The Auslander

De Rerum Exrementa or On the Nature of Crap

An Essential Primer on The Disposal of Trash in Germany

Section One- On the Past Grubbiness of Germans, and their Later Reformation

In the 16^th Century so illustrious a personage as Erasmus himself berated German innkeepers for being  ill-mannered, ill-tempered, lazy, and above all, unspeakably filthy.

When you have taken care of your horse you come into the stove room, boots, baggage, mud and all… You pull off your boots, put on your shoes, and if you will, change your shirt… There one combs his head, another belches garlic, and there is as great a confusion of tongues as at the building of the tower of Babel.  In my opinion nothing is more dangerous than for so many to draw in the same vapour… not to mention the farting, the stinking breaths.. without a doubt many have the Spanish or, as it is called, the French, pox- though it is common to all nations.

German manners, as far as cleanliness goes, have improved greatly since the reformation, although one can hardly credit this to Protestantism, as today the German catholic as well as the evangelical are likely to be obsessed (with certain curious exceptions) with personal and social hygiene.  Germans approach cleanliness with the zeal of converts, and rival Torquemada in their vigorous interpretation of a harsh and categorical faith.

Dirtiness, and trash in general, is a very serious subject here.  Far too serious to make a joke out of, if you are German.  Fortunately, I am not German, and so am at greater liberty in this respect.

Section Two- Theological Schools of Thought Pertaining to Refuse

Much as in Erasmus’ time, when much of Christendom was divided into monists, who thought that truth was one,  and pluralists, who thought that truth was many (University students being mostly armed to the teeth at the time, they tended to get drunk and kill each other over this question, so it must have been meaningful to someone) so is the world similarly divided into those who parse, analyze, dissect, vivisect, and otherwise get far too involved in the disposal of their garbage (known as Europeans) and those who just throw it away (essentially the rest of the world).

In the United States, to be fair, we generate an enormous amount of trash- in the form of paper, bottles, empty soft drink containers, cigarette packs, you name it, we make it- all the detritus of postmodern civilization (some of the residents of my home state might also be referred to as white trash, but strictly speaking, this does not fall under the purview of the discussion here.)  We don’t think about it, or classify it, we just throw it away.  This is because we are dirty heathens who don’t know any better.

This is not the case in Germany, where trash is not something to be merely, as it were, swept under the rug; viz, the definition of trash itself:

“Under waste and/or garbage (Swiss also: Kehricht, Austrian also: Muck) one does not understand any more necessary remnants in the solid state, which includes liquids and gases in containers. Chemical arrears are called also waste materials.”

I am entirely uncertain as to what “chemical arrears” might be, but it sounds awful. Please note that within the German speaking world even the word for “Trash” is contentious.  Additionally,

“Waste can designate also wrong material at the wrong time at the wrong place.”

That statement certainly bodes ill for me, as I am often in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I will spare you the recitation of the official German guides for what constitutes trash, and how one is to dispose of it, as this is written in the most complex language (the sort of thing that drives undergrads studying Kant to suicide) and is surpassed in volume only by the Babylonian Talmud and is no less concise.

Section Three- On the Nature of Trash, its Origins, and its Constituent Parts

After weeks of careful study, I have determined that the following types of refuse exist in Germany:

“Yellow Sack Trash” -

This is the sort of trash that consists of metal (such as cans), plastic if it isn’t one of those bottles with a deposit (which is one out of a hundred bottles, but you still need to know which one), wax paper that is more wax than paper, but not wax paper that is only a little bit waxy, paper like stuff that isn’t paper, essentially anything that doesn’t get defined as another sort of trash.  You can identify this by a ridiculously small triangle that may or may not be printed on the material.  This is called “Yellow Sack” trash because it is put in a small yellow sack- said sack being translucent so that the neighbors can examine it and inform the authorities if you have unwisely placed paper in the yellow sack that isn’t sufficiently waxy; whereupon you will be fined. Don’t worry, they will first ring your doorbell and berate you for not understanding that the paper that encloses frozen fish sticks is entirely unlike, obviously, the paper that frozen fish comes wrapped in.

“Paper”-

This goes in special plastic bins.  “Paper” should be obvious, unless, of course, wax comes into play, or any other substance that might be interpreted as waxlike- i.e. modern coatings.  Just as building a fence around the Torah requires endless argumentation and guaranteed lifetime employment for rabbinical sages, so does the definition of “coating” and “paper” and “paper coating” employ a veritable army of jurists, environmental technicians, and (as always) inspectors. The maintenance of this bureaucracy necessitates that your income taxes hover around 50%, insuring your inability to consume much of anything that might later become trash.  Now do you see the perverted genius of the system?

