Germany’s bureaucracy keeps changing the rules of convenience

My application to LMU Munich is a good example. The initial application was online, simple, and relatively quick. Then I received my acceptance in early July and had to submit physical documents by around the middle of the same month.

At the time I was still in Lebanon, so an application process that had initially been completely accessible online suddenly depended on whether I could get an envelope from Lebanon to Germany quickly enough.

DHL saved me, but the expedited delivery cost me around €150. I was obviously happy that the option existed because otherwise I could have had a much bigger problem, but spending that much money to complete what had otherwise been a digital university application felt unnecessary.

My experience with the residence permit was much worse. This happened in Fürstenfeldbruck rather than Munich, and I waited around a year for an appointment. The office itself felt outdated, and I was not happy with how my case was handled.

That is obviously my personal experience with one authority and one process, so I am not claiming that every immigration office in Germany operates exactly the same way. Still, waiting around a year for something as important as a residence permit affects almost every other part of your life because you cannot treat immigration status like some small administrative issue that sits separately from everything else.

Another example came when I needed to prepare my LMU qualification documents for use in Lebanon. In this case, I cannot blame Germany for the entire process because I was dealing with requirements involving both Germany and Lebanon, but I was still the person who had to connect all the different steps.

I first went personally to the Regierung von Oberbayern for the initial authentication. I had six documents, three in German and three in English, and the fee was €20 per document, which meant €120.

The next federal authentication stage required sending the documents by post and paying another €120. After that, the documents had to go through legalization at the Lebanese embassy, which again involved sending them by post. The embassy fee itself was comparatively reasonable, which I appreciated.

What stayed with me was not only the money but the entire sequence. I had a qualification issued by a German public university, but using those documents abroad turned them into a small administrative project involving physical visits, multiple payments, different government levels, and several envelopes.

Now I am dealing with another version of this while looking at establishing a UG for StreetShape and a sole proprietorship for projects such as Penci.ly and possible freelance work. I am still working through that process, but simply understanding the administrative structure already takes a considerable amount of time alongside actually building the products.

I understand why governments need to verify identities, qualifications, legal responsibilities, and documents. My problem is how often the person applying for something becomes responsible for carrying information between institutions that each only care about their own part of the process.

From a developer’s perspective, I would call that a problem with the entire user journey. From a political science perspective, I think it becomes a question about administrative capacity and trust.

An individual authority can technically perform its own responsibility correctly while the complete experience for the citizen remains expensive, confusing, and extremely slow.

I think Germany should judge administrative procedures by what people actually have to do from the beginning until the final step is finished. Having an online form at the start is useful, but if the rest of the process still depends on letters, long waiting periods, and information being moved manually between institutions, then the public service is only partially digital.