What do the Gestapo, Stasi, & the GEZ have in common?
• Gestapo – Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State’s Police)
• Stasi – Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service)
• GEZ – Gebühreneinzzahlungszentrale (Fee collections central)
They all represent groups of Germans that have been made at one time or another to spy and tell on other citizens. While the Gestapo and Stasi have run their routes and died out (with the exceptional release of a Stasi file that reveals that someone’s best friend was reporting on them for the East German government for 40 years), the GEZ police are still alive and well.
Although this band of people isn’t here to monitor my political thoughts and movements, they do maintain a special role in post-cold war, modern Germany: make sure that you pay your TV (yes, television) and radio taxes!!
For those of you that don’t know, the German system of television stations is dominated by 8 or so stations that grew out of each major region, i.e. Bayern, Baden-Wurtenburg, Nord Deutschland, Berlin-Brandenburg, etc. Because they couldn’t have possibly supported themselves, they’ve long been collecting money from the government in order to stay out of the red.
Needless to say, I hadn’t really planned on paying my TV taxes. I mean, for an American, the most un-American thing ever would to be forced to pay an additional tax just to have the privilege of purchasing a TV. It’s my right to buy as many TVs as I want (one for every room) and to be lazy and watch as much TV as I want. I’ll be damned if I am gonna pay for what should be rightfully mine…somehow they must have known this.
So at 7 PM, as I was cooking dinner for Erin and I, I got this strange ring at the door. Listening as best as I could – it was hard with the TV and iPod playing a mused mix of Ginglisch (German & English) – I tried to make sense of what the person downstairs was saying into the box. (I now have a new respect for the dude at Taco Bell…how the hell do they understand anything?) Not having a clue what he said, I just buzzed the guy in and cracked the apartment door.
Poking his head around the door and yelling over the beats of Ferry Corsten and the news of more German soldiers taking naughty pictures in Afghanistan, he flashed his badge at me and asked if I was Herr Suss.
“Yep!” I said eagerly – I love testing my German in these kinds of situations. And then I noticed…he’s here to collect for that stupid TV tax. At first I was pissed and my mind went racing: who told on me?! Sitting himself to the kitchen table, the guy sat down at the table and started explaining to me that he had compared the city registry with his records and noticed that we hadn’t paid.
I played dumb, real dumb. Thinking that playing the foreigner card might work out here, I suddenly lost all ability to speak German. “No habla Deutsch!?”
“No problem. I also have the information in this English pamphlet!!”
SHIT!! Totally trapped now. In the end, I gave the guy my passport and bank account. Erin and I will now be paying the €17.03 per month for our PRIVELIDGE to watch bad TV.
• Gestapo – Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State’s Police)
• Stasi – Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service)
• GEZ – Gebühreneinzzahlungszentrale (Fee collections central)
They all represent groups of Germans that have been made at one time or another to spy and tell on other citizens. While the Gestapo and Stasi have run their routes and died out (with the exceptional release of a Stasi file that reveals that someone’s best friend was reporting on them for the East German government for 40 years), the GEZ police are still alive and well.
Although this band of people isn’t here to monitor my political thoughts and movements, they do maintain a special role in post-cold war, modern Germany: make sure that you pay your TV (yes, television) and radio taxes!!
For those of you that don’t know, the German system of television stations is dominated by 8 or so stations that grew out of each major region, i.e. Bayern, Baden-Wurtenburg, Nord Deutschland, Berlin-Brandenburg, etc. Because they couldn’t have possibly supported themselves, they’ve long been collecting money from the government in order to stay out of the red.
Needless to say, I hadn’t really planned on paying my TV taxes. I mean, for an American, the most un-American thing ever would to be forced to pay an additional tax just to have the privilege of purchasing a TV. It’s my right to buy as many TVs as I want (one for every room) and to be lazy and watch as much TV as I want. I’ll be damned if I am gonna pay for what should be rightfully mine…somehow they must have known this.
So at 7 PM, as I was cooking dinner for Erin and I, I got this strange ring at the door. Listening as best as I could – it was hard with the TV and iPod playing a mused mix of Ginglisch (German & English) – I tried to make sense of what the person downstairs was saying into the box. (I now have a new respect for the dude at Taco Bell…how the hell do they understand anything?) Not having a clue what he said, I just buzzed the guy in and cracked the apartment door.
Poking his head around the door and yelling over the beats of Ferry Corsten and the news of more German soldiers taking naughty pictures in Afghanistan, he flashed his badge at me and asked if I was Herr Suss.
“Yep!” I said eagerly – I love testing my German in these kinds of situations. And then I noticed…he’s here to collect for that stupid TV tax. At first I was pissed and my mind went racing: who told on me?! Sitting himself to the kitchen table, the guy sat down at the table and started explaining to me that he had compared the city registry with his records and noticed that we hadn’t paid.
I played dumb, real dumb. Thinking that playing the foreigner card might work out here, I suddenly lost all ability to speak German. “No habla Deutsch!?”
“No problem. I also have the information in this English pamphlet!!”
SHIT!! Totally trapped now. In the end, I gave the guy my passport and bank account. Erin and I will now be paying the €17.03 per month for our PRIVELIDGE to watch bad TV.
posted by Dave Suss at 1:11 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home