One Week Without My Car — and a Germany I No Longer Recognise

20 November 2025

Exactly one week ago, on 13 November, I discovered that my car had been stolen in Berlin.

Even writing that sentence still feels strange.

My Peugeot 5008 was there, and then it simply wasn't.

Someone had taken it.

I have owned cars for decades. I have lived in different countries, travelled extensively, experienced places with very different standards of living, very different levels of wealth and very different reputations for safety.

And yet this had never happened to me before.

Until Germany.

It Was More Than a Car

Of course, a car is an object.

Cars can be repaired. They can be replaced. There is insurance. There are police reports, forms, claims, documents and procedures.

I understand all of that rationally.

But what has surprised me during this past week is how little the rational explanation helps with the feeling that remains afterward.

When somebody steals something from you, the financial value is only part of what has been taken.

There is also the violation.

Someone decided that something belonging to another person could simply become theirs.

Someone entered my life without permission, took something that I had worked for, and disappeared.

And now I am the one dealing with the consequences.

I am the one contacting the police.

I am the one contacting the insurance company.

I am the one contacting the finance company.

I am the one looking for documents.

I am the one answering questions.

I am the one waiting.

The thief, meanwhile, is somewhere else.

That asymmetry is difficult to accept.

Germany Was Not Supposed to Feel Like This

Perhaps this incident affects me so strongly because of what Germany represented to me.

When people outside Germany think about this country, certain words immediately come to mind:

Order. Safety. Organisation. Reliability. Rules.

Germany has spent decades building that reputation.

It is one of the reasons people come here.

It is certainly one of the things I expected when I made Germany my home.

I never expected perfection. No serious person does.

Crime exists everywhere. Bad people exist everywhere. No police force can prevent every theft, and no government can guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen to you.

But there is a difference between intellectually knowing that crime exists and waking up one morning to discover that your car has disappeared.

Suddenly, statistics and abstractions become very personal.

You look at the empty place where your car should be and think:

How did we get here?

The Empty Parking Space

There is something almost absurd about the first few moments.

You look.

You look again.

For a second, your brain tries to find a more reasonable explanation.

Perhaps I parked somewhere else.

Perhaps I am confused.

Perhaps someone moved it.

Perhaps...

And then reality arrives.

No.

The car is gone.

I cannot adequately describe the mixture of disbelief, anger and sadness that follows.

It is not simply: Someone stole my car.

It becomes:

Someone stole my car here.

Here, in Berlin.

Here, in Germany.

In a country where I expected to feel secure.

That distinction matters to me.

What Disappoints Me Most

I am not writing this because I believe Germany is uniquely dangerous.

It isn't.

Nor am I suggesting that Germany has suddenly become some kind of lawless country. That would be ridiculous.

My disappointment is more complicated than that.

It comes from the distance between expectation and experience.

If you expect very little from a place, dysfunction does not surprise you.

When you expect a great deal, every visible crack is much harder to ignore.

Germany sets an extraordinarily high standard for itself.

It presents itself — and is presented internationally — as a highly developed society in which institutions function, rules matter and ordinary people can build predictable lives.

That creates an expectation.

And increasingly, my personal experience of Germany does not seem to match that expectation.

The stolen car has crystallised that feeling.

It is one event, certainly.

But emotionally it feels like another piece of evidence that the Germany I imagined and the Germany I experience are becoming two different things.

A Strange Kind of Sadness

Anger is easy to understand.

Someone stole something from me. Of course I am angry.

But sadness has been the stronger emotion.

I am genuinely sad about this.

Not because I believe a Peugeot is irreplaceable.

It isn't.

I am sad because I wanted Germany to work for me.

I wanted to believe in this place.

I wanted to feel that choosing Germany had been the right decision.

I wanted Germany to feel like home.

And perhaps that is why something as apparently simple as a stolen car can become symbolic of something much larger.

Home is not merely the address where your letters arrive.

Home is the place where, at some fundamental level, you feel that you belong and that you can lower your guard.

This week, I don't feel that.

The Administrative Machine Begins

Since the theft, another side of the experience has begun: administration.

Police.

Insurance.

Financing.

Documents.

Vehicle information.

Reports.

Reference numbers.

Waiting.

More documents.

More questions.

Anyone who has lived in Germany knows that bureaucracy is almost a parallel dimension of German life.

Normally I can tolerate it. There are procedures, and procedures exist for reasons.

But bureaucracy feels very different when you are already the victim of something.

At that moment, every form is another reminder of what happened.

Every email with the word Diebstahl — theft — in the subject line brings you back to the same event.

Every time you type the vehicle registration number, the insurance number or the details of the car, you are documenting the fact that something that was yours is no longer there.

One week later, I am already discovering that the theft itself may have taken minutes.

Dealing with the theft will take considerably longer.

I Keep Thinking About Trust

Modern societies depend enormously on trust.

We leave cars outside.

We leave bicycles on streets.

We receive packages at doors.

We walk through cities carrying phones and computers worth thousands of euros.

We assume that the overwhelming majority of people will respect a very simple social rule:

What belongs to somebody else does not belong to you.

When enough people stop respecting that rule, society changes.

People install more locks.

More cameras.

More alarms.

More tracking devices.

More barriers.

More insurance.

And, perhaps most importantly, they trust each other less.

The financial cost of crime is measurable.

The erosion of trust is much harder to measure.

That is what concerns me.

Maybe This Is Personal

Perhaps someone reading this will say:

"Andreas, your car was stolen. It happens. Don't turn it into a judgement about an entire country."

That is a fair criticism.

And I agree, to a point.

One stolen car cannot define Germany.

But personal experiences inevitably influence how we understand the places where we live.

Countries are not experienced through GDP figures, crime tables or political speeches.

We experience countries through ordinary life.

Through the street where we live.

Through our neighbours.

Through the authorities we interact with.

Through whether public transport works.

Through whether we feel safe walking home.

Through whether our children feel safe.

Through whether our property is still where we left it the following morning.

These small experiences accumulate.

Eventually they become our perception of a place.

And my perception of Germany has changed.

The Question I Didn't Expect to Ask

I have spent much of this week dealing with the practical consequences of the theft.

But another question keeps appearing in my mind:

Do I still want to live here?

That is a much bigger question than a stolen car deserves.

And yet perhaps the car did not create the question.

Perhaps it merely forced me to acknowledge that the question was already there.

I don't know the answer yet.

A week is far too soon for dramatic conclusions.

Maybe the police will find the car.

Maybe the insurance process will work perfectly.

Maybe, months from now, this will simply become an unpleasant story I occasionally tell.

I hope so.

But right now, exactly one week after the theft, that isn't how it feels.

Right now I feel disappointed.

I feel violated.

I feel angry.

But mostly, I feel sad.

Sad that after years of living here, Germany feels a little less like the country I thought it was.

And perhaps even more sadly, a little less like home.

One Week Later

Somewhere, my Peugeot 5008 may still exist.

Perhaps it is somewhere in Berlin.

Perhaps it has already left Germany.

Perhaps it has been dismantled.

Perhaps I will never see it again.

I simply don't know.

What I do know is that one week ago I went looking for my car and found an empty space instead.

It was only an empty parking space.

But somehow, during this past week, it has come to represent considerably more than that.

I hope this feeling passes.

I genuinely do.

Because losing a car is frustrating.

Losing confidence in the place you call home is much harder.