“Biotonne”-

This word has no direct translation into English, although if one were to attempt to make one, one might translate it as “Stank-Goo.”  If it can rot, it is biotonne, unless it is hair or nails, or bones or eggshells, more about which later.  That bit of radish is biotonne, as are animal corpses (i.e. Chicken bits).

The corpses of Humans and Family pets I am unsure about.  Usually fastidious Germans tend to leave a pile of rotting veggies and chicken fat remainders on the counter, until one can transport them to the apartment’s courtyard and deposit them into the big brown biotonne container.  “Why don’t they put that stuff in a plastic sack?” you might ask yourself.  Clearly, you have not been paying attention and are a very bad person.  Your neighbors have taken note of this and, doubtless, there is a fine for moral turpitude of this severity.   If you put a plastic sack full of rotting biomatter into the Biotonne container, you have introduced and element (the sack) which obviously belongs in trash category 1- “Yellow Sack.” Thus you must fill the brown biotonne container directly, with the aforementioned rotting material.  This container is also filled with all the biotonne stuff from the rest of the apartments in your building, and is picked up once every two weeks.  I would not advise spending a great deal of time next to the Biotonne container during, say, the month of August.  Still, never fear- the authorities have thoughtfully equipped the biotonne container with vents, which allow the gases and compost odor to dissipate, preventing the danger of explosion.  Occasionally, however, the biotonne does give off ghostly flares of light under the silvery moonshine.  This can be quite pretty, if you aren’t close enough to smell it.

“Restmüll”-

This is the final, and most mysterious of categories of trash.  “Restmüll” literally means “all other trash not covered under categories 1-3.”  You thought this was what went into the yellow sack, didn’t you?  Poor Acolyte, do you not realize that Samsara is Nirvana?  What was I saying?  Oh yes.  “Restmüll”, or “remainder garbage” is really a sort of negative category  Just as the great sage Rabbeinu Bachya tells us in his Hovot ha-Levavot, written in while exile in Europe (like myself) that one cannot describe with authority what God is¸only, rather, what he is not, restmüll is defined by negation.  Restmüll is what it isn’t, so to speak.  This is only confusing to you if you are not German.  Restmüll is not recyclable, that is yellow-sack.  It is not paper (unless it is, see above). It is not biodegradable, although it may stink (think cigarette butts).  It is etwas ganz anders. It is the great other- that cloud of unknowing into which all inconceivable garbage must be thrown.  The official rules for restmüll give very few concrete examples; those that they do give are fingernail clippings, “horn” (?) and hair.  Perhaps this includes the family pet as well, but I would consult with a lawyer first.

Easy, isn’t it?  Not really.  Consider this; you have just finished smoking the last cigarette of that 5 euro (that’s like “$42.50 in US dollars) pack of rancid Turkish cancer sticks that you bought last week.  What shall you do with it?  What type of trash is it?

Section Four- Empirical Considerations of Praxis regarding Refuse (i.e. how to actually throw it away)

The Nominalists would say that the cigarette pack is Restmüll. (except for a small heterodox cabal of stinking heretics who claim that it is yellow-sack, but these are confined, as always, principally to the Saarland).  Clearly it is not biotonne, as it does not biodegrade.  It is paper, but not enough to be paper. Therefore, as it is clearly easier to say what it is not, rather than what it is, it must be restmüll.

“Not so!” say the pluralists.  “For just as the man in Plato’s cave grasped only at the parts of the elephant’s shadow, one thinking it a Volkswagen and the others a mouse, so you have failed to see the cigarette pack as it is, noumenally speaking- to wit, a collection or intersection of various properties.” The cigarette carton, so this school of philosophy holds, is better thought of as complex trash rather than simple trash.  The plastic wrapper around it is clearly yellow-sack.  The cardboard-like stiff paper is paper (cardboard is paper but wax paper isn’t), and the foil coated paper inner lining, not being paper, is restmüll.  Thus the cigarette pack must be disassembled into its various parts, and each part then consigned to the appropriate receptacle.

