Your first Sunday here will teach you more about this country than any guidebook.
You walk to the supermarket and it’s shut. So is the next one, and the hardware store, and the shoe shop, and everything else with a till in it. The street is quiet in a way that feels almost staged.
Nothing has gone wrong. This is the arrangement, and once you stop fighting it, it turns into the best day of the week.
Saturday Is for Doing, Sunday Is for Nothing
Saturday carries the whole week’s backlog. The big shop, the recycling run, the thing on the balcony that has been wobbling since March.
Which is why the hardware store on a Saturday morning looks like a cup final. The working week has ended, the drilling can finally start, and there’s a strong argument that the Baumarkt is where we German men go to play. Aisles of screws sorted by length, and a coffee machine at the entrance. ;-)
Then Sunday arrives and the country switches off.
Some bakeries open for a few hours in the morning, because bread rolls are not negotiable. Petrol stations and shops inside main railway stations stay open, which is where everybody who forgot something ends up. Restaurants, cafes, and cinemas run as normal, and so do museums and swimming pools.
What closes is retail. Plan the week around that once and you’ll never think about it again.
What people do instead is the part worth copying. A long walk, ideally in a forest. Coffee and cake in the afternoon, which is a fixed institution rather than a snack. A visit to relatives, or a day trip that starts late and ends early.
Nobody expects anything from you on a Sunday. That is the whole point of it.
Public holidays work the same way, and there are more of them in the Catholic south than in the Protestant north. Which ones apply where is on German holidays.
Quiet Is Something People Share
We Germans want peace at home, and we want it seriously. This is the cultural trait that catches newcomers hardest, and it’s also the one that pays them back fastest.
Most buildings observe a Ruhezeit, a quiet period, overnight and all day Sunday. Some regions add one over lunch. During those hours you keep the noise down: no drilling, no hammering, no lawnmower, no bass through the floor.
Read it the other way round, though. It means you can sleep. It means the flat above you won’t throw a party on a Tuesday night. More than half the population rents, and thin walls are as common here as anywhere. So the quiet is worth a great deal, and everybody guards it because everybody benefits.
The other household habits take about a week to learn. Waste gets separated into paper, packaging, and organic. Glass goes by color, and everything else goes in the last bin. Bottles and cans carry a deposit, the Pfand, which you get back at a machine in any supermarket. Leaving them in the bin means throwing away money, and somebody else will collect it if you don’t.
None of it is complicated. It’s just unfamiliar, and the neighbors will tell you if you get it wrong.
There’s a Club for That
Now the single most useful thing on this page.
Whatever you do with your spare time, there is a Verein for it. Not just football and tennis. Choirs and brass bands. Carnival societies, allotment associations, model railways. Rabbit breeding, historical fencing, amateur radio. Chess and hiking, shooting and beekeeping, the volunteer fire brigade. If a hobby exists, somebody here has founded a registered association around it and elected a treasurer.
Sport alone runs to around 86,000 clubs holding some 29 million memberships, in a country of roughly 84 million people. Add the gyms. Close to one person in seven trains at one, and more than one in five of working age. Organized exercise is part of the ordinary week for a very large slice of the population.
That’s the bit outsiders underestimate. The club is not a leisure option here. For millions of people it’s a fixed evening in the week, the same faces every Thursday, for thirty years.
Which makes it the door. Somebody new in a city will find more contact in four weeks at a club than in a year at the supermarket checkout. Turn up, say you’d like to try it, and somebody will hand you a form and a beer.
It’s also where the formal address quietly disappears. We Germans use a polite form and a familiar form, and the switch between them is a small ceremony. Inside most clubs everybody uses the familiar one from the first evening, whatever their age or job. German phrases covers how the two forms work.
One more thing about the people you’ll meet there. What sounds blunt is rarely meant as rude. A German who tells you your idea has a flaw is engaging with the idea, and would consider polite vagueness the less respectful option. It stops feeling harsh after a few months, and then the alternative starts to feel evasive. ;-)
Things That Still Catch People Out
Cash held on here far longer than elsewhere, and the reputation lingers. The reality has shifted fast. Cards work almost everywhere now, phones work in most places, and the bakery that only takes coins has become the exception rather than the rule. Carry a note anyway for the market stall and the small restaurant.
Every household pays a broadcasting fee. It funds public radio and television, and it’s charged per dwelling rather than per person or per device. The bill arrives whether or not you own a television. Register when you move in, because the letters find you regardless.
Appointments run the rest of it. Public offices work by appointment and the slots go weeks ahead. A plumber may quote you a date in six weeks and mean it. Doctors, hairdressers, the workshop for the winter tires: book early, put it in a calendar, and show up.
And be on time. Ten minutes late to a private dinner is accepted. Ten minutes late to anything with a professional on the other side is a problem, thus arriving five minutes early is the safe default.
The culture underneath all these habits, and why so little of it looks the same from one region to the next, sits on German culture. The practical side of settling in is on living in Germany.