Comment by nicbou
I help people navigate German bureaucracy for a living.
The biggest issue in my opinion is unpredictability. Every state, city, office and case worker does things differently. They have different requirements, policies and timelines. My job is not to document the truth but the variance.
My favourite recent bit of German bureaucracy was the integration test to apply for citizenship. I had to apply for an in-person appointment. The appointment was to book a test date. The test is a 33-question, multiple choice test. Getting the appointment can take a few weeks. The test date is 1-4 weeks later. Grading the test takes up to 8 weeks.
All of that to answer 33 questions.
The word kafka-esque was inspired by German bureaucracy. Making an appointment to make an appointment sounds exactly like that.
I once queued in at the local council in Berlin for a guy that handed out numbers for the machine in the waiting room. When your name comes up, you go to the assigned room for whatever you needed (something related to my registration if I remember correctly). All the guy did was push a button and hand out a number. So you queue to start queuing. Very nice guy and friendly. But also one of the most pointless jobs I've ever seen.
Somebody later explained to me that they invented jobs like this to keep otherwise completely redundant former DDR civil servants in some kind of job. They had way too many of those and they were kind of very unemployable in a city with very high unemployment (at the time). It's literal busy work that they invented to avoid having to fire the person. Besides, being a civil servant is an iron clad job for life in Germany. So firing wasn't an option to begin with.
A German DOGE wouldn't be a bad thing at this point. Maybe do it without all the hyperbole and libertarianism. But the CDU that just won the election did actuall campaign on the notion of Germany being crippled by its own bureaucracy. Which of course the CDU helped create for the many decades they've been in power (almost on stop since WW II). The last four years were one of only two (I think) exceptions to that.