Conclusion

Ultimately it all boils down to this. In order to throw your pack of cigarettes away you have to spend a few minutes analyzing it, and then determine whether it is one thing or many things.  You must then determine what sort of thing/things this thing is, and then you must actually throw the thing away.  This can take upwards of 10 minutes.  So what? You ask.  Well, not only must you do this for the pack of cigarettes; but for you coffee filter (paper or biotonne?), for the sugar package you poured into your coffee (what is the nature of the interior of the sugar packet, is it coated, if so, with what?), for every single thing that you use or consume in any way. It is discouraging the way reading Kafka is discouraging.  Like much in this society, it ultimately leads to paralysis and despair.

However, it is great for a diet.  You are much less inclined to eat that candy bar when it turns out to be so little pleasure, for so much work.

Would You Like a Kitchen with That?

“The Mothership”, as we shall hereafter refer to my Bebezinho’s employer, is a giant German multinational. The biggest of the big. It is so huge t has a factory on the Rhine that is larger than my hometown. For legal reasons (actually, because I don’t know the laws of Germany but I am quite sure they are inflexible, severe, and exceedingly just) I will not disclose the name of the Mothership. Suffice it to say that it is large, German, and thorough.

It approaches the transfers of international workers in the same way. When Bebezinho’s employer (let’s just call her BBZ, it’s easier than typing that out all the time) plucked like an overripe fruit from the wilderness of the Americas, they arranged everything. They bought our house in Jersey City. They set us up with a temporary apartment in Ludwigshafen. They arranged a Patin, or a “Godmother” for us, a woman who would essentially help us navigate the diffuclt patches of our move to Germany. She helped me get my green card. She set us up with health insurance. She helped us look for a house. This was when I knew that things were going to be far stranger than anticipated.

“OK” she asked me at our first meeting. “What exactly are you looking for, ana apartment or a house?”

“I think an apartment.”

“OK. how many bedrooms?”

“Uh, at least two.”

“Ja. Gut. And with a kitchen or without a kitchen?”

“….Huh?”

“Do you want an apartment with a kitchen or without a kitchen.”

“Well, with a kitchen, I guess.”

“That will cost more money.”

“Well I suppose so, but, well, you have to cook, don’t you?”

“You can bring your own kitchen.”

I’m sitting there imagining bolting a kitchen on some sort of platform to the exterior of the apartment when I realize that it has finally happened. I have run up against my first case of linguistic bafflement. Clearly we are not on the same wavelength here. “What exactly do you mean when you ask me if I want a Kitchen” I ask.

It turns out that Germans, when renting an apartment, bring everything with them when they show up, and take everything with them when they leave- including everything in the Kitchen. And I mean everything. Inexorably, when I tell my American friends about this, they ask me “Do you mean they, like, take the stove and stuff?” No. I mean they take everything. The stove. The refrigerator. The cooking range. The sink. Even the countertops. When you walk into a german apartment, the Kitchen is simply a giant, stark, white room with a pipe sticking out of the wall (where you hook up the sink) and a cable sticking out of the wall (where you hook up the stove). That’s it. That’s all, folks.

And it’s not just the kitchen. The first place I saw I assumed had been looted or something. Although the looters had left a remarkeably nice wooden parquet floor behind, and had thoughtfully repainted the apartment a stark and beautiful white whilst patching and resurfacing the masonry German looters would do that, I suppose, as Germans are in the main rather polite (with notable exceptions we’ll get into later). Not only was the kitchen entirely bare, but the apartments usually lack even light fixtures. Wires dangle from the ceiling where lights would usually be. I assumed they were not live wires, but thought it best not to test that theory. Some places have light switched, others don’t.

Also, built in closets do not apparently exist in Germany. It’s true that Germans do spend a great deal of time naked in public (more on that later) but I have seen them with clothes on, so they must have semewhere to put them. They buy giant freestanding closets that they push up against the walls.

Walls which, by the way, are made of concrete. If you want to hang a picture, then you need a masonry drill. but don’t make noise before 9 AM! And definitely not on Sunday. Also, I’ve been told that you shouldn’t make noise between 1 PM and 3 PM, but I’m not sure exactly why. Germans certainly aren’t the sort to take a siesta.

Fortunately the kitchen issue can be solved with a trip to Ikea or MediaMarkt. Ikea has a whole department devoted entirely to selling you modular kitchen elements like cabinets, sinks, and counters. The sizes of such things as stoves and ranges are standardized, so you can mix and match between companies. You can even have an espresso machine built in to your cabinets. As always, these devices from Siemens or Bosch are exquisitely made, and terribly expensive.

