfortunately on that day the apartment wasn’t in Ordnung.  The cooker was missing, the new woodwork had not been painted, the windows and doors were filthy, the shower cabinet was broken and there was no cellar storage area.  Also the backdoor bolt was jammed, there were oil stains on one wall and the keys to the bicycle shed didn’t work.
    ‘Sign here,’ demanded the Hausverwaltung.
    ‘But how can I sign with all these problems?’ asked Mrs. Cat.
    ‘In five minutes I begin my weekend,’ replied the Hausverwaltung.  ‘If you don’t sign you cannot have the keys until next week.’
    Cue my phone call from the A100 autobahn.  ‘I’ll arrive in 30 minutes.’  Cue crying Maus who had tripped over an unfinished threshold.  Cue Katrin’s signature.
    ‘I want you to remember the true condition of the apartment,’ Mrs. Cat said to the Hausverwaltung as she picked up her pen.  

    But Hausverwaltung have short memories.  In the two years since then I have written about 25 letters to them.  We had to pay for a new cooker, replace the shower cabinet and paint the woodwork ourselves.  We bought the missing keys from former tenants.  We still haven’t found the cellar.  Yet my barrage of correspondence has evoked only a solitary response.  It states that on a certain date at a certain time everything in the apartment was in Ordnung and that, on the day which we vacate the apartment, it must be restored to its original ‘pristine’ condition.

    The need for a home is emotional as well as practical, hence our tendency to pay over the odds for stability.  This phenomena is heightened in Germany, again because of history.  The traumas and radical reversals of fortune during the first half of the twentieth century increased many Germans' need for security.  For me, this helps to explain why property people can get away with such bad behaviour here.  So what’s the excuse for the property business Princes of Darkness in Britain and the US and China and...?

    Visitors to Germany often overlook the countryside, focusing instead on the richness of the cities.  Why bother with little Schierke (population: 950) and the Rübeland caves when one can have the towers of Frankfurt or underground Berlin?  But tourists who visit urban areas alone miss the greater part of the country.  Germany is vast, covering more than 350,000 square kilometres, 83% of which is still forested or farmed.  It boasts mountains and moors, glacial flats and wetlands, hundreds of miles of sandy beaches, 13 biosphere reserves and 104 nature and national parks.



    Mrs. Cat’s heart – like that of our 13-year-old Golden Retriever Tess – is in the countryside.  Over our first two years in Berlin we’re wheeled our bicycles deep into the Spreewald and around the Brandenburg lakes.  We’ve swum in the Havel, Müggelsee and Krumme Lanke.  We’ve sledded in Staaken.  We’ve ventured out of town to Heidelberg, Munich and Dresden.  But we’ve all but skipped rural Germany.  I can’t remember when I last saw a cow.

    So last week we rented a car and set out for the Great Outdoors.  We swept through bucolic Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, dipped our toes into the Mürnitz See, idled away an afternoon at Schwerin’s magnificent Schloss, and ended up Schleswig-Holstein, about 300 miles across the North Sea from Norfolk.  Our final destination was the ‘Holstein Switzerland’ nature park, a rural patchwork of lakes and forest, aristocratic estates and historic farms set in gently rolling landscape which once reminded someone of Switzerland.  We trekked along its nature park trails, built sandcastles and rented a Canadian canoe to explore the Großer Plöner See.

    But the high point of the holiday was rolling in the hay.  Heuhotel – or hay hotels -- are a new trend in Germany.  Across the country farmers are converting their barns and outlying buildings into communal, green accommodation. Visitors are offered beds of straw rather than duvets and linen, and find themselves snoozing alongside as many as a dozen fellow travellers.



    Mrs. Cat, our son Maus and Tess the Golden Retriever drove between fields of ripened corn to Hof Hainböst, one of Schleswig-Holstein’s original hay hotels.  In 1996 the farm’s owners, Achim and Anne Schütt, hit upon the idea of converting their barn into a country hostel.
    ‘I was a teacher at a school for handicapped children,’ Anne told me.  ‘My husband Achim was an educator at a young people’s care home.  When we bought the farm the cowshed was full of old machinery.  We cleared it out and – after a long period negotiating for planning permission – opened our HeuHotel.’
    At first Achim and Anne brought city children to the farm on day courses, allowing them to run free (under the supervision of other teachers).
    ‘We set no programme for the children, allowing them to find their way back into nature,’ she explained.
    In time adults also discovered the picturesque location, and began spending the night.  The Schütts then started to host weddings at the farm – with the newly-weds spending their nuptial night in the barn.
    ‘But usually without the other guests,’ Anne explained with a smile.

