“In Munich, everything…and I mean EVERYTHING…is controlled,” quipped a German friend of mine earlier this week.
We were discussing the process of getting settled in Germany and the accompanying slew of bureaucratic obstacles over which successfully hurdling requires quite a bit of skill. You have to be an expert at waiting in lines, for example. And adept at sensing the secret day of the week and specific two-hour window that the office you are seeking is open. And you always have to be prepared to magically produce a pile of papers as tall as the Alps to prove you have been to the eighteen other offices that require visits before this particular place will provide the service that you, so desperately, need.
The size and style of Germany’s Bureaucracy is actually quite infamous. As a native Hamburger (someone from the city of Hamburg, not the greasy American delight), my friend is quite accustomed to it. She finds the obsession with checking tickets, IDs, documents and official stamps not the least bit strange.
Last night, as I sat down with the text for my history seminar “World War I Online”, her comments were far from my the forefront of my thoughts. I read about the change from an “analog” world of documentation “digitalized” one. Accessibility to books, papers, periodicals, documents, photos, sound clips, and videos is increasing exponentially. Indeed, one of the great questions this generation faces is what are the rolls of openness and accessibility in a world that’s characterized by the proliferation of digitalization and the massive expansion of the Internet.
I found my thoughts drifting, and suddenly I was back working in the stacks at Lauinger Library, remembering a conversation with my boss. Georgetown University is the last university in the district to keep its library open to the public, she had told me. Anyone, as long as they they can produce some sort of photo ID, is welcome to use the library free of charge, though they cannot check anything out. She maintained that other libraries had discontinued the practice due to security concerns regarding both staff and students, as well as the library’s collection itself.
How different, I thought, from the libraries I have recently visited in Munich. Both at the university’s libraries, and at the library of the State of Bavaria, patrons must be prepared to rent a locker and leave belongings, food and beverage behind, stuffing their study materials into clear plastic bags, before showing their special Library ID and passing through a security checkpoint in order to enter the area where the library’s collection is kept. Even then, libraries often require patrons to request materials in advance, refusing to let them browse the stacks themselves. And the ability to check books out? Not a guarantee.
Suddenly my friend’s words were echoing in my head – “In Munich, everything…and I mean EVERYTHING…is controlled” – including access to the vast stores of information housed in the expansive libraries.
Perhaps this strikes me as astounding because I come from a society and culture rather unaccustomed to this type of routine verification. Perhaps Georgetown’s insistence on the open access to their library has colored my view. But it certainly appears that many institutions in German society habituate the German people to routine verification to a much greater extent than their counterparts in the United States do. It not only explains the confused frustration I found spending over two weeks dancing the bureaucratic-verification Tango, but also illustrates why the Germans around me stood patiently in line, not the least bit perturbed. At a young age, they got used to it; now I need to do the same.
