Andrei still doesn’t know if that’s true. But he never drops cigarettes. And he always checks for deer. And that, he says, is the real point of the German driving test: to make you afraid enough to be safe.
Then came the video questions. In Romania, theory tests are still pictures. In Germany, they show 5-second real-life video clips. One clip: a rainy city street. A child’s ball rolls onto the road. A woman with a stroller is 15 meters away. A tram is approaching. The question: “When must you begin braking?” chestionare auto germania
Andrei, a 34-year-old software engineer from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, had been driving in his home country for twelve years. He could parallel park a minibus in a snowstorm. He once drove to Budapest and back without using GPS. So when he moved to Berlin for a job at a tech startup, he assumed the German driving license conversion would be a bureaucratic formality. Andrei still doesn’t know if that’s true
Andrei started having nightmares about traffic signs. And that, he says, is the real point
But Andrei couldn’t. Because the German test wasn’t testing knowledge. It was testing German-ness : the belief that every situation, no matter how chaotic, can be resolved by applying the correct subparagraph of a law written in 1971 and amended seventeen times.