I’ve lived in Europe before, right after BBZ and I got married, so I though I had this whole thing down. The concrete walls I was expecting. Since most of the problems with renting a place in Portugal had to do with my size (like special ordering a bed that my feet wouldn’t hang off of) I figured that this would be easier as Germans aren’t small folks. But this is a whole new set of issues.

So, on the 15th, we will be moving into our brand new, totally empty apartment. I will be wiring lights (this may be my last post) and we will have some “engineers” ,as the landlord put it, assist us with the installation of our new Ikea kitchen. Whcih should arrive in about 6 weeks. So I guess it’s bread and water until then.

Still, it could be worse. At least we have a toilet!

How did it come to this?

Hi,

My name is Ryan. I was once a nice young Tennessee boy with a bright future, but I fell in with the wrong crowd. It started out small, like all addictions do. I took Spanish language in middle school. In high school, I moved up to the hard stuff- Spanish itself isn’t so bad, but it is a gateway to things like German. At the tender age of 14 I was introduced to Duetsch Huete, a textbook featuring main characters name Udo and Heike, both of whom were sporting huge afros and bellbottoms, and extolling the utility of German because you could speak it in 5 countries; West Germany, East Germany, Austria, Switzerland and, as always, Lichtenstein- a small country named for an ancient tribe whose religious rituals centered around the licking of giant stone monoliths. This should have been a clear warning, but I was blind.

I consoled myself with two things; my German teacher, despite teaching German for 26 years, had as far as we know never actually left Tennessee, and I wasn’t as crazy as those kids who were hooked on the Latin- you would see them sometimes down by Church Circle in Kingsport, Tennessee. Looking all scraggly, burdened with hideous facial tics, “two dollars man! All I need is two dollars to get me a new wheelock’s!” Driven to the edge of madness by their need to figure out what, exactly, the ablative case was, I told myself I would never let it get that bad.

I knew when to stop. I would never get that foreign. No way man. As soon as I got to college I was going to quit. Study engineering. Marry a nice corn fed girl. Settle down and work for the Eastman.

But in college, I only got deeper into the foreigness. I took, against my better judgement, a class in pre-war German Film. I couldn’t stop. I took another class in port-war German film. I got back into German classes. The downward spiral had begun.

After several years, I found myself in a flop house in Prague. Surrounded by Godless Canadians and worse. And finally, the nail in my coffin.

Every time your child studies a foreign language, watches the BBC, reads the economist, or moves to a suburb of New York City they are in immediate danger of meeting a foreigner. And, ultimately, they will meet the worst type of foreigner, the one that will seal their doom. The hot Latina.

The hot latina is every parents nightmare. Particularly the Portuguese ones. Not raised in a culture that is obsessed with skinniness, she actually looks like a real woman. Once little Johnny meets her, you can forget about the nice wedding with that Smith girl from church at the country club. She will conqour him, and drag him off to foreign lands as war booty, never to be seen again.

And that is what happened to me. I was unfortunate enough not only to marry a Latina, but to marry one with mad financial skillz and a high paying job with a foreign company. A job that eventually took her, and me, down that road from which no one ever returns. The giant german chemical company mothership called my hot Latina home. “Come” it beckoned. “Come to a land with high quality plumbing, where we will pay you in Euros and give you six weeks of vacation a year. Come to me….”

So now I find myself, as so many do, at the rock bottom every foreign addict must eventually come to. I am, myself, a dirty, dirty immigrant.

I am kept under lock and key in a small apartment in Mannheim Germany, surrounded by Germans, only allowed out to gaze in stupefaction at insanely complex rail schedules and to search fruitlessly for a single jar of peanut butter, while not understanding why there are no bags in the supermarket.

My only lifeline to the world is this, my blog of exile- both a cry for help and a warning to you all not the do the things I’ve done, as the great Kenny Rogers once said.

So tune in for regular updates on what it is like to be an American in Germany, how you can avoid this fate, and (should you find yourself here) perhaps a little bit of my experience can help ease the pain. The bitter, bitter pain.

In future posts we will address the burning questions that you have always had about Germany, such as:

-What is that stanky plastic “Biotonne” bin for?
-How come I am in Germany and all my neighbors are Turks?
-Why are these people naked all the time?
-Why do German apartment have no light fixtures?
-Why is it considered appropriate to tell new acquaintances all about your Urinary tract infection?

It’ll be a lot of fun.