Schreiberseele — a scribe’s soul. The Duden dictionary defines it as a bureaucratic, petty person, and marks the word as disparaging.
Papierkrieg — paper war. The long exchange of letters and forms with an office.
Ärmelschoner — sleeve protectors, the cloth sleeves that clerks once wore over their jackets. The word also stands for a narrow, clerkish attitude.
Berlin’s citizens’ offices, the Bürgerämter, work by appointment. In 2015 a start-up offered to find appointments for a fee: 25 euros for one within five working days, 45 euros for one within 48 hours. The city’s portal said that bought appointments were not valid. In December 2015 the site gave up, at least for the time being.
In September 2023 the platform netzpolitik.org tested the booking system. Two out of three requests for an appointment failed. In May 2026 the Senate reported that, by its calculation, every request in March 2026 could be met within 14 days. Mayor Kai Wegner said: Und wir haben Wort gehalten. And we kept our word.
In Berlin a person can leave the church only through the local court. The city’s service portal states: Der Austritt kann nicht online erklärt werden! The exit cannot be declared online. A declaration through an authorized person is not allowed. The fee is 30 euros.
In June 2021 the city administration of Karlsruhe answered a question from its council about waiting times. The average wait for an appointment to leave the church was about seven weeks. Before the pandemic it had been ten days.
In December 2025 the German Olympic Sports Confederation submitted a statement to the sports committee of the Bundestag. A large part of the time that volunteers give to sport, it said, is now used up in overcoming bureaucratic hurdles.
The statement named time as the main reason volunteers stop. It described clubs that struggle with bureaucracy, a lack of support and outdated facilities.
On 7 July 2022 the Bundestag passed the Bundeswehr-Beschaffungsbeschleunigungsgesetz, the act to accelerate procurement for the armed forces. It was meant to let procurement procedures for military equipment be completed faster and more efficiently. The law was limited to the end of 2026.
On 23 July 2025 the federal cabinet approved the draft of a new and wider version, which covers faster planning as well as faster procurement.
In 2025 the Institut für Mittelstandsforschung in Bonn calculated the cost of bureaucracy for a model machine builder with 150 employees. The study was done for the foundation of the machine builders’ association VDMA. The researchers identified 3,900 rules that machine builders must observe in their usual business. Complying with them costs 2.18 million euros a year, or 6.3 percent of revenue.
The institute translated the cost into people. It equals the average salaries of 34 full-time employees.
In a 2022 survey of about 8,500 employed doctors by the doctors’ union Marburger Bund, documentation and data entry took three hours a day on average. In 2013, 8 percent of doctors had spent more than three hours a day on administration and documentation. By 2022 the share was 32 percent.
In May 2023 the union’s task force on reducing bureaucracy gave examples. Forms for patients must be printed, explained, signed and then scanned in again. The paper for patient forms comes to about 1,300 tons a year.
At the end of 2024, organizations in Germany held 45,983 valid certificates under ISO 9001, the international standard for quality management systems. The certificates covered 104,193 sites. In the ISO Survey for 2024, Germany ranked fifth in the world, after China, Italy, India and South Korea.
The figures change from year to year. A German publisher for quality management called the 2023 figures unscharf, blurred, because not all certification bodies report to the survey.
In 2015 the consultancy BearingPoint and the process management consultancy BPM&O surveyed nearly 300 companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For three quarters of them, process management was already an important or very important topic. Almost 60 percent expected it to become more important.
The figure for strategy was lower. Process management was part of corporate strategy in 45 percent of the companies.
German business studies divide an organization into two parts. The Aufbauorganisation, the structure organization, divides the company into units that share the tasks and coordinates them. The Ablauforganisation, the process organization, orders the work in space and time. Kosiol defined the pair in these terms in 1962. In this teaching the process organization follows the structure organization.
Nordsieck in particular had argued for this dual view of organization in 1934. Today the official training plan for industrial clerks requires every apprentice to explain the structure and the process organization of the training company.