Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, The Metamorphosis, published in 1915, begins with Gregor Samsa waking up as a giant insect. His first worry is not his body. It is the clock. Es war halb sieben Uhr, und die Zeiger gingen ruhig vorwärts. It was half past six, and the hands were moving calmly on. His train had left at five, and the next one would leave at seven. Gregor thinks of his firm, which suspects the worst at the smallest failure. Then the firm’s chief clerk arrives at the apartment in person. He tells Gregor through the door: Und Ihre Stellung ist durchaus nicht die festeste. And your position is by no means the most secure. In five years of service, Gregor had not once been ill.
Always On Time
Since 26 December 1952, Germany’s main evening news, the Tagesschau, has run on ARD. For decades its place has been fixed at exactly 8 p.m., opened by a gong. In 2020 and 2021, more than 11.6 million people watched it on average. At its 60th anniversary in 2012, Georg Mascolo, then editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, described it this way: Immer pünktlich, immer zuverlässig, fast immer fehlerfrei und ein kleines bisschen humorlos. Always on time, always reliable, almost always without errors, and a tiny bit humorless. He called it the Glockenschlag der Republik, the stroke of the bell of the republic.
Who Comes Too Late
Wer zu spät kommt, den bestraft das Leben. Life punishes whoever comes too late. Germans attribute the sentence to Mikhail Gorbachev, who visited East Berlin for the 40th anniversary of the GDR in October 1989. There is no recording of him saying it. On 6 October, the words a German news agency reporter heard were: Ich glaube, Gefahren lauern nur auf jene, die nicht auf das Leben reagieren. I believe dangers lie in wait only for those who do not react to life. On 7 October, his spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov told the press, in English, “Those who are late will be punished by life itself.” The agencies then put together the German sentence that the country remembers. Gorbachev later used the familiar version in his memoirs.
Reopening a Promise
Before the federal election of February 2025, the CDU and CSU promised in their program: Wir halten an der Schuldenbremse des Grundgesetzes fest. We are holding to the debt brake of the Basic Law. A month after the election, the party leader Friedrich Merz, not yet chancellor, led a reform of the debt brake through the outgoing Bundestag. It passed on 18 March 2025. In the ZDF Politbarometer poll that week, 73 percent of respondents said that the Union and Merz had deceived the voters. Among the Union’s own supporters, 44 percent said so.
Word Broken in Hesse
Before the Hesse state election of January 2008, the SPD leader Andrea Ypsilanti ruled out working with the Left Party. Es gibt keine irgendwie geartete Zusammenarbeit mit den Linken. There will be no cooperation of any kind with the Left. After the election, she planned to become premier with the Left Party’s support. In March 2008, she dropped the plan after three days, because one of her own members, Dagmar Metzger, refused to go along. In the autumn she tried again. On 3 November 2008, the day before the vote, four SPD members announced that they would not elect her. The vote was called off. The word used against Ypsilanti was Wortbruch, breach of one’s word. After her party lost heavily in the new election of January 2009, she stepped down as party leader and as leader of the parliamentary group.
The Philosopher’s Walk
In 1834, Heinrich Heine described the daily life of Immanuel Kant in Königsberg. Aufstehn, Kaffeetrinken, Schreiben, Kollegienlesen, Essen, Spazierengehn, alles hatte seine bestimmte Zeit. Getting up, drinking coffee, writing, lecturing, eating, walking, everything had its fixed time. When Kant stepped out of his door for his walk, Heine wrote, die Nachbarn wußten ganz genau, daß die Glocke halb vier sei. The neighbors knew exactly that it was half past three. Heine wrote this three decades after Kant’s death. It is a literary portrait, not an eyewitness account.
Lateness Can Cost the Job
In German labor law, coming late is not a small matter. In 1988, the Federal Labor Court ruled that repeated lateness can in itself justify dismissal without notice, once it amounts to a persistent refusal to work. In 2021, the state labor court of Schleswig-Holstein upheld the dismissal of an employee with more than 13 years of service. The employee had come to work much too late, or not at all, on three of four consecutive working days, after one oral warning.
Everybody Talks About the Weather
Alle reden vom Wetter. Wir nicht. Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t. In 1966, the Deutsche Bundesbahn, the West German railway, advertised itself with this line. A 23-year-old secretary at the McCann agency in Frankfurt, Margot Müller, came up with it while serving coffee at a meeting. The railway presented itself as a way to travel that the weather could not stop.
Today the railway publishes its punctuality every month. A long-distance train counts as on time at a stop if it arrives no more than 5 minutes and 59 seconds late. By that measure, 62.5 percent of long-distance trains were on time in 2024, and 60.1 percent in 2025.
An Unreliable Recruit
Ein unsicherer Kantonist, an unreliable cantonist, is a person nobody can count on. Duden defines the phrase as a person who is fickle and unreliable. A Kantonist was a recruit in the Prussian canton system, which was fixed in 1733. Each regiment drew its soldiers from its own canton. The unreliable cantonist was the recruit who tried to escape being called up.
Two Famous Assurances
In spring 1986, Labor Minister Norbert Blüm pasted up a poster himself on the market square in Bonn. It read: Denn eins ist sicher – die Rente. Because one thing is certain: the pension. The short form Die Rente ist sicher became almost a proverb, and Blüm was much smiled at and criticized for it. On 1 July 1990, the day the West German mark came to East Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl said in a television address that the eastern states would schon bald wieder in blühende Landschaften be transformed, soon into flourishing landscapes again. In 2021, an analysis in t-online found the statutory pension surprisingly robust. It also wrote that with the poster, Blüm had secured himself a place in the collective memory of the republic.