23 May 2006

Zuchtgenehmigung


A lovely piece in this morning's Grauniad on life in Germany today. I enjoy these personal accounts a lot; journalists spend most of their time writing like automatons, it's good to see how they react to the societies and cultures they cover. My favourite passage:

Germany's legendary reputation for bureaucracy is, though it pains me to say it, deserved. In a nature park east of Berlin, we stumbled across two otters - Sid and Doris - living in separate pens fenced off with giant green spikes. "Why can't they live together and have little otters?" I asked Sid and Doris's keeper. "Ah, that's a good question," the keeper replied. "We haven't got Zuchtgenehmigung [breeding permission]," he said. Until some bureaucrat stamped their form, the otters were condemned to a life of lonely isolation.

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