    We had arranged to meet British friends at the farm and – as soon as we arrived – the children fell out of the cars and started running.  They peered into chicken coops and rabbit hutches, chased long-necked geese into the pond and collected blackberries and eggs.  They didn’t stop moving or shouting even as they leaped into their sleeping bags.  Eventually they collapsed on the soft, clean hay.



    Hay hotels are especially popular with cyclists but luckily we had the barn to ourselves.  And despite worries that we would awake with backs in knots and nerves frayed, all enjoyed the finest night’s sleep in ages.  No bugs.  No allergic reactions.  And happy children (plus one ecstatic dog) crowding around the refectory tables eating a hearty country breakfast.



    Now back in Berlin our clothes and pillows smell of dry hay and fresh air.  These days there are hundreds of hay hotels across Germany.  I am a city-dweller, but after last week it won’t be long until Mrs. Cat and I (along with Maus and Tess) are rolling in the hay again.

    I am just back to Estonia, the tiny Baltic nation of sweeping seascapes, leggy blondes, heroic translators and impenetrable language (unless you happen to speak Finnish).   It’s a land of oily herring, delicious beer and tragic history, its population all but halved three times in the last five hundred years.  It’s also the home of the EEK – but for only twenty more weeks.



    My pocket is full of EEKs, or Estonian Kroon. The currency has been around since 1928, apart from the sad, hard years between 1940 and 1992 when it was replaced by the Soviet rouble.  But on 1 January 2011 this small-but-perfectly-formed Nordic currency will be replaced by the Euro.

    Now in Berlin I reach into my pocket and grasp a fistful of it, with its heroes, artists and peculiar denominations (like the explorer and naturalist Karl Ernst von Baer on the 2 krooni note, and author Anton Hansen Tammsaare on the 25 krooni).  As I don’t expect to visit Estonia again this year, and the currency will vanish in five months, my little hoard of jingling coins and crisp notes – which yesterday which would have bought me a side of smoked salmon or lifetime’s supply of the local herbal alcohol Vana Tallinn -- is in effect worthless.

    The dead weight in my pocket stirs memories of days before the Euro, when every European journey ended with the traveller sorting through a similar stash of odd coins.  Whither the Portuguese Escudo with its sailing barques and starry crests?  Or the Spanish Peseta with the head of young Juan Carlos?  Or indeed the bold, proud five Deutsche Mark coin, with its Seventies TV logo look?  Where are they now, this coinage of yesteryear?  In a big heavy box in my attic.



    In those days of yore, returning travellers like me sorted their coins into old yoghurt pots and pill containers, carefully labelled as Francs (Belgium) and Francs (French), then stuffed them into a kitchen drawer and promptly forgot about them.  I rarely remembered to dig them out on my next visit Bruges or Paris.  When the Euro was introduced in 1992, the old currencies remained legal tender for a time – but who was going to make a special trip to the Greek Central Bank in Athens to exchange 527 Drachmas (worth about €1.50 at the time)?  

    Yet as worthless as those Guilders and Schillings became, I could never throw out.  To do so seemed too arrogant, profligate, above all wasteful.  Men and women had laboured for them, carefully counting them out at the end of their working week.  Children had wrapped their small fingers around them, dropped them into piggybanks, exchanged them on Saturday mornings for sweets.  I was too much of a romantic to cast them into the rubbish.  Hence they have sat around for twenty years, tokens of quaint post-war European nationalism, which are now about to be joined by this handful of Estonian kroon.

    Britain may doubt the wisdom of joining the Euro, seeing the small respite in the steady decline of Sterling’s value as substantiating the argument for economic independence from its main trading partner.  But for an individual living in Europe, and travelling between Berlin, Paris and the Cyclades, the Euro is a joy – and a remarkable achievement.  It also means that my attic is less cluttered with metal tokens.

    So, what to do with these old coins? As a novelty some German Christmas markets still accept Deutsche Marks and I’ve heard that Finnish fisherman use old markka as weights for their lines.  But there must be millions and millions of these now-worthless cash tokens in Europe’s kitchen drawers and old briefcases.   Could they be donated to charity?  Or recycled as jewellery?  Or fashioned into simple Euro-eco batteries by squeezing saline-soaked blotting paper between them?  Or simply squashed one-by-one under the wheels of Brussels trams?  

