Moving to Germany presents new arrivals with many questions, most of which are practical concerns about accommodation, bureaucracy, or horrors of the German tax system. Even when these queries are answered, there are many smaller, though no less important quandaries that are apt to mystify those without a deep knowledge of German culture. The most common, at least from my own experience, is how to make friends with German people.

The answer may seem obvious, and usually anytime I see the question posed on social media, the replies and comments all seem to take a similar form: Join a Verein (club), go out more, learn German. Though this is all eminently sensible advice, the number one answer to the question of making friends in Germany, the solution that’s vital to building a German friendship group, is time. Bonding with Germans isn’t so much about the activity, or even the language, but a steely resolve to never give up, to persevere through a surface level of coldness, until eventually you’ve made a friend for life.

Patience isn’t so much a virtue in Germany, than it is a survival strategy for newcomers. I’ve heard people suggest six months as the magic amount of time it takes to win over Germans, while I personally adhere to the belief that it takes roughly two years before a German considers anyone an actual friend. There will be little breakthroughs along the road, especially if you regularly go drinking with Germans, but the only way you really know if you’ve made it with any potential German friend is the moment they invite you to their home. This is the final hurdle, or rather last port of call for the good ship ‘German Friend’.

I’ve known this for a long time, and it’s a rule I’ve come to live by, but recently I’ve realised that it isn’t exactly a watertight approach. I’ve made friends here, more than enough to fill a room at least, but then something happened to me, or rather to my wife, that changed the dynamic entirely: we had children. Anyone who’s had kids will know what I’m about to say. As the blanket chaos of nappies, 3am feeds, and nap times descended from up on high, we devoted all our attention to our bundle of joy who, for some reason, wouldn't stop crying. With all focus on the baby, time for friends, or what non-parents might casually describe as “fun”, quickly took a back seat, and eventually a different vehicle, until three or four years down the line, my wife and I suddenly come out of the bunker of infant rearing and discovered we didn’t seem to have as many friends as we used to.

This isn’t the same for everyone of course, some people manage to keep all their plates spinning in unison, but that’s far fewer than most may imagine. For the majority, the sudden realisation that you haven’t properly spoken to another adult other than family, a midwife, or an employee at a pharmacy for many months is a painful realisation. This has certainly been the case for my wife and I. As our world moved from sleep deprived confusion, through to dropping the little ones off at the Kindergarten, we suddenly found that we didn’t have friends so much as people whose social media posts we read with a small measure of jealousy.

The sense we’re not alone in this has been amplified by our contact with parents who send their kids to the same Kindergarten. Since our children joined, we’ve been invited to various events, either hosted by the Kindergarten itself, or by other parents. Ostensibly this is to help the children to get to know each other, but it also seems to be for the parents to widen their social circles after years of parental tunnel vision. Everyone seems thirsty for friendship, signalled by the fact that our fellow parents are more friendly than any group of Germans I’ve met, and certainly more chatty than I’m used to Germans being when meeting for the first time.

As nice as this all is, it does turn my understanding of German friendship building totally on its head. Being invited to someone’s house is usually the final stage of German friendship as I’ve mentioned, but now it seems like the first step in making parent friends in Germany. Play dates are usually hosted in people’s homes, as are birthday parties, which usually includes a group of parents getting to know each other while the kids run around screaming the house down. I have to assume for everyone else, the new rules of friendship are clear, but to me, I’m travelling an uncharted path without the map I’ve been using for a very long time.

I’m never totally clear on whether we are friends now, or just acquaintances. Usually I might work this out from the conversation topics, but even this leaves me mystified. In the past, I would often overstep the lines of German friendship building by talking about too personal a topic, nothing wild, but I might mention some family issue, and then realise the person I was speaking to was slightly uncomfortable, and certainly very reluctant to share anything but the most prosaic information on their own families. Now though, family seems to be the only topic going, what else are a group of parents going to discuss if not their common connection, children? I know about sleep patterns, diet, holiday plans, struggles with parents-in-law, and many other points from this group. They happily share the intimate sides of themselves before mentioning hobbies or the usual friendship building topics that I’m used to. This has been helpful, since I was concerned making friends with fellow parents might lead to rather stilted conversation. Instead, I know more gossip about these people than I do about friends I’ve known for many years.

The larger problem I often ponder is how long will this sustain? A colleague reliably informed me that they are still good friends with many of the parents they met through their children’s Kindergarten and various play dates over the years, even though the children have long since moved on to different schools and different friendship circles. This gives me some hope, but I still wonder how strong a friendship will be when it seems to be based on a measure of social survival. When I spend time with the other parents at the Kindergarten, it tends to feel like we’re all shipwrecked survivors, brought together by fate, but with a desperate desire to return to the mainland by any means necessary, even if that means using the rest of us as a life raft.

All this new found confusion is a good lesson in the realities of living within an adopted culture. The moment you think you understand how things work, a life change occurs, or age catches up, and you find the situation that you fully understood has morphed into a completely different scenario, one that comes with new rules and new lessons. I’m fairly certain this will continue as our children get older, which seems rather daunting. The only saving grace is I might have some German friends to commiserate with.

Proofreader: @ScandiTina

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