    Or should they be kept in hand in case the Euro does implode?  In fact, given that man’s greatest enterprises eventually turn to dust, perhaps the wise Mandarins at the European Central Bank should anticipate that distant day, and reissue Euro coins with a hole in the middle (like the ancien French 5 centimes piece) so that, come the inevitable, the currency can provide enduring value as fishing weights and earrings.  Or perhaps you have a better idea?

    “The gravel crunched under our feet like the bones of small animals.  Winston the pet pig walked beside us with confidence and grace, springing lightly on his trotters, excitement in his eye.  He liked an adventure.  The Trabant, with its bug eyes and beige beetle body, resembled an awkward insect overlooked by evolution.  At any moment it might roll over and die.  The ‘go faster’ stripes were particularly incongruous.  A green rubber frog hung from the rear-view mirror.  
    My aged aunt Zita settled herself into the driver’s seat.  Her cardboard car for comrades spluttered to life and, miraculously, edged forward when she put it into gear.  Its instrumentation consisted of only a speedometer.  There was no fuel gauge.
    Winston had sat beside Harald amidst the luggage on the back seat.  
    ‘Wenn der Engel reist, gibt es gutes Wetter,’ Harald announced.  When the angel travels there is always good weather.  Then a cloud of blue two-stroke exhaust obscured our view.”



    I have a soft spot for the Trabant, one of communist East Germany’s most enduring icons.  My first book Stalin’s Nose, from which the above extract is reproduced, tells the story of a Trabbi-road trip from Berlin to Moscow in the spring of 1990, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  But as Der Spiegel reports this week, the icon’s numbers are dwindling.  Around the time of reunification there were a million of these hairdryers-on-wheels on Germany’s roads.  Today only about 35,000 of the wheezing vehicles remain – that’s a decrease of 95% in less than two decades.  Last year’s cash-for-clunkers program appears to have finally persuaded many owners to ditch their brand loyalty (the German government offered a €2,500 vehicle scrapping bonus to persuade people to buy new cars to boost the flagging economy).

    Back in 1990, as I wrote in Stalin’s Nose, en route to Moscow Zita and Harald concocted a plan to buy Trabants in the former East and sell them – for a quick profit – in the West.  Harald’s brother had the right connections as he was a bodywork foreman at Sachsenring Automobilwerk.     
    “‘You buy them cheaply from the factory and I’ll sell them on for Deutschmarks,’ Harald had said, gesturing at the car parked in the yard.  ‘Look at her; there’s beauty, there’s enduring design.’
    Zita’s Trabant had a haunted look as though any moment could be its last.
    Harald stroked an imaginary contour.  ‘Classic lines.  We used to have to wait as long as fourteen years for delivery, that made us appreciate her value, now no one here wants them and that suits us fine.’”

    After the fall of the Berlin Wall almost every driver in East Germany wanted a Western car.  Later – as Zita and Harald had predicted and Der Spiegel now reports -- the Trabbi with its fume-belching two-stroke engine became a cult item for hard-core auto enthusiasts -- and for those who had succumbed to Ostalgie, dubious nostalgia for life in communist East Germany.

    The Trabant also became the butt of many jokes, especially after former owners had bought a BMW.  For example, how do you double the value of your Trabant?  Fill up its petrol tank.  Or what do you call a Trabant on a mountain?  A miracle.  And finally, what device is used to measure the acceleration speed of a Trabant?  A calendar.

    Trabants have (probably) made the road journey from Berlin to Moscow but – as I write in the book – Zita’s vehicle didn’t get further than Romania.  On the outskirts of Bucharest, by the sulphur works, I had driven into a flooded pothole and the engine had stalled... 
    “It was Zita who had noticed the steam rising through the floor.  Winston the pig had squealed as the car began to sink.  We had scrambled out as the tarmac split open.  I’d passed out our bags as hot water swirled around my feet.  A crowd had gathered.  The road, already perforated with potholes, disintegrated and slowly, like a great liner going down in the Atlantic, the Trabant sank into the boiling whirlpool.  It disappeared from sight.  A huge heating culvert had fractured and the Trabbi was gone.”